AIR MARCH 24, 1999

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. Some nice weather over the weekend but now a little cooler weather just to help us remember that it is still March. Soil temperatures are still running in the mid to lower 40’s so it’s still just a little bit early even for corn.

The warm weather over the weekend sure brought out the fires, and I’ll even admit that I was burning some trash piles, etc. I have had a few calls over the past few days wondering if this would be a year that we could burn pastures early and the answer is that we really don’t know yet. Give the soil temperatures and all I’d say no. We need to be aiming at April 25th as our average start date. In an early year that may move up to the 15th of April. If you are burning native grass pastures before April 15th then you are burning too early and causing long term harm to your pasture. Burning too early, year after year allows undesirable cool season grasses to move into your pasture. Every time that I’ve investigated a complaint about needing to burn early or it won’t burn I find many cool season grasses. Learn to identify Indiangrass and big bluestem and burn when they have 1 to 1½ inches of new growth. Burning early also hurts your potential production, in fact for every week ahead of normal you can decrease about 5 - 7% of normal production. What you can be doing right now is getting firebreaks mowed and burned and getting ready for that one right day each spring when the wind is right to burn. By mowing and burning a 4 to 6 foot wide firebreak now, it’ll allow you to get burning more quickly and more safely when the day arrives. When you burn those firebreaks choose calm days and have lots of water on hand. Early morning and evenings work good too as the higher humidity makes the fire easier to control. One of the risks of burning at this time of year is that foliage or fuel is very dry normally, and this year it seems to be even worse and fire’s burn faster and hotter and can get away from you quicker.... as a few folks found out this weekend. The bottom line is that we’re still about a month away from normal pasture burning time, BUT you can start getting ready for when it’s time to go!

This is Chuck Otte, Geary county Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook '99.

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