(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - Hello everyone, and welcome to Sunup.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

Now that January is in full swing, we're focusing on managing your cattle through the winter.

Today's topic, managing your ponds and water sources.

Here's Sunup's Kurtis Hair with Dr. Dave Lalman.

- Winter in Oklahoma can present a lot of issues for cattle producers.

And Dave, one of the issues is with ponds.

And as we can see right here, ponds are already starting to freeze over.

So ice is something that producers need to be concerned with in regards to access to their ponds.

- Cattle need access to water 24/7, basically.

And it's interesting that lower quality forage actually increases water intake, whereas high quality forage reduces water intake.

So water consumption is still important in the wintertime.

Cows that, well, when it's below 40 degrees, cows don't drink as much water, of course, as they do in the summertime.

And generally, just in case folks need to know if they need to haul water or whatever, a cow's gonna require somewhere in the neighborhood of about one gallon per hundred pounds of body weight, give or take.

If they're lactating, they'll drink more.

If they're dry, they'll drink less.

- So in regards to ice and having access to water, what are some things that producers can do to make sure that their cattle are safe and some things that they need to just really consider just for ice?

- Yeah, it can be a problem.

And it's good to be aware, for maybe folks that are new to the industry or haven't experienced it, that cattle in our part of the world don't experience thick ice that they can walk on very often.

And so they don't know the dangers and tend maybe just to walk out there on the ice.

- [Kurtis] Especially those yearly heifers.

- Especially, because we know they've never seen ice on the water.

Probably only as little babies, maybe, if they're early spring born calves or something.

But yeah, and the obvious resolution to that would be to find another source of water and fence them away from that pond if possible.

But we understand that's not possible for everyone.

So really the only thing you could do in those situations is to make sure you keep the water open so they're not walking around on the pond looking for an open water source.

- And that means breaking ice.

- That just means chopping the ice, do it every day.

And make sure you have an adequate stretch of ice broken so that those cattle have plenty of water access.

They don't have to crowd around it some out there on the edges falling through the ice.

- Yeah, and as you can see, like we got a obviously drought, huge issue this past last year, and probably gonna be going into the new year.

And you can see the pond right here as severely drought stressed.

So in regards to water quality, especially in the winter, how does that impact things?

- Well, unfortunately, it's another impact of drought conditions.

When you have evaporation of water, there's generally, most ponds are sediment, and if cattle have access to the ponds, they're gonna stir that sediment up.

That increases the total dissolved solids in the water.

And as the water evaporates, the concentration of those total dissolved solids is going to increase.

And so it can get to a point where it's a problem for cattle.

General guidelines, if you have your water tested, it needs to be somewhere below, around 3000 parts per million is very safe.

And that's a test that's easily done at our Soil Water Forge Analytical Laboratory here in Stillwater.

The cost is about $15 a sample.

- And obviously, producers can always contact their local county extension office for water testing just for help.

- They can help you know how to sample the water.

They're very familiar with the soil, Water Forage Analytical Laboratory that work with them all the time.

And so they can be a big help when it comes to the the water testing and forage testing as well.

- All righty, thanks, Dave.

Dr. Dave Walman, beef cattle specialist here at Oklahoma State University.

And to find your local county office, go to our website, sunup.okstate.edu.

- Hi, Wesley, and welcome to a new year of the Mesonet Weather Report.

Last year was not the most favorable for Oklahoma weather conditions.

We spent most of the year in drought with rainfall hard to come by.

This graph shows monthly statewide average rainfall received by the blue bar and the 30-year average shown by the orange bar.

The arrows along the top show us that 10 out of the 12 months, we received below-average rainfall.

The only really wet period was the end of May, where two weeks of rainfall brought most of the state back up to normal for the calendar year.

Then, the summer drought intensified with a vengeance.

This is easily seen on this graph showing rain received by the dark line and the long-term average in blue from June to November.

The state fell, on average, about eight inches behind normal during this time.

