AIR September 22, 1999

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. For those of you who were trying to find me last week I am back in the office. I was in Omaha last week for the annual meeting and professional improvement conference for the National Association of County Agricultural Agents. It was an interesting week spent talking about where we are and where we, and agriculture are headed. I wish I could tell you where we all are headed, but my crystal ball seems to be unusually cloudy these days.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could just know the future or at least what the weather was going to be like if even for a month at a time? That’s kind of the predicament we find ourselves in every year at this time as we start trying to decide when to take that last cutting of alfalfa. Every time you take an alfalfa cutting the plant starts to regrow and for the first couple of weeks it is using up it’s stored root reserves. After a couple of weeks it has enough growth so it can start to replenish those root reserves. As the alfalfa crop goes into winter we want it to have a full tank of root reserves to get it through the winter and off to a good start in the spring. Too empty of a tank and it may winter kill or not be very healthy in the spring. Our general rule of thumb is that we need to have 8 to 12 inches of foliage or 4 to 6 weeks of growth time before the average killing freeze date. Our first frost is around the 20th of October. Often this first frost may not be enough to really shut down the alfalfa, but it’ll probably happen soon after that. What that means is that you probably shouldn’t take another cutting after about the third week of September. If it’s a year like last year you could probably have gone well into October, but that was unusual. It just isn’t worth the risk. Once we’ve had a hard enough freeze to shut down the alfalfa you can do whatever you want to with that stubble. I certainly would not want to leave that on all winter. It’s where alfalfa weevil eggs overwinter. Either flail chop, harvest or graze that stubble off after it’s gone dormant. It seems to me that grazing does the best job of destroying that stubble (and eggs) but do whatever, including a late winter burn, to get rid of that old crop residue.

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

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