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

I'm Lyndall Stout.

As harvest progresses in Oklahoma, we are returning today to the recent Wheat Field Day at Lahoma.

We'll have more from there in just a moment, but first up, Dr. Mark Johnson talking about creep feeding.

- Good morning, Oklahoma.

Thanks for joining us on "Cow-Calf Corner."

This week's topic is the concept of creep grazing.

Now in the past, we have addressed the concept of creep feeding, and creep feeding is a very well researched topic in the field of animal science.

We're basically gonna use grain-based diets, and give those pre-weaned calves access to a higher-protein, higher-energy diet, and it can be done ad-lib.

It can be done with additional salt in, and doing it in limited quantity.

But the point to creep feeding is to put additional weight on calves, and creep feeding will certainly do that for us.

The thing we get back to, and the age-old question, if we're looking at commercial cow-calf operations, is it profitable to creep feed on grain-based diets?

And usually when we pencil it out, that additional weight is offset by potentially the heavier calves selling at less price per pound, potentially taking a bit of a discount for being overly fat, the additional equipment, the labor that we get into it, typically, in commercial cow-calf operations, creep feeding isn't profitable.

Now that changes a little bit when we think about purebred seedstock operations.

Purebred seedstock operations aren't necessarily marketing at weaning.

We've got a longer-term marketing plan.

We feed creep in order to get those calves to express their genetic variation for growth up to the point of being weaned, and a little different marketing objective longterm, makes it a more profitable practice in a lot of seedstock operations.

Now, as opposed to creep feeding, concept of creep grazing is to try to accomplish the same thing.

We have the potential to avoid some of those detriments that we talk about in creep feeding, and we're basically gonna utilize forage, and give baby calves access to that, or pre-weaned calves access to it.

We feel like we can potentially do it a little more cost-effectively, and avoid some of the downside longterm.

So what works well for creep grazing?

Well, we're gonna still be using a typical creep gate, something that's got about 18-inch-wide slots, so only the calves can get through, and the cows can't.

We can potentially do this with hot wire fence, something about 36 to 42 inches tall is gonna permit those calves to pass through underneath, and keep the cows out.

What type of forage actually works well for this?

Something like Bermudagrass.

In a year that fertilizer's expensive, we've dealt with some drought issues, if we're gonna be selective on when and where we're gonna utilize some urea fertilizer, potentially putting some nutrient-dense strips out in our Bermudagrass pastures, and only giving those young calves access to it, could work pretty well.

Other improved grasses, something we wanna establish, maybe a sorghum-sudan, a legume, potentially even pearl millet, can work really well in creep grazing programs.

The upside to creep grazing?

We don't put as much weight on as we would creep feeding with a grain-based diet, but we avoid some of the downsides of potential over-fat calves at weaning, potential replacement heifers that get just a little riper than we want 'em at weaning.

So there is the potential benefit of that.

This year, as we tighten our belt make the best management decisions that we can, thinking about where we're gonna be selective, and how much fertilizer we're gonna put down, consider and pencil out the potential management benefits of a creep grazing program for those pre-weaned calves.

Thanks for joining us this week.

(upbeat music) - Hello, Wes Lee here with another edition of "The Mesonet Weather Report."

Rains continued again this week, adding to last week's impressive numbers.

For the month of May, the rainfall map looks pretty good, with a lot of green.

Most of the state, excluding the Panhandle, had four or more inches of moisture.

When you compare this to the last 15 years of Mesonet data, you can easily see how much above, or below, each site came in compared to the longterm average.

Negatives in the Southeast and Panhandle, but positive numbers in most of the remainder of the state.

Now let's some of the other weather variables for May.

It was another warmer than expected month, even with the massive cool down we had towards the end of the month.

All 120 sites were warmer than normal, with the Southwest being up to five degrees above what was expected.

It also was another windy month, to add on to the windiest April in Mesonet history.

May had high winds in the west that were two to five miles per hour above the longterm average.

