(upbeat music) - Hello everyone and welcome to SUNUP.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

On the agenda today, weed control in wheat fields and ideas to tackle the issue of herbicide resistance.

Let's head into the greenhouse to talk with Dr. Misha Manuchehri.

We're joined now by Dr. Misha Manuchehri, our Extension Weed Specialist.

Misha, today we want to talk about some applied research on herbicide resistant weeds.

And let's kind of just talk about what you and the team have set up in the greenhouse.

- Sure, so these are all Italian ryegrass plants annual ryegrass, Marshall ryegrass.

We have a few different names in Oklahoma, same plant, and we're just trying to find out is there any products that are still working to kill this weed in wheat once it's emerged.

And there are two products that we're screening: Axial and aggressor herbicide.

- So what are we seeing so far in the results?

- So we have, this would be very typical.

This is non-treated.

Didn't spray anything on these plants.

This would be a successful treatment.

Many of these plants are dying.

Both of these herbicides kill fairly slowly, so it takes multiple weeks for us to see kill.

This is from an Axial application.

We also have some plants that were sprayed with aggressor herbicide.

That herbicide can only be sprayed in coaxium wheat systems.

And so we're trying to find out do our plants, are they resistant to Axial and aggressor or is it one or the other, and if they're resistant to them both, what do we do.

- As you try to find the answer to that very question, talk about pre- versus post-emergence and how you're looking at that piece.

- So typically we like to spray herbicides post-emergence once the plants have come up.

In some counties, we are gonna have resistance to the only post products left.

So that will force us, if we want to stay in winter wheat to spray an herbicide that goes down shortly after planting.

That's called the delayed pre-application timing.

Those herbicides are Axiom, Zidua, and Anthem Flex.

And we have found in past research studies that they do a very good job controlling this plant.

- So if these two herbicides that we're talking about don't work, let's talk about some of the options that the other options producers may have.

- So they can go out, if they're gonna use a chemical application in wheat, they can go out shortly after planting at that delayed pre-emergence timing.

It is important that we have a rain following those applications to get the herbicide incorporated.

And once we do, many of those products, Axiom, Anthem Flex, Zidua, they do a great job controlling ryegrass.

So we still have a timing, it's just not the post-emergence timing.

- Okay, how about tillage or no-till?

How does that play into what you're seeing in the fields?

- That's a good question.

So of course we're seeing more tillage as herbicide resistant weeds increase.

We're trying to find out, we have some students looking at weather residue impacts, some of our delayed pre-emergence herbicides.

If we have too much residue on the ground, are some of those pre's going to suffer.

So far, we are seeing that if we spray with enough water, our carrier volume is high enough.

We aren't seeing any kind of hindrance from having residue on the ground, so that is a good thing.

What is most important with the pre's again is getting them incorporated by rainfall, not the type of tillage playing you have.

- Got it and of course rainfall is a little challenging right now, to say the least.

What do you, when you get all of this information gathered up, then what happens?

Is it translated to producers who can then apply the information?

- Yes, so we have an Italian ryegrass management fact sheet and we also like to update our county maps.

Oftentimes, we tweet those out on social media and just try and let producers in Oklahoma now and our extension personnel, here's where we have issues so we can plan for future seasons.

- Great.

Okay, great information.

Thank you very much.

And of course, we can provide a link to those fact sheets on SUNUP.OKState.edu.

And now to our next segment.

Speaking of no-till, we have an update on research in Oklahoma, beginning with Dr. Jason Warren.

(upbeat music) - No till's just simply the idea that we're planting a seed into soil through residue without inverting the soil.

That's extremely beneficial, particularly as you move from east to west, as we get to dryer environments 'cause that residue - Increases water infiltration, reduces runoff, and then improves water storage.

- Ultimately, we want to try and protect that soil from erosion is, to me is the major goal for Oklahoma.

- [Lyndall] Dr. Jason Warren and Dr. Randy Taylor looked into the historical trends of tillage in Oklahoma going back to the Dust Bowl days.

- Well, if you look at the history of agriculture, like, crop production in Oklahoma, you know, we would have been running moldboard plows in the beginning with listers.

Very heavy, intensive tillage.

And, you know, I grew up in western Oklahoma and I know where people ran plows when I was a kid in the '90s and they no longer run moldboard plows.

If they run anything, it's a disk or a chisel or something like that because we've realized we didn't need to plow that deep.

- [Lyndall] They found that conservation tillage systems such as no-till have increased dramatically in the last few decades.

- One of the reason we've seen a large adoption of no-till is that farms get bigger and you could just cover a lot more ground with the self-propelled sprayer and 120-foot boom than you can with a 40-foot disc.

- We see a lot of double-crop soybeans and that would be challenging under a conventional tilled system in our environment because the soil would dry out so fast in late June, early July.

