(lively music) - Hello everyone and welcome to "Sunup".

I'm Lyndall Stout.

Cleanup and recovery efforts are well underway in many parts of our state after significant tornado outbreaks this past week.

Of course, safety is a number one concern, and that also applies to our food and water supply.

For some guidance, we begin with our extension food safety specialist, Dr. Christi Evans.

- So if you don't open the refrigerator during that power outage, then your food will be fine in there for about four hours.

After four hours, that's when you need to consider moving that food to a cooler with ice or you're gonna lose that food and you need to consider what you're gonna need to throw away.

So it's really important that you kind of watch that window if you're without electricity and try to get your coolers and ice out in that four hour window.

Now, the food in their freezer, that can usually be okay for a day or two.

If the freezer is half full, you've got about 24 hours during a power outage where that food will stay frozen.

If it's a full freezer, you can go about 48 hours where that food will stay frozen.

- So we know it's going to be weather aware kind of day.

The threat is high.

That's an easy thing to go ahead and do and buy yourself some time.

- Right, yeah.

So if you've got leftovers that you're saving to eat later in the week, just go ahead and put those in the freezer now because they'll be fine in the freezer.

If you decide to have those like maybe tomorrow, you're just gonna need more time to thaw them and cooking.

But yeah, they'll be safe longer in a power outage.

- We all know how much we spend on food, and so it's great when you can save what you can.

- Right.

- Let's switch gears from perishables to non-perishables and dry food.

What is your guidance there?

- Okay, so during storms like we've had this week, over the last weekend where tornadoes or homes have received tornado damage that can affect the dry food storage, foods in the cabinets and the pantries.

If there's been any broken glass or other debris or if there's rain that's entered the home or flood waters, that can affect that dry food storage.

So it's important for people to look at the packages.

If they inspect each package of food to see if it has any glass shards or if it's wet because it got rained on, things like that.

Just try to see what you can save so that you don't have to throw those foods away.

Things like paper packages or cardboard packages, infant formula, you wouldn't wanna keep.

That would be something unsafe.

But like our commercial canned foods, those are protected in that can.

As long as the can is not damaged, then those would be fine.

- Let's switch gears now to the preparation piece.

You mentioned it a little bit, the day of the storm or the day before, but what can I do now to prepare for this next round of tornado warnings?

- Well, we talked about a freezer, how a full freezer can keep foods frozen for about 48 hours, where a half full is 24 hours.

One thing people can do is to fill that freezer space.

You can fill empty gallons of water or containers of water, just put those in the freezer.

It'll give you an extra day for the foods in the freezer, but then you can always take those containers out and use those in your coolers if you have to move food from the refrigerator.

And then also that gives you a backup supply of water if you need.

If you're well is affected or your water supply, then that way you've got a drinkable water supply, too, then in the freezer.

- So we talked high level today about food safety and water, but more specific questions, especially in the counties affected, they can talk to their family and consumer sciences person in their county.

- Yeah, yeah.

So people, I mean, the storms unfortunately have been statewide, but we have county OSU extension offices all across the state, so there's people in those extension offices that can help them.

So if they contact the extension office in their county, they can receive more information.

- We talk a lot of course about the ag questions at the extension office, but it's nice to talk about the FCS stuff too.

- Yeah.

- Well, Christi, thanks for your time today and for our viewers who want a link to their county extension office, just go to our website, sunup.OKstate.edu.

(lively music) - Hi, Wes Lee, and welcome to the Mesonet Weather Report.

We have been waiting for some time now for drought-ending rains to get started in Oklahoma, and they finally did.

Unfortunately, they arrived with some deadly severe weather impacting several communities, including Marietta, Ardmore, Holdenville, and the beautiful historic downtown Sulphur.

Focusing on the positive aspects of the storm were drought-quenching rains for many areas.

This seven-day rainfall map from midday Wednesday shows them in moderate to incredible numbers.

Six plus inches in the north central, northeast and south central regions can be seen.

- Topped off by a whopping 8.36 inches in Fittstown.

The far northwest and panhandle regions missed out again, but hopefully continuing rain chances through the weekend will seek them out.

