(upbeat music) - Hello everyone.

And welcome to SUNUP.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

With the warmer temperatures, pastures are starting to green-up.

Joining us now is Dr. Alex Rocateli, our extension forage specialist.

Alex, is kind of a a pivotal time for Bermuda grass, give us some advice.

- Yes.

Now is the time that Bermuda grasses start to green-up .

Soil temperatures are reaching around 65 during the day and 60 during the night.

So the Bermuda grass try to wake up and that's a time that we need to be thinking very strategically on how to proceed with our pastures.

- Okay.

So what are some of the initial steps that producers need to do?

They kind of identify the Bermuda grass.

That's step one.

Right?

- Right.

At this time in the past before Bermuda grass green-up, the producers could just apply an non-selective herbicide and kill all the weeds that were coming up.

But now becomes a very critical time because if the Bermuda grass in some places are red ,greening up and in some places on the verge to green up the producers must be scouting and making sure that the Bermuda grass didn't green up yet.

So they can still apply some glyphosate to control.

As you can see here, it's pretty green but if you go down and see there is no much Bermuda grass in this specific pasture.

Now, if you cross and you look at there, there's much more.

So what I'm saying is, it's very important to identify the Bermuda grass.

- So what do people need to look for specifically?

- Well, when we are looking for Bermuda grass if you wanna really know if berm.. we have a red Bermuda grass greening up on your pasture the first thing that you need to do is make sure that you identify where the death growth from last season was.

And you start to look around and you can see that from the below ground of the plant you can see that the new plants start to come as you can see here, right?

And as you can see Bermuda grass it's kind of connected by stolons and rhizomes.

The rhizomes are structures that's very difficult to see here but are structures underground, as you can see like we don't have just one specific stem coming out.

You can see that they are together - Right.

- And so that's why this plant I say has stolons here.

That's another way to identify.

And one thing is the Bermuda grass has pretty much like the stem of the Bermuda grass is pretty much flattened ,so it's not rounded.

you can feel, when you place your fingers that is not rounded.

It's a flat stem.

And if that's not enough, you can just look and see that when you look at the leaf here in this part of the leaf, there is no hairs at all.

And when you go to the leaf blade, also we don't have hairs but when you look where the leaf sheet and the leaf blade meets, can you see?

We have long puff of hairs at the corners here.

So that's how you can identify Bermuda grass.

- So bottom line, it's at a critical stage of development and the herbicides could affect that if you apply them now, if it's already sprouted?

- Exactly what happened is, the Bermuda grass on these kind of underground structures and the internodes.

I mean, that's where the Bermuda grass last year accumulate all the reserves.

So it can survive during the winter.

So during the winter the Bermuda grass was just spending out that energy.

And what happened now, is the plant is pretty much I would say, starving.

And energy that is still there the plant is saying, well, let me invest with the soil temperature going up on new leaves so I can make more energy.

So imagine if you apply a non-selective herbicide or even a selective herbicide that has restriction for a green-up what can happen is you would damage injury too much your green leaf that's gonna do new photosynthesis and energy.

And at the same time you don't have more energy here to grow new leaf.

So that's where it can be very bad for a pasture.

And if you keep doing that year after year your pasture with time is gonna thin out.

- Sure.

Now once it's established and kind of the pasture has filled out, so to speak then you can apply herbicide later?

- Yes.

Green-up is a stage that would say when you see new growth coming up is when the green-up, I would say start.

And I would say the green-up ends when you can see that the Bermuda grass is quite even in our field.

And you have about two inch of growth.

- Well, we're just touching on the subject today, but you have some fact sheets that our viewers can check out?

- Yes, we have some fact sheets on Bermuda grass establishment for spring, for seed, and also some fact sheets on Bermuda grass management overall.

And also, don't forget that we have our county educators.

They are always a good resource to check if you have more specific questions.

- Great, well, great information Alex, and we'll see you again soon.

And for a link to those fact sheets, as well as a link to find your local county extension office, go to sunup.okstate.edu.

(country instrumental music) - Welcome to the Mesonet weather report.

I'm Wes Lee.

We are quickly approaching what should be the wettest time of the year for Oklahoma.

Usually late April through June marks the wettest months of the year, when looking at the state as a whole.

This past week, we received some great rainfall, but only in parts of the state.

This seven day map from midweek shows one-inch-plus numbers in most of the southeast.

Seminole came in with a whopping 4.08 inches and McCurtain County had numbers above three inches.

But has been the case for many months, most of the drought-stricken northwest missed out on the big rains and recorded numbers of a 10th or less.

Zeros, again, for the dries parts of panhandle.

Here is our deepest look of soil moisture levels on Wednesday.

It is the percent plant available water from the surface down to 32 inches under sod.