But under no-till, we can maintain that moisture at the surface to germinate the crop.

- [Lyndall] No-till, however, requires effective herbicides to control weeds, and because of that, many producers are rethinking the practice.

- Well I think one of the challenges is is likely herbicide resistant weeds.

As those become more prevalent in some of our systems, when chemicals aren't controlling them anymore, the people are gonna go back to some kind of tillage.

- We've done a little bit of a decent job of moving intensive tillage to that conservation tillage and then to no-till.

But as a conservationist, my hope is that we don't go back to the intensive tillage 'cause that's what really sends soil down the stream.

- [Lyndall] For those will no-till challenges, researchers encourage them to consider other conservation tillage options.

- My advice would be if an individual's having some challenges with weed control in a no-till system, is to start, you know, trying to identify what that real problem is and then try to address it.

It may be a tillage pass for certain crops but then trying to maintain a lot of residue or maybe no-till into another crop when they don't have those challenges with resistant weeds.

Actually, if you're really wanting to control weeds, some kind of a sweep implement is the way to go.

We've got a lot of those available to us now.

Not our big five-foot sweeps that we used to pull around quite a bit in western Oklahoma, but there's some low lift 26- to 24-inch sweeps that you can run at a fairly decent speed with that really undercut the weeds and give us pretty good weed control.

- The no-till management is an outstanding practice for a variety of reasons, but we have to figure out how to control some of these weeds 'cause we can talk about conserving the soil for the future, but in the future, if we can't kill weeds, then what have we done?

- If you have a question about no-till or herbicide resistance, be sure to contact your local county OSU Extension Office.

We have a link to those offices at SUNUP.OKState.edu.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Mesonet Weather Report, I'm Wes Lee.

Spring is not far away now and with the warmer than normal winter temperatures, plants will begin breaking dormancy soon.

Along with that will come insect pests.

For alfalfa producers, the alfalfa weevil is usually our most damaging pest.

It is a unique insect in that it estimates in the hot summer months and the adults come out in the fall and early winter.

Females lay eggs in the stem that will hatch when an appropriate number of heat units have accumulated.

In Oklahoma, that hatch begins when approximately 150 heat units have added up since January 1st.

With this map through Tuesday, you can see the red color that indicates hatch has already likely begun in the far, southern counties.

At Mesonet, you can also look at heat unit accumulations at an individual site, as well.

Here are the numbers for Washington.

It reached the 150 heat unit mark on Valentine's Day.

Producers or consultants should begin field scouting for the insects in the southern half of the state soon.

One bit of good news is that sampling done by OSU indicate that the egg numbers for this winter are relatively low.

Sometimes in an early hatch year like this, a really cold snap can help by killing off the small larvae.

Now here is Gary with the persistent drought map.

- Thanks Wes and good morning, everyone.

Well, we've got a good dose of water this week.

Some good moisture across the state.

We're gonna take a look at the newest drought monitor map before that moisture fell and see where we're gonna be starting at next week when we try and make improvements.

Well, at least before that moisture, all we had on the drought monitor map was, I'm afraid, increases in intensity this week.

Now we have most of the Western half of the state covered by that D three or extreme drought.

We just have one little small area of severe drought over into Southwestern Oklahoma that's left basically the Western half of the state and including in South Central extend over into Southeast Oklahoma covered by that D three extreme drought.

That's the bright red color.

So taking a look at the 30 day rainfall before the big storm this week, of course, this is the justification for the increases still across the Western really five, six of the state less than an inch of rainfall over the last 30 days.

It is the driest time of the year.

So not quite a shock there.

However, if we look at the percent of normal rainfall maps for that same timeframe over the last 30 days even those areas across far Eastern Oklahoma remain below normal.

In fact way below normal.

Less than 50% of normal over most of the state and in parts of the Northwestern quarter of the state less than 25% of normal.

So certainly not a good map.

Hopefully these numbers are much improved before next week's drought monitor map.

So we can start to make some improvements.

Now, when we start to take a look at the outlook for next week this is for the February 22nd to the 26th timeframe.

We do see a large area of much below normal temperatures extending down across basically the Western two thirds of the country coming down into Oklahoma.

So this is possibly another extremely cold air outbreak like we saw last February.

Probably not quite as cold and not nearly as long, but lasting a couple of days and maybe our next big winter storm to bring us some moisture.

We are just getting into the first of the spring season.

We start to hit March through May.

That is climatological spring.

We take a look at the seasonal drought outlook from the climate prediction center for, uh, the end of February through May 31st.

Unfortunately, they see much of the state still remaining in drought through that timeframe.

So, that would be through the end of spring, certainly not the end of the hopes for the rainfall because we do have quite a bit of rain as we extend into June and even into July in some cases.