Lastly, when we look at percent sunshine, we see where the clouds stay socked in over the Northeast, while the West had more sunny, clear days to deal with.

Now, here's Gary, erasing some of the color on the drought map.

- Thanks, Wes, and good morning, everyone.

Well, for the fourth week in a row, we have good news on the drought monitor.

It looks like drought, for the most part, in Oklahoma is on its way out.

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

This map looks better than last week.

There's still lots of color on there, especially across the Western third of the state.

Some of that extreme drought still there.

Just a little bit of exceptional left in the Western panhandle, but for the most part, drought is on the downturn in the state.

We are starting to push it further and further to the west.

And if we take a look at the next map, I'll show you why probably a little bit more of that will be gone next week, and maybe a lot of it.

Okay, this is just the rainfall from the last two days, and there's still rain falling at this time, so there's gonna be even more.

But the rainfall in consideration for each drought monitor map ends at 7:00 AM on Tuesday morning.

This is rain that has fallen after Tuesday 7:00 AM this week.

So, look at all this rain.

Two, three, four, even more than five inches across the Western third of the state will all be considered for next week's map.

That's what tells me that a lot of that color across Western Oklahoma is going to disappear again on next week's map.

Now, let's get to more good news on the Climate Prediction Center's outlooks for June.

We start with the temperature outlook.

We do see above normal temperatures, little bit increased odds across the Southwestern half of the state.

Not too bad, the Northeastern part, equal chances for above, below or near normal conditions.

So, basically seasonal temperatures are favored there.

Now let's get to some more good news.

The June temperature, precipitation and drought outlooks from the Climate Prediction Center.

For temperatures, we see increased odds of above normal temperatures across the Southwestern half or so.

And then for precipitation, for much of the Northeastern half of the state, say for the panhandle, we see increased odds of above normal precipitation, but especially from Central up through North Central Oklahoma over into Northeastern Oklahoma, so... And now for the best map, the June drought outlook from the Climate Prediction Center.

We do see much of that drought across the Western part of the state, except for the panhandle shows drought improving or even being removed.

So, as I mentioned many times as we were going through January, February, even March, spring rainfall is the great equalizer when it comes to drought, especially when we get into May and June.

And it looks like that's what's happening this year as well.

That's it for this time.

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

- We're back at Lahoma with Dr. Brett Carver who leads our wheat improvement team at OSU.

And Brett, he had some exciting news about Doublestop this year in terms of planted acres in Oklahoma.

- Yeah, seems like the farmers really liked it, and not surprisingly.

It's the number one planted variety this year in Oklahoma for the first time.

- [Woman With Blonde Hair] And just briefly tell us why it's been so successful, and why more farmers are turning to this variety.

- It's that classic workhorse variety.

It just takes a lot of abuse from the weather, from nature, in terms of diseases and so forth.

It just knows how to adapt to Oklahoma, and we wanna take advantage of that in the Breat program.

- [Woman With Blonde Hair] So, you're using those qualities and then you're kinda carrying on the generations, if you will, right?

That's kinda what we see here.

- That's right.

What we're doing different now than before is, we always carried on the generations beyond Doublestop through the Clearfield trait package, in other words, the herbicide tolerance package.

And it just became obvious to me after time.

Well, you know, Doublestop is so good.

We need to enjoy and capitalize on the benefits outside of that herbicide tolerance system.

In other words, take that trade away, keep it in some cases, but take it away in others.

That's what we have here.

- [Woman With Blonde Hair] Okay.

So, let's kind of walk down the line and tell us what we're seeing with some of these offspring.

- Yeah, this is a group of 10 offspring of a cross from Doublestop with an experimental line that we never released, but is perhaps the most widely used experimental line in our breeding program today.

I called it Duster Diamond just to give it a nickname, but the number was okay 12-6-21.

This parent brought in some key characteristics, one of which is barley yellow dwarf resistance, and it's featured in the variety Uncharted.

Uncharted comes from that experimental line.