Shallow soil moisture percents look great in the eastern two-thirds of the state, fair in the southwest and downright pitiful in the panhandle.

Looking deeper, down to 16 inches, shows a little more hope for the drought stricken panhandle and northwest regions and plenty of water in the east.

Forecast for next week look more on the normal range.

However, the monthly forecast for May that came out at the end of April looks promising for rainfall.

On average, May is the wettest month of the year for most places.

Let's just hope that severe weather stays away.

Gary's up next with a summary of last month's weather.

- Thanks Wes, and good morning everyone.

Well, we do get a lot of unfortunate severe weather, tornadoes, big hail, flash flooding, severe storms, but that's how we get rainfall in the springtime in Oklahoma.

So hopefully it's improved the drought situation.

Let's take a look at the new map and see where we're at.

Well, we do have some improvements, at least up across the northern Oklahoma.

We did get rid of some of the drought across the east central portions of the state.

We still have a big blob of that severe to moderate drought up in far northwest Oklahoma.

But some of the rains that we got just over the last couple of days should help improve those on next week's map as well.

And since we are at the end of April, let's take a look at the rainfall map for April.

This is from the Oklahoma Mesonet.

We see up in the panhandle less than an inch of rainfall, so a little bit scarce up that way, but some good rains up in northeastern down into south central Oklahoma.

When we take a look at the departure from normal rainfall map, we can see where those surpluses are, again, from south central up into northeast Oklahoma and then creeping over into North central Oklahoma.

The rest of the state though, they need some more rainfall.

Hopefully, we get that with more storms as we go through the next week or two.

Speaking of the next week or two, let's take a look at the Climate Prediction Center outlooks for May.

For temperatures, we see increased odds of above normal temperatures.

That won't help the drought, so we hope that it's not too bad, at least when that heat ramps up.

But however, we do see that for precipitation, we see increased odds of above normal precipitation.

So maybe some above normal rainfalls.

Okay, it's springtime in Oklahoma.

We should expect just about anything, but hopefully whatever we get does come with some good rains, get this drought outta here.

That's it for this time.

We'll see you next time on the "Mesonet Weather Report".

(upbeat music) - As the wheat crop hits its stride, OSU Agriculture's field days and plot tours are well underway.

Today, "SUNUP's" Kurtis Hair takes us to Grady County for the event at the Chickasha research station.

- Thanks, Lyndall.

You know, one of the great things about coming to the field days isn't just looking at to see how the wheat's doing, it's also running into old friends like Steve Calhoun.

And Steve, it was about a year ago that we met last year, wasn't it?

- That's right.

- Yeah.

So how have you been?

- Great.

You know, you came down then to check on our wheat and see how things were going in Grady County and we appreciate you coming down.

- [Kurtis] So how are things looking this year?

Last year was pretty rough.

You basically kind of got like, you know, a crop-saving rain just right at the right time.

- Yes, we did.

I had a pretty good yield last year.

I was really impressed as dry as we were back early, but it came out of it.

And this year, it's looking even better.

- [Kurtis] Oh, good.

- [Steve] We just had a rain last night.

We had seven-tenths in my area.

And so anyway, things are looking really good right now.

- You can definitely tell we're, you know, we're getting some lodging right here.

Are you dealing with any issues of lodging?

- Not really.

I haven't seen any in my fields.

What we're concerned now is the weather and the hail issues.

So anyway, we're kind of watching the weather and hoping and praying we don't have any of those issues - Because weather in Oklahoma is always an issue, but it's particularly right here in Grady County 'cause that I-44 corridor is, you know, pretty... can get pretty gnarly.

- You know, I can have one field that may have hail damage on it and two miles away, nothing.

You know, it's just one of those deals, whether if you're in the right area or not for a hail zone.

- Well, and that was kind of the issue last year.

You would have one field that had somewhat decent moisture and good-looking wheat and literally a field just a stone's throw away that had none.

- That's right.

You know, I've been raising wheat for almost 60 years and every year's different, you know, depending upon the moisture and Mother Nature and what all that comes out to be.

