AIR October 6, 1999

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. A little bit of frost on the pumpkin Monday morning. And for part of the area this wasn’t the first time. This frost was much more widespread and may have sounded the death knoll for the tenderest of annual plants. For soybeans it should just help the dry down along even more. It’ll probably be a mixed blessing for the milo crop. It may have been enough to top kill the sorghum plant or at least knock most of the leaves off, so dry down might be hastened along. But it certainly wasn’t a hard enough freeze to kill the entire plant. Look out for new shoots coming up, especially in Sudan or forage sorghum fields. IT probably will burn a little bit back on the alfalfa, but again, certainly not enough to be a hard enough frost to set the plant dormant. This is certainly quite a change from a year ago when we never thought we’d have a freeze and the soybean and milo harvest will certainly be the better for it - not to mention a little hay fever relief for some of us.

It sort of has become a tradition that I announce that we are now at the Hessian Fly Free date and you can start planting wheat. And now all of you who have already gotten wheat planted can have a good chuckle and we’ll all go on our way. I did receive one call from a producer who was ready to plant wheat only to find that his nicely worked field had a great stand of new volunteer wheat after the rain a week ago. The question was whether to till out the volunteer or just plant into it. Well, I thought that this would be an obvious answer, but let’s talk about it. Sure, on the one hand you’ve got a nice seedbed with good moisture, and going in with a springtooth will get the volunteer but lose some moisture. But, planting into a thick stand of volunteer is just asking for trouble. If it was a few plants scattered here and there, I probably wouldn’t worry about it. But with a thick stand you can easily start out with a 2 or 3x population. It’ll sure hold the soil in place, but the added competition will not be good for the soil moisture condition later on, not to mention the soil fertility. A thick stand is also going to have thicker foliage and this will lead to a greater risk of foliage diseases this fall and next spring. And finally, most of this volunteer is probably light test weight kernels that blew through the combine, and we’ve shown time and again that light test weight seed often has a significant yield depression over good weight seed. Bottom line, till it out and plant into a clean seed bed!

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

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