You can see that the eastern two thirds are in great shape, but the reds and yellows in the west show areas where the drought is most persistent.

It would be nice if weather patterns change in the west before they miss out on the normally wettest months of the year.

Rainfall that is desperately needed to replenish soil moisture levels there before the heat of summer returns.

Now here's Gary, showing the recent rains impact on the drought map.

- Thanks Wes and good morning, everyone.

Well, as Wes said, our drought map does look a little bit better.

Let's get straight to that map and see where we're at.

Well, better is a relative term, of course.

We do have at least the eastern half of the state looking a lot better than it has with mostly abnormally dry conditions and maybe moderate drought, little bit of severe to extreme drought peppered in there.

And even a lot of the far eastern parts of the state, completely outta drought.

But we still have that monster area of extreme to exceptional drought covering the western half of the state, in general, a few areas of just plain severe drought, which sounds a lot better than it is.

But we do still have that bad area across the western half of the state.

And unfortunately, still getting lots of impacts, especially wildfires across that part.

That improvement's really come on some beneficial spring rains.

Of course, climatological spring started March 1st.

We look at the rainfall since that timeframe.

We do see that eastern part of the state with a good general, four to six inches of rainfall, little bit less, little bit more in some areas.

And then across the western half of the state, generally less than two inches of rain.

Again, a little bit more, a little bit less in places, but that's the overall picture of the rainfall since spring began.

The haves versus have-nots for spring, so far, does show up pretty well on the percent of normal rainfall map for that same timeframe.

All the greens and darker greens show those areas of surpluses.

The reds and darker reds, oranges, yellows, those are areas of deficits.

And unfortunately, those deficits are still pretty strong across the western half of the state, over into other portions of south central and east central Oklahoma.

As Wes told you, the soil moisture, doing a little bit better, could be better, of course, especially across the western portions of the state.

And compared to last year, if you look at this map from the USDA, we do see 59% of the states' topsoil moisture, percent short to very short.

That's 36% more than last year at this time.

So, at least compared to last year, the drought is much more severe.

So we're gonna continue to see those drought impacts, especially across the western half of the state, and especially those impacts due to fire danger.

So that's it for this time.

We'll see you next time on the Mesonet weather report.

(upbeat music) - Talking grain markets right now with our crop marketing specialist, Dr. Kim Anderson.

So Kim, let's jump right in, what's going on?

- Well, you can look at the factors that's impacting prices right now.

Probably the biggest is Ukraine and Russia and the the war that's going on over there.

Then there's weather.

You go in central to western U.S., too dry.

You go back to the east, it's too wet, delayed planting.

You got the USDA reports that came out last week.

That's being digested.

- Price volatility, and of course your higher input cost.

- You know, for the past few weeks weekly, you've been giving updates just what's happening in the world with the crop market.

Let's go back to January and talk about how those factors have changed.

- Well, if you look at wheat right now, you can forward contract wheat in North Central, Oklahoma, the Panhandle, for $10.10, just above $10, Southern Oklahoma around $9.70.

If you go back to January 1, we were at $7.50 for harvested 2022 wheat.

It came on out pretty much flat.

And when we got into late February, when the conflict started in Ukraine and Russia, $8, it moved up to $11.50 for forward contract.

And then it came back down, it wallowed, oh, between $9 and $10, $10 and a quarter, something like that.

And of course right now, we're right above $10 for forward contracts.

And so what you've got is those factors and the strong demand for wheat prices, and it's increased the risk.

Now that's shown with a basis.

You go back before the conflict started, that basis was a minus 28 cents.

After the conflict, it went down to a minus 87 cents.

It's down now to about a minus 58.

That difference in 28 and 58 is how much risk the merchandisers are putting on this market price.

- So what about corn and sorghum?

- Well, you look at corn, you can forward contract to North Central, Oklahoma, $6.80 right now, Panhandle around $7.45, Southern Oklahoma $7.10, but you go back to January 1, you were at $5.20.

But corn has just made a slow and kind of a little faster increases in prices for the last two months.

A lot of that was relatively tight stocks, relatively good demand, and then late February, the war.

18% of exported corns coming out of Ukraine, so naturally we had another increase in price.

Also, as you look at this graph, look at the volatility, the increased variability in prices after we got past February, the 20th.

$6.80 for corn right now, that's relatively good.

Of course, part of that is you look at corn planted acres, 89.5 million, 93.4 last year.

And that's the high input cost covering their impact and that lot happening in that market.

- So we can't forget about soybean.

So how soybean kind of reacting along with corn and sorghum?

- Well, soybeans, you don't have to put as much nitrogen fertilizer if any on the beans, so you had increased planted acres for soybeans, 91 million this year compared to 87.2 last year.

You go back to January, soybean prices were $11 or so.

When the war started, they had increased to $14, that's because we had a smaller Brazilian crop than we'd anticipated.