- Yeah, so let's talk really quickly about the field day.

You know, you've mentioned that you come here, you know, pretty much yearly.

What do you like to get out of this?

- Well, for one thing, I'm a manager at Ross Seed Company and a lot of these producers that show up here are my customers.

Plus, it's a social event.

(group chattering) And then we are always wanna know what the new variety is or what the new disease preference is coming out or if we got any aphids or anything like that coming on, so that we are aware of it.

- So we talked a little bit about weather.

Have you been dealing with any weeds at all?

- No, I spray mine back earlier, to kind of control that.

So we don't have an issue at harvest time.

So anyway, I put down a chemical for the ryegrass and then I put down a chemical for the broadleaf weeds.

So anyway, hopefully we won't have any issues this year with that.

- Well, Steve, it was great to see you and hopefully get to see you next year at the Chickasha Field Day and hopefully that you get more rain and no hail.

- Alright, we really appreciate you guys coming down and get with Cam Anderson and see what he can do about our wheat prices.

- We'll try, we'll try.

You know, he's always got that crystal ball out, but sometimes he just doesn't know what he's gonna see.

All right, thanks, Steve.

- Thank you.

- Good morning, Oklahoma, and welcome to Cow-Calf Corner.

This week's topic is to address the success story that cattle men and cattle women have had in selection for marbling.

Throughout my professional lifetime we routinely heard of our weekly harvest mix in the beef industry having about 1% to 2% of all of our cattle reaching the quality grade of prime.

Now, prime is the highest quality grade for the young maturity groups of beef cattle.

It indicates the highest level of tenderness, juiciness, and flavor, and guarantees the greatest insurance policy for eating satisfaction for those of cooked beef.

It's a great news story that in the last few years, we routinely see 8% to 10% of our weekly harvest mix that is reaching the prime quality grade.

It means more people are satisfied with their eating experience, it's more premiums in the pocket of those that are finishing out cattle, and it is truly a success story and evidence of what we can accomplish whenever we put selection pressure on a highly heritable trait like marbling.

If we look at the genetic trend data in most of our beef breeds, we see a really high increase in the additive genetic merit of beef breeds for the trait of marbling, and it is obvious that producers and cattle breeders have responded to the market signals and improving this highly economically important trait.

Bottom line, marbling, beef quality grade, is the primary thing that influences the value of a beef carcass.

This is a good news story for our industry.

I congratulate the cattle breeders on what we've accomplished.

As we move forward, and we're now pretty consistent several years into this, we can attribute a lot of this to the additive genetic merit improvement for marbling.

It's true, we are finishing cattle to heavier weights and feeding 'em a little bit longer, but that has permitted us to fully tap the genetic potential of cattle to marble.

If that genetic potential wasn't there, we wouldn't be able to tap it by taking 'em to heavier weights.

(ambient music) As always, thanks for joining us on Cow-Calf Corner.

(ambient music) Another reminder about our Blueprint for the Future part two conference, May 22nd, May 23rd, here on campus at the Totusek Arena.

Registrations are coming in for that event.

We're working with the speakers for all those panel discussions.

Really interesting variety of topics from land stewardship, selection and mating topics, and taking a look at gene edited animals in the beef industry and the process and some of the things we've seen happen and how that works through the production chain.

Hope you can join us for Blueprint for the Future part two.

Registration is available online, and a reminder to all my colleagues as extension educators, if you type in the code word educator, it does give you half price discount on the registration fee for the conference.

(cheerful ambient music) - We're joined now by Dr. Kim Anderson, our crop marketing specialist.

Kim, kick things off with what happened in the crop markets this week.

- Well, let's quickly go through this.

You look at wheat prices, we got a good rally in wheat prices.

They got up to around $6 and 10 cents, that's up in northern Oklahoma, for harvest delivered wheat.

You take 30 to 40 off of it in southern Oklahoma and maybe 10 off for the panhandle.

If you look at corn, we had a small rally.

It peaked out and it's kind of come down.

It's staying at $4.35 to $4.60n for harvest delivered corn.