But not a good map for these purposes this time around.

So, a good dose of moisture as we start out, uh, for the next week.

Maybe it's a start of something good and we can start to really hammer that drought out of here over the next few weeks.

That's it for this time.

We'll see you next time on the Mesonet Weather Report (upbeat music) - Joining us this morning is Dr. Kim Anderson crops marketing specialist at OSU.

Here to talk to us about wheat prices.

Dr. Anderson, why don't you tell us a little bit, to start off with, about how this year's wheat prices compare to some of our previous year's wheat prices?

- Well, they're higher than previous prices, especially last year.

Now you can go back to 2010, the prices have been going well below that $6 level.

And I like to look at that $6 level for critical, high prices and low prices.

Prices went above that in September of 2010 essentially stayed high above $6 through $14, but between four, 2000, February of 2014 and July of 2021 prices stayed below six bucks.

We're above six bucks.

So we've got relatively good prices.

- Okay.

What do you think attributes to these higher prices?

- Well, I think these prices are high.

You can go back to looking at this year's production around the world.

We had record production at 28.5 billion bushels almost the same as last year, just slightly half higher.

However our consumption this year was a record 28.8 billion bushels.

You know, it's higher than production.

And last year we had 28.0 billion bushels which was higher than the year before so, we're reducing stocks.

Any stocks are projected to go from 10 more .9 billion bushels in 2019 down to 10.2 billion bushels this year.

There's a lot of uncertainty in the market.

You can look at the Ukraine/Russian conflict going on right now.

It makes it uncertain about wheat being shipped outta the black sea port, ports.

Also, you can look at the major exporter minus the European union.

Ah, you've got Ukraine, US, Argentina, Australia, Canada and Russia, all basically hard winter wheat exporters of course Australia's is a white wheat of soft white wheat but competes directly with our hard red.

You look at the five year average on the US, for these exporters, we averaged 1.3, 4 billion bushels.

This year we produced 900 and, and, 56.

Uh, is 16% over the five year average down to 12%.

How, you look at Russia?

Their average production was 2 billion 854 million bushels.

- This year they only produced 2,000,000,774.

But now that reduction in production in Ukraine?

Average 980 million, this year over 1.2 billion.

You can look at Australia, their average 868 million bushels, 1.2 billion.

So if you total those up, you got 4.34 billion on the average, this year 4.42.

Higher production but still higher prices, and that's because of the above average consumption.

- How high do you think wheat prices could go?

- I think $9 is a limit.

Should go back to that 2010 through 14 period, we hit that $9.

Actually we hit $9.03 on two different times.

One in February '11 and one in July of '12.

So that $9 is I think a critical level, and I think we could hit that again.

You go back to 2008, you can see wheat prices going up to $12.65.

If this drought continues in the United States and we lose other crops with consumption being higher than production, we could run up to that 10, 11, maybe even $12.

Not very likely, but it could happen.

- So on the flip side, how low do you think prices could go?

- Wheat prices got down to $2.73 a bushel.

Are we gonna get that low?

I don't think so.

I think that $6 is gonna be a hard price to break through on the bottom side.

I think we could hold that.

If we do, I believe $5 will be our low price for the next year out.

- Well, thank you Dr. Anderson, for that wonderful information about wheat markets for this year and for sharing information with our viewers.

(upbeat music) - Good morning, Oklahoma.

Welcome to Cow-Calf Corner.

You know, it's that time of year that we've got breeding season just around the corner in beef herds that are gonna be calving in early January.

We're really only a few weeks away right now from bull turnout.

Accordingly, it's the time of year we give consideration to the things we need to think about in terms of how many bulls and what do we do with our bull battery to prepare for that breeding season that's comin' up.

The objective of any breeding season is to try to get as many cows bred early in the breeding season as possible so we have as many calves born that following breeding season as possible, and we've got older calves at the point we wean and accordingly more pay weight whenever we're actually weaning those calves.

Considering the calves gain about two pounds a day from birth to weaning on average, a cow that gets bred one heat cycle sooner equates to about 40 pounds more weaning weight.

So as we think at this time of year about how many bulls we're gonna need to turn out, we want to address bull-to-female ratios, kind of from a conservative and a rule of thumb standpoint.

We would say that a yearling bull that has passed a breeding sound this exam should be capable of getting about as many cows bred as he is months of age at the beginning of breeding season when we turn him out.

So if we're looking at a 12 month old bull that we're gonna turn out right now, if he's passed a breeding soundness exam, we should expect him to cover about 12 cows for us over our defined breeding season, whether that's 45 days or 90 days.

For every month that we add to that bull's age at the beginning of breeding season, he's good for about one more cow.

So if we're turning out 15 to 18 month old bulls, about 15 to 18.