And we got that run up in prices.

Since late February, the soybean prices really moved sideways to slightly lower.

Right now we're at $13.80, within 20 cents of where we were in late February.

- So what about cotton?

Last time we spoke, cotton really hadn't done much.

So, what's going on with cotton?

- Well, cotton, we had a high price, because the increased demand in relatively tight stocks.

Demand for cotton has deflated the cotton supply.

Planted acres for cotton this year are up 9%, at 12.2 million acres.

Go back to January, 94 cents cotton.

This is the forward contract or the hedge price for coming out for the fall '22 cotton crop.

By the time you got into early February, it was at $100, it wallowed around to $100 and $105.

On the last couple weeks, it's went up to about $113.

This is demand-driven cotton prices and reduced stocks.

- All righty, thanks, Kim.

Dr. Kim Anderson, Grain Marketing Specialist here at Oklahoma State University.

(upbeat country music) - We're joined now by Dr. Rod Hall, our state veterinarian for the State of Oklahoma who is based out of the Department of Agriculture.

Dr. Hall, thanks for joining us today.

We wanna dive right in and talk about avian influenza, and in the last week or so, we've had a case confirmed in Oklahoma.

So get us up to speed on what happened and where we are now.

- Okay, well, thanks for having me Lyndall.

We did have the, almost two weeks ago now, we had a person in Payne County who found a wild waterfowl that wasn't sure if it was injured or sick, collected it, took it to the veterinary school at Oklahoma State University, and the prognosis was very, very poor.

So they went ahead and humanely euthanized that duck, and then took it to the Oklahoma Animal Disease Diagnostic Lab to be necropsied and tested.

- And it was positive at that lab, it had to be, since avian influenza is a foreign animal disease, it has to be confirmed at a USDA lab.

So a few days later we got confirmation that it was positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza and this only confirmed what we already knew, that the virus was present in Oklahoma.

- And we've talked with our extension veterinarians, Dr. Whitworth and Dr. Biggs about some of those biosecurity measures, it doesn't hurt to go ahead and give a quick overview again of some of those safety practices, what do folks with poultry need to do?

- Well, I'm gonna focus mainly on the backyard poultry, Lindell because our commercial poultry industry, they have to take biosecurity measures already for other diseases, but for the backyard folks that have 6 or 8 or 10 or in some cases even much larger backyard flocks, they can take some measures to help prevent exposure of their birds.

Since the virus is carried by these wild water fowl, we are looking at places where wild water fowl come to visit, so that would be farm ponds, lakes, city lakes, rivers, and then the potential for the domestic poultry to come to those places.

So anytime we want to try to prevent those domestic poultry from going to ponds or to prevent the wild water fowl from coming up into areas where domestic poultry are gathered, just covering the areas where domestic poultry are to prevent the droppings from these wild water fowls as they're flying over.

- And it's my understanding that this is pretty contagious, can you give us some context on that on how the disease is transmitted from one animal to another?

- It is very contagious once it gets into domestic poultry so usually we think of chickens and turkeys, it goes from one to the other very easily, it doesn't take much of whatever kinda material, like I say, typically, it's the feces of those infected animals.

- So what can the public do to help with this situation in terms of reporting and just helping with the tracking, what do you need people to do?

- Well, certainly if producers have sick birds and we're talking the domestic poultry here, so chickens or turkeys, any significant illness or deaths in those birds, we would appreciate the people contacting us and letting us know.

We've got two numbers that we'd like to give out, so our number here at the Oklahoma Department of Ag is area code 405 522 6141.

So, that number would be the one to call for any suspicious cases in domestic poultry.

If a person notices wild water fowl, they can report that to the USDA wildlife services.

- Dr. Hall, thank you for your time today and an update on this kind of evolving situation.

For a link to the phone numbers that Dr. Hall mentioned and for more information on avian influenza and its prevention, go to our website, sunup.okstate.edu.

(bright music) - Good morning Oklahoma, welcome to "Cow-Calf Corner", thanks for joining us.

This week we continue on our topic of management considerations on our replacement heifers.

It's that time of year we're thinking about which ones we're gonna keep back to make the next set of cows and last week we talked about some feeding strategies, some selection strategies, this week, we wanna talk about Reproductive Tract Scoring.

Sometimes it's difficult to look at those heifers and know for sure whether or not they've reached puberty and in some cases, even if they're at their target weight, we can't always say with 100% certainty that they're cycling and they've reached puberty.

Reproductive Tract Scoring is something we're gonna do in consultation with our veterinarian.