Soybeans, we got, again, had a little rally in that, got up to that little $11 mark and then it's came back down to the $11.50.

So not much movement.

They're just kind of moving sideways, waiting for something to hit the market.

- Kim, last week you said farmers should sell their wheat between June 1st and August 31st.

Recap that for us.

- Well, if you look on 2009 through 2023, at the June, July, and August price, it averaged about $5 and 83 cents.

You had to take 23 cents off of that to get it down to the September price, and then it continued to go down and bottom out in December, January.

So if you look at all those years, the time to pull the trigger is the June through August time period.

- So what if harvest prices this year end up to be above average?

- Well, if you look at the period for harvests to be above average, you'd go 2011 through '14, and the '21, '22 and '23 years, on that, you had a slightly higher price, but let's just look at one year during that period to look and see why you should stagger it over that period rather than selling once.

So if we look at 2011, we came in, you look at the long run, '09 to June '11, you had prices $6.50, get down around $3.50, until you got into the '10, '11 time period, went up to eight bucks, and then was up around that $7.50 to $8 as we came into June.

So we got above average prices.

Well, we came into prices at around $8.50, $8.60 in June.

By July one, they were down to $7.50.

By mid-July to August, they were down to $6.72.

But by the time we got to August 31, they were back up to $8.70.

That's why you need to stagger when prices are above average.

Now you look at the other years, it started mostly high and came down, but you don't know what it's gonna do.

- And then on the other side, what if harvest prices end up being below average?

What does that look like?

- Well, you'd think if prices are below average, it may be prices would just go up.

Let's look at 2016.

You go '09 through '16.

You started out with prices around six bucks in '09.

In '10 we had a good rally.

We got 'em up around that $8.

They stayed six to eight going out through '12 and '13.

We came back down.

We came in the harvest at $3 and 71 cents in 2016.

Your average price is running around six bucks if you'll go back over that time.

So it had been 2005 since you had seen prices go below that $3 and 50, $3 and 60 cents.

So if you look at coming into harvest, we were up around that $3.50.

Prices fell off.

By July one, we were down to 3.50.

Then you gotta go back to '05 before you're lower than that.

Waddled around sideways for a while.

We finished August 31 at $2 and 58 cents.

Who'd of thunk it!

I mean, you've got a well below average price.

It's been 10 or 12 years since you've been prices below that average.

And they still do it.

That's why you've gotta dollar cost average.

I don't care what the price is.

Stagger it over time.

Maybe rather than a third, a third, a third do a fifth, a fifth, a fifth, a fifth, and a fifth, and average that price out.

- Well, it is important too to analyze that historical data, right?

All these numbers you just ran for us, that has to be a part of your decision making too, right?

- Actually, in my humble opinion, ignore it.

Just every year from June through August, average your sales out and over time until the market changes, and it will one of these days.

Hopefully you'll have somebody here to catch it.

But over time, it's gonna average out.

Don't second guess your strategy.

- Okay, sounds good.

Kim, thanks a lot.

We'll see you next week.

(lively music) - We are back here at the Chickasha Field Day with our OSU Extension Weed Specialist, Dr. Liberty Galvin and Liberty, you just came aboard OSU.

So first tell us a little bit about yourself.

- Thanks Kurtis, for having me.

So I actually was born and raised here in Oklahoma.

I grew up in northeastern Oklahoma.

Did my undergrad at Oklahoma State.

Afterwards, I did a lot of my graduate education at UC Davis, but just moved back last fall to start this job.

My specialty is small grains, but I'm kind of doing a little bit wherever the need presents itself, but I'm happy to be here at the Forges Wheat Field Day today.

- Well, we're happy to have you aboard and there's always a need when it comes to weeds.

So first off, let's talk a little bit about what your talk here at the field day was about.

- Yeah, so, there's a lot of reports across the state about herbicide resistance issues.

And Dr. Resha, my colleague and I, are really trying to understand how bad is the resistance.

So how many modes of action have we lost for those weeds, but also how widespread across the state is the issue.

And I think a lot of people get really shocked when they see how many weeds have resistance to the herbicides that we have available in the state.