The year was also very warm, especially during the summer.

This graph is displaying average temperatures after starting with three cooler than normal months shown by the blue arrows, we spent the next seven months above normal shown by the red arrows.

Focusing on the summer average highs and lows, we see the lows were near normal, but the highs were very warm, about four degrees above normal.

Now, here's Gary focusing on the ever-continuing drought.

- Thanks Wes, and good morning, everyone.

Well, we're starting out the year with an unfortunate drought picture in the state.

It does look like those long-term deficits are continuing to drive that drought depiction on the Drought Monitor.

So let's get right to the new map and see where we're at.

Well, really, it's the same basic picture we've had for a while now, and that's 90% of the state still in drought and about 56% of the state in extreme to exceptional drought.

Those are the two worst categories.

That shows that those long-term deficits that we've talked about are indeed still driving the latest drought picture.

We do have just a small percent of the state out of any sort of dry conditions, and that's over in Far East Central Oklahoma.

It's only 2% of the state, but let's hope that's a good start.

We're going to show you the 2022 rainfall totals from the Oklahoma Mesonet.

Notice out there in Far Western Oklahoma in the Central Panhandle.

The Mesonet at Goodwell recorded 6.48 inches of rainfall, which is the new all-time lowest annual rainfall total for the Oklahoma for any place any year in the state.

That tops Regnier, 6.53 inches from 1956.

So certainly not a good situation out in the Panhandle region in Far Northwestern Oklahoma.

The rainfall totals do get a little bit better as we get farther to the east, but even in those areas, most of that is still at a pretty good deficit.

That shows up really well on the departure from normal rainfall map for the 2022 period.

Again, much of the state, six to 12 inches below normal.

A little bit lower in some areas, a little bit higher in other areas.

And again, the only area of surplus over in Far East Central Oklahoma where we are at a drought, and they had a surplus of about six to 10 inches.

Taking a look at the U.S.

Monthly Drought Outlook for January 2023, we do see that the Climate Prediction Center expects drought to persist across the entire state at least where it exists at this time, but at least it doesn't show any development of new drought over in East Central or Southeast Oklahoma where either abnormally dry conditions or no conditions exist on the latest Drought Monitor map.

So we had a pretty good December over much of the state with some moisture, but those long-term deficits continue to dominate, so we do need some really good rainfall totals or snowfall totals to bolster that December precipitation amount to hopefully get a little bit more of this drought out of here.

That's it for this time.

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

- Talking cotton now and the challenging growing year for producers in Oklahoma and Texas that seriously impacted harvest.

To learn more, we caught up with Gary Strickland in the Jackson County OSU Extension Office.

- Well, Linda, as you can imagine, it wasn't the harvest that we were hoping for.

If you just look at USDA numbers for Oklahoma in general, if you start out in the August report and what they were forecasting, we might harvest about 260,000 acres, which was gonna be 41% down from '21.

In '21, they showed 440,000 acres harvested and they were predicting yields of around 498 pounds an acre.

If you fast forward then to December report and look at it as it finished up, we actually harvested maybe a few more acres and what they thought, but our yields were significantly lower than what they were anticipating.

The East side of the Southwest region down here, the East side probably looks a little bit better.

That's a little bit better harvest.

In fact, some of the gins that did show some production, were getting cotton material coming more from the Eastern side and Southwest region of the state.

But the more you head West in the Southwest region, the worse it got.

And now, I'd say that carries right on over on into the Texas Panhandle, too.

- So we've, it's been a really rough year when it comes to cotton harvesting.

You trace it all the way back to that drought that we were experiencing through the winter and heading into early spring.

- Talk a little bit more about the drought.

And obviously, setting up into planting time, but then it lingered on.

And like you said, it's just so exceptionally dry that it really couldn't get the start that it needed, right?

- And that's exactly right.

I think one of the differences, you know, a lot of comparisons have been made between this dry period and back to 2011 when we started into that drought cycle, one of the differences is was how deep we were dry.