So, we're trying to repeat some of that disease resistance package in Doublestop kids, Doublestop progenies here.

And that's what we're seeing in this set of 10.

Now, it's not just a set of 10 random derived lines from Doublestop.

There's some organization to it.

We have really about four families featured here, and we're trying to figure out what family is the best and which lines within those families are even better.

- Now, when will you receive that data and start analyzing, or this is a process that takes quite some time?

- It takes years.

Takes years.

And we started with hundreds of these, and now we've narrowed it down to 10.

We have about five of these under foundation seed increase.

We took the chance.

Did we pick the right five?

I hope we did, and I think we did.

- So we now, already, have a jump start on the foundation seed increase if we decide on one of those of those five or one of those 10, and what we're gonna look for in these derivatives are Hessian fly resistance, stripe rust resistance, leaf rust resistance, acid soil tolerance, the quality that we expect in Doublestop.

Everything put together in one variety.

Can we do it?

Wait and see.

- So, is this the first time you've had all 10 of these kind of semi-finalists if you will.

- That's right.

- together, growing together in the field?

- That's right.

We've had them in small plots scattered across the state, and now, we've put them all together in the same nursery.

Here, we just planted them in large strips, so the public could see them, you know, see them in an actual agricultural setting, but the comparison becomes more scientific, now.

- Well, best of luck to this next generation, and we can't wait to hear more about it.

- Thank you.

- Thanks a lot, Brett.

(country music) - Hi, I'm Melissa Mourer here at Lahoma talking with Dr. Tom Royer, extension entomologist.

Dr. Royer, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you've been seeing across the state with our wheat?

- Well, this has been, I would call it the growing season in wheat of the mite.

I've had calls about wheat curl mite in some fields that were pretty heavily infested.

Not much we can do about that at this point in time because you can't control 'em with insecticides.

Actually, got one control on winter grain mite, but by far, the most calls and questions that I've had are about a little tiny critter called the brown wheat mite.

Even until now, we've been seeing brown wheat mite across probably most of the wheat in Western Oklahoma from I-35 West.

And, it's because we've had dry, warm conditions for this for this growing season.

They do extremely well in kind of droughty conditions or dry conditions.

And, when there's... when we don't get a lot of rain, and it gets warm, it stays warm.

It's not really cold.

So, I started getting questions about what could we do to control 'em?

How do you control 'em?

I think a lot of producers, initially, were just thinking, "oh, my wheat's looking bad cause of drought," and they didn't... these mites are so tiny, you have to go out and really look for 'em.

But, the other question was that we lost one of our insecticides that we would've recommended to control brown wheat mite for any producers that wanted to do it.

It's called lorsban.

It's no longer able to be used in any food crop.

So, the only labeled insecticide was dimethoate, and it was hard to come by because there are people wanting to buy it and use it.

So, we decided that we would try and look at some of the other insecticides that are registered in wheat, but they don't have brown wheat mite on the label.

And, it turns out that most of the pyrethroid insecticides, which are probably cheaper even than dimethoate, work about as well as dimethoate does for controlling brown wheat mites.

- Well, and you've talked about a little bit of the research you've been doing with that.

What other research you be doing here out at Lahoma?

- I've worked, I've been working for about the last four to five years with the small grains variety trial program with Dr. Marburger and Dr. Silva looking at a common practice that growers do, of including an insecticide when they topdress their nitrogen in the wintertime.

And, I wanted to find out if it was paying for itself, and what it would be doing at that time of the year 'cause it's usually in February.

And, insect activity's pretty low.

And, my first inclination was: why are you wasting money putting an insecticide in?

But, it's an inexpensive product.

And, you're not having to make an extra trip across the field because you're already spraying for topdress nitrogen.

So, we started looking at that research, and I've really kind of had to eat a little bit of crow over the last few years because finding out... that it does pay for itself or even, you know, pretty regularly... - Well, as you look at the wheat crop and you've looked at some of the insect pressure.