As that bull gets closer to two years of age, if we're turning out a two year old bull, we ought to expect about 25 cows outta him.

And beyond the age of two, bulls ought to be good for about 25 to 35 cows a breeding season.

And we would expect our bulls to be prime of life up to about the age of six.

So if we think about how many seasons of service we'd expect to get out of a bull, I always liken it to a professional athlete.

From the time they're a yearling and they pass that BSE, each successive year we continue to use 'em, as we've pulled them at that age of six breeding season, it's not that they couldn't last a few more breeding seasons, but the reality is they're more likely to break down on us in the middle of a breeding season and somewhat like a professional athlete that gets to the age of 38 or 40, you don't hear about a lot of those continuing to play past the age of 40.

It's not that there isn't some Tom Bradys in the world that are still winning Super Bowls at age 44, but we're a lot more likely to hear about athletes retiring at some point in their thirties.

So something to keep in mind there, as we think about typical life expectancy.

If we want to translate that to the amount of cows that they're gonna service and settle over their lifetime, well, six breeding seasons and those basic ratios we're talking about from the time they're yearlings 'til the time they're six, we'd expect a bull to cover about 155 to 160 cows if we're using him one breeding season a year.

Obviously if we're in situations where we may use 'em spring and fall, if we're one of those type operations, we'd bump that number up even more.

- Other things to consider as we look at putting together bull purchases is the social behavior of bulls is such, they're gonna wanna fight and establish a pecking order if we mix 'em together.

So if we're going around to bull sales this spring, it's good to mix bulls that are the same size, same age as close as possible about a month before we're gonna be turning them out.

That's gonna give them time to fight, and argue, and establish a social dominance or pecking order.

By the time we turn 'em out with cows they're gonna be ready to go do their job.

So just some things to keep in mind, we are very fortunate in the state of Oklahoma to be blessed with a number of great purebred seed stock breeders.

There's a lot of bulls that are available for sale and a lot of opportunities to improve the profit potential of our herds through investing in superior genetics.

Thanks for joining us this week on Cow-Calf Corner.

(upbeat music) - If you are a commercial poultry producer or if you're just a backyard enthusiast, when it comes to poultry, I hope that you've been paying attention to the news.

High path avian influenza has been found in the United States.

Now most of the cases have been in wild birds up and down the East Coast, but there has been one commercial turkey flock infected in Indiana and a commercial broiler flock infected in Kentucky.

One backyard flock in Virginia has the virus as well.

Most of you probably can remember the 2014, 2015 high path avian influenza outbreak.

It was the most costliest animal disease in the United States.

The USDA and Congress spent around $1 billion trying to clean that disease up.

We lost 50 million birds as far as turkeys, and chickens, and other varieties of poultry.

So it is something that we should all be concerned about at this time.

Avian influenza is very contagious.

It's easily transmitted from one bird to the next.

It is commonly found in wild birds and especially migratory water fowl have the virus, they typically do not have clinical signs.

They just pass the virus in their fecal material wherever they are.

So if you're a poultry producer, large or small, what should you be doing?

The most important thing you can do is follow your biosecurity plan.

Biosecurity is our best defense against this disease.

You should be reviewing that, making sure that you're doing everything that it says.

If you do not have a plan, get in contact with your local county extension office and see if you can't get a plan developed.

The USDA Defend the Flock website has great ideas and a lot of great information about biosecurity.

Go there and you can find information on how to write a plan.

The National Poultry Improvement Plan website also has good information.

Oklahoma State University Extension has a fact sheet for small flock producers about biosecurity and avian influenza.

It's a great resource.

You can find that at your local county office or you can go to Oklahoma State University Extension and find it as well.

The second thing you need to do is make sure you know the clinical signs of the disease.

Now, one of the most common things that we find is increased mortality and increased morbidity.

What we're saying here is you'll suddenly have an increased number of deaths or an increased number of sick birds.

Those sick birds may display clinical signs, such as respiratory signs like coughing, sneezing, watery eyes, or maybe moisture coming from their nose.

Other clinical signs are neurological, Head tremors, shaking, incoordination, head tilts.

Most of these birds could also, you're not gonna see these birds want to eat a lot or drink a lot.

So they'll go off feed and water, egg production will drop, and there may be some misshapen eggs.

All these things are things you might find.

If you see these things or you definitely if you have this sudden increased number of deaths or an increased number of sick birds, you need to get in contact with somebody as quickly as possible.

You can contact your local veterinarian, contact your local extension office, contact the state veterinarian, Dr. Rod Hall.

And the USDA has a toll-free number that you can report suspicious illnesses in poultry to them.

If you'd like some more information about avian influenza, if you'll go to sunup.okstate.edu.

(upbeat music) - That'll do it for us this week.

Remember, 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."

(upbeat music)