I've made the comparison in several meetings that we were preparing in April for land judging contests and dug pits down to 40-something inches and never hit moisture.

And what you would see in the topsoil profile or, say, from let's say two to 10 inches in there is that we would move 'em for about five to six days and then they'd drop right back down to, you know, dry again.

So we were so dry that the rains we were getting weren't lasting very long and they weren't being very effective.

Now, right at the end of May, first of June, we got some rain.

We got some rain to kinda get us established, get the cotton up and growing.

But boy, from the last half of, you know, about the 10th day of June on through middle August, you know, we just went absolutely hot and dry.

And so our cotton never was able to get growing and responding out there.

And when you talk about dry conditions, you know, Lyndall, especially if you look at the irrigation district down this southwest region, all of those acres were dry land acres this year.

We didn't have enough water in the lake to release water to irrigate with.

So irrigated acres that were harvested down here had to be harvested off of center pivots and/or well systems that might be supplying a drip system or something in there.

But even then, our wells down here, certainly as you headed to the west side of this area down here, we had wells that were staring to run dry and pump dry, you know, at the end.

And so we were really limited on the amount of water we got.

- When you talk about the yields and the challenges with drought, of course, there has to be an emotional toll or an emotional impact for the growers and probably for the community at-large.

Is there a ripple effect when it's been a season like this down in your area?

- Absolutely, and that's a really good point.

You know, most your, you know, your ag producers are in this to make a crop and be pretty profitable but also be productive in their system.

So it's very frustrating to 'em when you have to deal with years like this and deal with these dry conditions.

You know, now we're in an area where we deal with dry conditions.

We recognize we're in an arid area.

But when we're lacking rainfall like we did this year, certainly, it has an impact on everybody's outlook.

- So, you and your colleagues at Texas A&M are also planning an event coming up soon, an annual event that we all look forward to.

Give us some details on that.

- You know, Lyndall, this is something when you and I have talked about having done these interviews for several years now, you did one of the very first interviews with me on the Red River Crops Conference at its inception.

We're into our 10th annual Red River Crops Conference this year.

And the 2023 Crops Conference is gonna be held in Childress, Texas at the Childress Event Center on January 18 and 19.

You can check the Jackson County OSU Extension website and download a brochure and registration form there.

You can also check with most of your extension offices in this area and get a registration form for that conference if you wanna pre-register.

But we certainly welcome registration at the door.

In fact, the bulk of what see at the conference is registration at the door the day of the conference.

And registration, Lyndall, has stayed the same since we started the conference.

It's $25 and that gets you both days.

- Well, sounds fantastic.

Certainly an all-star lineup again this year, and we will have a link for our viewers who wanna learn more or go ahead and register at sunup.okstate.edu.

Well, Gary, great talking with you, as always.

Our best wishes from "SUNUP" to all the producers down in your region.

And happy New Year to you and all of our colleagues there at the extension office.

- Thank you, Lyndall, enjoyed being with you today.

(country music) - Dr. Kim Anderson, our crop marketing specialist, is here now.

Kim, we tend to watch prices.

Why are the current prices so important to Oklahoma producers?

- Well, most Oklahoma producers have sold the 2022 crop, so that's the question, "Why should I watch prices?"

Well, today's price is the best predictor of the price in the future.

Also, when you look at that price, say... - The price of wheat's $8 and 10 cents.

What does that tell you?

Well, it tells you that that wheat's worth $8 and 10 cents.

If I tell you that the average price of wheat over the last 10 years has been $5 and 60 cents, well that $8.10 has a little more value there, 'cause it tells you that prices are relatively high.

If I tell you wheat prices worth $13 when you get back in last March and April, that tells you, well, it may not be so high.

You need to look at prices, 'cause that tells you what's can potentially happen in the future, it's the starting point.

But you've also gotta have additional information to know what it's really telling you.

- It's also good to look year over year, of course.

As we head into January, let's look back at 2022 compared to now, 2023.