Across statewide, what have you been seeing?

- The farther West you go and the farther South you go, the crop doesn't look as it...

It's just suffering from drought.

Combination of drought and mites and maybe some diseases.

Wheat curl mite transmits a wheat streak mosaic virus.

And so, you know, even from Cherokee to Alva, the wheat... there were some wheat fields that were really not looking very good, and they'll probably end up abandoning them or trying to make some hay out of it or something.

But, this is probably, so far, this is probably the nicest wheat I've seen in any of the demonstration field days that I've been to.

- Well, thank you so much, Dr. Royer, for all of his helpful information.

We look forward to hearing more about the research you have now, and what's coming up in the future.

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

Now, Kim let's dive right in and talk about what's happening with wheat harvest.

- Well, you know, it started out, those combines hit the field.

They were breaking in the wheat, and then it started raining.

And, that put a screeching halt to it.

You look at Oklahoma, probably 5 to 10% of the harvest is complete.

You go to the Texas 10, 15, maybe 20% at the upper side.

I think the quality looks good, and yields are above expectations.

There are some reported problems: the rain is delayed to harvest a little bit with the weeds growing up through short wheat.

And so, there's maybe some potential problems there, but right now it looks better than expected.

- That is good news for sure.

Let's talk about the market news now, and what you're seeing.

- Well, of course the winter wheat harvest is in the news the weather delayed harvest... - You wonder about quality.

It's probably a little early for it to impact test weights as such.

The European Union got rain on their winter wheat crop, but that's expected to increase yields.

I think that's part of the reasons our price took a dive.

Australia, it was reported this week, that they will have another bumper crop, probably.

Of course it's a long time before Australia harvests that, but right now it's looking relatively good.

Russia, maybe a record crop.

There's talk that Russia, we know they've been shipping wheat.

There's talk that they're gonna get that wheat shipment, wheat exports in line.

The US is supporting that to a certain degree, because they'll ship both wheat and fertilizers.

We know we need the fertilizer around the world.

And then of course, Ukraine, their harvest will probably be somewhere around 68% of last year's harvest.

We know they've got a lot of excess in the bins.

They're gonna have problems getting that out in the market.

- You mentioned a dip in prices.

Expand on that a little bit.

- Well, if you look at prices, you go back into the March, April time period.

We had prices, oh, $9, slightly above that.

Went up to $11.40.

Moved sideways, oh, 11 to 11.40, maybe 10.50 to 11.

And then when we got out to May 17, it peaked out at $13.13.

It's came down since then.

The harvest started with prices above 12.

They're down now around $11.15, 11.20.

They've taken $2 off that top.

I think that, as high as prices were, was to be expected.

- So with that in mind, do you think they could go even lower?

- Oh yeah, they can.

It's like a pendulum.

And remember, the pendulum is moving the fastest when it's in the sweet spot down low, and it tends to overreact on the top and the bottom side.

There's some analysts saying that we had a head and shoulders top pattern in the wheat prices.

If that's the case, we'll take another $2 off.

In other words, we were about 13.13.

The neck line was at 11.15.

That means we'd go down to $9.15, if that is a traditional head and shoulders top.

So that's where I'm putting my bottom right now.

I won't be surprised to see prices move, if the rain stops and we get the harvest going, down into 10.50 range.

- So with that in mind, what guidance do you have for producers?

- Just don't watch price, stagger it into the market.

I'd normally say a third, a third, and a third.

I think I'd stagger it out more like 20% at a time, where I'm having five sales.

This market's volatile.

It's got as high a probability of going up as it does down.

Nobody knows what it's gonna do, so don't try to second-guess it, dollar cost average, stagger it into the market.

- All righty.

Great advice, Kim.

Thanks a lot.

We'll see you next week.

(upbeat music) - As the calving seasons are starting to wind down, producers are gonna switch their focus on getting those cows bred back.

There are many diseases and conditions that can interfere with those cows breeding back in a timely fashion.