- Yeah, because they might be using those herbicides just not even knowing that's not effective.

- Yeah, yeah.

And a lot of growers, I think, are aware that they're ineffective, but they're kind of running out of options.

So it was important to connect with growers on that piece today.

- So what kind of questions were you fielding from growers here today?

- Well, we are really looking for buy-in for our scouting program.

There was a couple of folks that came up to me and said, Hey, I'm confident I have herbicide-resistant Italian rye grass in my field.

- [Kurtis] Yeah.

- I've been spraying it all season.

Nothing's happening to it.

So that was a big thing.

Another piece is because these herbicides aren't working, we're really looking at what our non-chemical control options are.

And kind of part of my talk today was fishing to see what growers might be interested in, if people have already tested some of these strategies.

So that was also very helpful at this field day.

- So shifting, just in general with weeds, we've had some warmer days and good moisture, thankfully.

But at the end of the day, wheat likes that, but so does weeds.

- So do the weeds, yeah.

The biggest complaint that we hear across the state from wheat growers specifically is Italian ryegrass.

We also focus a lot on our broma species, so our truchet, rescue grass, and even some of the broma species that are planted for forages.

Ryegrass is planted as a forage, and now we're kind of seeing some of those species creep over into our wheat fields, which sometimes have a dual purpose.

They're grazed for cattle in the fall.

Hopefully you can get a good wheat crop off of it in the spring, but because of this intersection between grazing and wheat production, we're seeing really interesting field-level ecology and what type of weeds we're seeing.

- So when it comes to management, as you just mentioned, it's kind of a struggle when it's coming to manage those.

So what are your recommendations for this time of year in this environment?

- So honestly, this time of year.

- Got weeds, there's not a lot of options.

Some things we are looking at for the future, though, I have a grad student who has a wild land firefighting background.

He's a natural resource ecology management undergrad.

He's gonna start a grad program with me next January and we're looking at using fire as a potential control tool for herbicide-resistant weeds.

Now that that doesn't work for everybody because of their proximity to a highway-- - Yeah, right.

- Or their proximity to an airport.

Crop rotation.

There's not a lot of winter crops because our big issue are our winter annual weeds.

So you have to have a diverse winter annual crop to rotate with, so probably gonna be looking at canola, maybe some alfalfa.

- [Interviewer] Oh yeah.

- You know, we wanna make sure that growers aren't missing out on that forage opportunity, the growers that do grow wheat for forage.

So fire, crop rotation, and I also, I was fishing a little bit today and some growers seem amicable to the idea of a post-harvest seed crusher.

- Oh, okay.

- And a seed crusher is essentially a gigantic grinder that will crush any seed that's left over in the chaff.

- [Interviewer] Oh, okay, yeah.

- So it doesn't necessarily address the seed bank issues, but it will prevent any more weed seeds from being deposited into the seed bank.

So a couple of non-chemical options that we sort of have on the table.

And now that I've gauged the interest from growers, I think that those control options need to be on the table, for me, research-wise over the next couple years.

And, honestly, I'm really excited about that.

- Well we look forward to seeing what that research project holds and we're happy to have you aboard, Liberty.

- Thank you so much.

- All right, thanks.

- Appreciate it.

- Liberty Galvin, OSU Extension Wheat Specialist here at Oklahoma State University.

Well, it's officially May and y'all know what that means.

The 2024 Lahoma Wheat Field Day is up around the bend.

The event will be May 17th from 9:30 in the morning to 1:30 in the afternoon.

And, as always, it will be held at the North Central Research station in Lahoma.

Topics will include wheat varieties, breeding, fertility, and pest and weed management.

Be sure to register before May 12th so you can be entered into a prize drawing and it helps get a head count for lunch.

To register, go to sunup.okstate.edu.

- That'll do it for us this week.

A reminder, you can see us anytime at sunup.okstate.edu and also follow us on YouTube and social media.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

Have a great week, everyone.

And remember, Oklahoma Agriculture starts at Sunup.

(laid-back country music) (crowd murmuring) (laid-back country music continues) (people murmuring)