- Well, if you look at wheat prices, Northern Oklahoma around $8 and 10 cents.

Southern Oklahoma around 45 cents less than that.

You go out to Panhandle, oh you'll pick up a dime or so.

You look back around harvest in June, July, August is around $9.

The average price in November was $9 and the average price of wheat in December was $8 and 20 cents.

We lost 80 cents there and current price is around $8.10.

If you're looking at corn, November average price, $7.40.

December average price, $7.20.

Corn's just been flat across their current price, $7.30.

Now, if you're looking at soybeans, soybeans have been in an uptrend.

You go back to harvest, they were down as low as $13.30.

They came up to around $14.30.

For the average November price, December, $14.70.

A little higher, $14.85 now.

So beans have been working up, but relatively high there.

Cotton, you know, we had a $1.20, $1.30 cotton back earlier the year.

But the last few months it's just been walling around around 80 cents.

- What market factors do you think might impact future crop prices?

- Well, everybody's talking about the war, but there's a lot more going on.

Next week, the USDA will release the Seeded Acres report, I call it the Planted Acres report, for Winter Wheat and Canola.

The WASADE's coming out, the World Agriculture Supply and Demand Estimates, the first one of the year, really summarizes all 2022.

You've got with corn and soybeans, of course you've got China, what's going there with the COVID and their demand for the beans and corn.

And with corn and beans, you've got South America.

You know, Argentina has only harvested about 60% of a normal wheat crop.

And then you've got the weather, because wheat, corn, bean, all your commodity prices for all practical purposes are tight.

So we're in a weather market.

And we're watching the world weather, you know, all over.

And in the United States, especially in this area, we got drought problems.

So the weather is a big deal.

Then you got the Black Sea exporters.

Insurance.

The reinsurers have said, we're not gonna insure shipping coming out of the Black Sea area.

And that's having a big impact, or has a potential impact for future prices.

- Plenty going on, of course.

How is all of that impacting 2023 crop prices?

- Well if you look at what they're offering for wheat, $8 for 2023 harvested wheat.

That's 55 cents underneath that July contract.

Southern Oklahoma, around $7.50.

Panhandle around $8.

Corn, $5.80, 75 under that December contract.

If you go to the Panhandle, $6.35.

Milo, $5 and 45 cents.

Northern Oklahoma, $5.70 in the Panhandle.

Soybeans, around $13 and 70 cents, 85 under that November contract.

And cotton, around 80 cents.

- All right, well some of those prices a little higher than normal.

Why so?

- Well, it's because stocks for those commodities are tied around the world.

Plus your input prices are relatively high.

The market's gotta set the price high enough to pay for production, so that we'll have commodities to consume.

- Alrighty, Kim, lots of great information.

We'll see you next week.

(upbeat music) - Good morning, Oklahoma.

Welcome to Cow-Calf Corner on SUNUP TV.

This week, we talk about preparing for winter calving.

Winter calving always potentially poses some unique challenges to us.

We've got cold weather, potentially wet weather.

Calves born through the winter months can tend to be a little heavier than the ones that come at the end of summer.

So how do we get ready for all this stuff that we're gonna face?

Get prepared.

Is we think about managing the cow herd in times of the year like this.

The Mesonet Cattle Comfort Index is something we can find online.

Gives us a feel for the days and the temperatures that we maybe need to provide a little additional nutrition just because of cold or wet weather.

For example, as we get below 32 degrees, for every degree colder than that we are, we increase cows energy requirements by about 1%.

If you've got a wet hair coat, or a cow is wet all the way to the skin, that's gonna go up by 2% for each one degree temperature we are below 32.

So that's a handy tool we can use in management to feed accordingly.

If we think about just managing those cows themselves, if we can possibly set up some windbreaks, some shelter, potentially some bedding in cases with we may have a muddy ground or snow on the ground, that can be really beneficial to cows.

And it's good if we can separate our heifers from the mature cow herd.