He's gonna actually come out and do a rectal palpation on those heifers, gonna reach in palpate ovaries, and those heifers are gonna get a score from 1 to 5, where 1 tells us that their ovaries are immature, we're not picking up any activity, that we've got oocytes or that there's a corpus luteum, and the other extreme of that scale is that those heifers get a score of 5 which means we're actually picking up a corpus luteum, they've had a heat, they've ovulated, and so now we've gotta CL on 'em, and the intermediate scores when we get into scores around 2 or 3, we're gonna have to make some management decisions on those, those 2s, we probably separate out with the 1s and figure they're not ready, we're gonna go ahead and curl 'em, the 3s were kinda iffy on, the 4s and 5s are the ones we feel pretty good are ready to breed up, turn out bulls with, and they are ready, so.

- In tandem with what we talked about last week, at this time of year as we think about trying to overcome some of the lack of cool-season grass and some of the lack of moisture we've dealt with.

Another thing to take a look at in making decisions on which yearling heifers to keep is using Reproductive Tract Scoring to our advantage, to know which ones are actually ready for Breed-Up.

Thanks again for joining us this week.

(bright music) - [Narrator] And just a quick reminder about the upcoming Eastern Oklahoma Beef Cattle Summit.

The event will be at the Southeast Expo Center in McAlester on Thursday, April 14th.

The cost is $20.

And for more information about this event, go to SUNUP.okstate.edu - Talking pests in wheat fields now, and the particular mite that thrives in dry weather.

And can also cause issues in your field.

Here's SUNUP's Kurtis Hair and our Extension Entomologist, Dr. Tom Royer.

- Usually if you spot some changes in the color of your wheat, that might signal a wheat disease, but Tom, there is an insect problem that could be causing that.

- Right.

Because it's been so dry this year.

I've gotten calls about a mite actually, not an insect, but a mite called brown wheat mite.

And they show up when it gets dry like this and they can cause issues of the wheat.

They feed on individual cells of the leaf and so they make the leaf just kinda look sick and discolored.

Maybe take on a grayish or brownish, tannish cast.

And it just looks like the wheat's just not doing what it should be doing at that time of the year.

But when it's so dry, sometimes people mistake it for well, it's a drought stress or it's some kind of disease.

But if they go out in the field and check they might see that they have a brown wheat mite problem.

- So first, let's just jump right in.

How can you check to see if you have a brown wheat mite problem?

- Well, what I usually suggest is to get a piece of white paper, and if it's on a windy day like this you want to keep it so it's not blowing around.

But you can just go out in your field and set it down like this and just tap.

And if they're... Before they blow away if you start seeing a bunch of them crawling around on the... That tells you that you have a problem.

Now the bad news is if you have a lot of them, we don't have a threshold.

So it's just, if you got a lot of them and the wheat's looking sick that's when we suggest you treat.

- Okay, so let's start off.

Like how do we treat?

- Well, there's some good news and bad news about brown wheat mite.

The good news is it doesn't show up every year.

The bad news is we've actually looked at evaluating some products up in Goltry and down in Walters this year.

And the initial results are that nothing works great.

We've lost one of our probably most effective tools.

Chlorpyrifos it's no longer registered... Or no longer be able to use it in any of our food crops.

So what we've got left that actually has brown wheat mite on the label is dimethoate.

And then we have a lot of pyrethroids that don't list mites on the label, but they're registered for use in wheat so we wanted to see how they held up against dimethoate.

And it turns out they don't hold up quite as well.

And it's not like dimethoate is the greatest product in the world to use for them, too.

So, right now we're looking, at least for the tests that I have, maybe 50 to 60 percent control, that's about it.

- So how, you know, since it's kind of they're really hard to control how much, like what type of damage will this make to the overall yield of the crop?

- It can cause some yield loss, but if we get any kind of rains that'll probably get rid of them a lot of times, because they do not like wet conditions of any kind.

They don't do very well.

There's I think diseases that take them out.

Do that kind of thing.

So a lot of times we've just kind of ignored them, because they don't show up every year and we don't really have a strong threshold.

But if there's a problem with them right now, yeah, you need to do something about it.

- So, before we let you go, you know, springs here, the wheat's starting to green up, there has been rain in some spots.

- Yes.

- So in regards to other insects that we normally worry about this time of year, are you seeing or hearing anything?

- Right now I'm not hearing much.

I kind like hearing that it's kind of quiet on the wheat front right now, but you never know.

Anything can show up.

Aphids could show up, army worms could show up later.

So it's always important to watch your wheat.

And it's especially important this year, because the price of wheat is really high, and so if anybody has a healthy wheat crop they're gonna want to protect it from pests, including diseases and insects, and that kind of thing.

- Alright, thanks Tom!

Tom Royer, Extension Entomologist here at Oklahoma State University.

And if you'd like some information for what he talked about, go to our website, SUNUP.okstate.edu (peppy music) - That'll do it for us this week.

Remember you can see us anytime on our website 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.

(peppy music continues) (guitar strums)