- Just because heifers are inexperienced, they may need a little more assistance in terms of the calving process or helping claim that calf when it comes along for the first time.

And it's good to have what we refer to as a calving kit put together and just various things you may need through the process of calving season.

Some paper towels, potentially a larger bath towel that you may want to have on hand if you get a wet calf or something that needs to be cleaned up or dried off, some kind of a lubricant, which we'd put in a smaller bottle to keep in our calving kit.

We wouldn't want that whole gallon jug necessarily with us.

Some sort of antiseptic if we have to intervene and help a heifer, a cow.

We want to be clean.

We want some lubrication for that.

A flashlight is also pretty handy and probably all of us anymore have got an iPhone that comes equipped with a flashlight function on it.

OB chains are gonna be pretty critical to have if we have to provide assistance to get those on.

We've got the OB chains and the handles there for those.

I don't have a calf puller to show you this morning, but obviously, we want to know where that's at.

Make sure it is clean and in good working order.

And a rope halter is something I always like to have on hand.

I think it comes in really handy.

Certain cows or heifers, if we can't get 'em to a chute just to be able to halter 'em up and maybe tie 'em off to the pickup or whatever while we provide assistance can be really beneficial.

OB sleeves are gonna be handy.

Maybe we don't need the whole box, but just take a half dozen of those sleeves out, put it in our calving kit so we've got it if we need it.

And if we get in situations where we need to provide colostrum, whatever form of colostrum we've got on hand, and a feeding tube and bottle to get that colostrum into those baby calves in the first few hours that they're born becomes really critical.

So those are the things I would have on hand in my calving kit.

Again, the key thing is to be prepared.

We think about a baby calf whenever it hits the ground this time of year, it's coming out of its mother's womb, which is 101 to 102 degrees.

If a calf was born here this morning, that means it came at about a 80 degree temperature drop from what it had been living in for the past 280 days or so.

And we need to be there to intervene and help.

If we've got cold, wet, muddy, or potentially snowy ground.

And those calves are equipped with some brown adipose tissue, it's gonna help 'em burn it and generate some internal heat, but if it gets extremely cold, a lot of this stuff is gonna be important to us to get those calves off to a good start.

If they do get a little cold stressed or hypothermia, it makes 'em more susceptible to navel infections, scours, and pneumonia, and we want to head that off as well as helping them get off to a good start.

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

(upbeat music) - One of the most common questions that I receive is what does quail habitat actually look like?

Well, this is it.

Think brushy prairie.

Quail need scattered patches of shrubs because that's where they spend the majority of their time during the day just loafing, trying not to get killed by a predator.

So you need isolated patches of dense shrub cover.

That might be sumac, might be sand plum, small oaks, depending on what part of the state you're in.

And these patches of shrub cover need to be 50 to 100 yards apart so that quail can, no matter where they're out on the landscape, they can quickly move into these shrub patches to evade predators.

This is important year round, but it's especially important in the fall, winter, and early spring when they're in coveys.

And they do need herbaceous cover as well.

And I'm talking about scattered patches of grass and forbs.

A lot of these plants provide food resources, and around us, we have native grass and a lot of forbs like ragweed that provide important seed for quail throughout the winter.

And this vegetation, this herbaceous vegetation, it needs to be not overly dense.

If you can walk through it without your feet getting tangled up, that's a good indication that quail would use that area.

They're small birds and they're not able to crawl through dense grass, so the grass needs to be kind of patchy.

So things like Bermuda grass, that doesn't work.

It's a sod forming grass, they can't move through it, and it shades out food producing plants like croton, and ragweed, sunflower, all of these things that are so important.

So think about scattered grasses and forbs, some bare ground so that quail can move between those plants, and patches of shrub cover that's well distributed across the landscape.

If you have all of those components on your property at a big enough scale and big enough area, then you have everything you need to support quail on that property.

- That'll do it for SUNUP this week.

Remember, you can see us anytime on our website 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.

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