One of those diseases is cystic ovarian disease.

Cystic ovaries interfere with the normal reproductive cycle of a cow.

We typically see this more often in dairy cattle than beef cattle.

It's hard to define this disease.

Many experts define it differently, but basically you have an enlarged follicle on the ovary that fails to ovulate.

The size of those are usually .2 millimeters or greater.

There are two different types of cyst.

One is a luteal cyst, and the other is a follicular cyst.

Typical clinical signs that we'll see with cows that have cystic ovarian disease, are in estrus, or they fail to cycle.

They do not breed.

Occasionally you'll see cows that are constantly in heat, and breeding on a continual basis.

And some cows will actually have bull-like behaviors.

You know, if we're gonna accurately diagnose this disease, we're usually gonna notice it on rectal palpation.

Follow that up with an ultrasound, and then we may have to do hormonal analysis to definitely define what type of cyst it is.

Approximately 50% of these cysts will spontaneously resolve.

The other ones will require some form of treatment.

Most of the treatments are gonna involve hormonal treatment.

One of the common treatment therapies that veterinarians will choose is just to put these cows on some type of estrus synchronization protocol, because the drugs that are used in that are the hormones that are recommended to treat this disease.

One thing to keep in mind is that once we put a cow in therapy, we need to breed that cow in her first heat cycle, since the subsequent heat cycles may not, you may not get ovulation in those cycles.

- Unfortunately for beef producers, one of the problems that we run into is, a lot of these are gonna be diagnosed when we preg check cows, and so that's gonna put them out of sync with the rest of the cow herd, which, maybe it'd be a good idea to go ahead and call those cows since we know there is a hereditary component to this.

If you'd like some more information about cystic ovarian disease, please go to the SunUp website.

(cheerful music) - Going back to Lahoma now, here's Dr. Misha Manuchehri, our extension weed management specialist, with information on herbicide resistance.

- CoAXium Wheat Production Systems is, after a couple decades, it's our newest herbicide-tolerant wheat trait.

So we've had Clearfield, Doublestop, very popular variety in the state of Oklahoma, that we've been able to spray Imazamox or Beyond Herbicide over.

Now we have another totally different system than Clearfield, and it's called CoAxium.

It utilizes herbicide aggressor, and it kills grass weeds that are emerged.

Doesn't get broadleaves, no soil activity, but it kills our grasses, which typically are our problem, and it's done a great job.

Where it has a fit in Oklahoma is managing some of our most difficult-to-control grasses, like Rescuegrass, which is a brome, true cheat, another brome species, and then feral rye or cereal rye.

So, for weed control, we've been very happy.

So any varieties that end in AX, which you'll see at Dr. Silva's, Amanda's variety stop today, those are CoAXium varieties that you can spray aggressor over the top of.

For the past four or five years, we've seen acreage at least double every year, so acres are expanding, and as we have acres expanding, it's the job of the Weed Science program to make sure we know how the technology works and that when a grower invests in it, they see everything that they wanna see.

One challenge that we have had with the technology is crop tolerance.

So sometimes, when we spray aggressor herbicide over certain varieties and in certain environments, we see crop injury, and we have a master's student who's been looking at that for the last couple years.

I guess what I'll say as a take-home message is, it looks like some of our newer varieties that have been released are more susceptible, and we're studying that and trying to figure out why.

You're gonna wanna apply early, think about the variety selection.

It's not a cheap system, so when you invest in it, we want it to work.

When we approach jointing, first hollow stem jointing, about the time where we pull cattle off in Oklahoma, that's the latest; that's too late.

So once you've hit jointing, too late to apply aggressor herbicide.

One of the challenges that I think we always have in Oklahoma, especially for those who might be saving seed and planting that seed, and we can't save seed for our herbicide-tolerant varieties, but for our conventional varieties, planting our weeds with our wheat, that's common if we're not properly cleaning our wheat crop.

And so, for anyone who's thinking about saving seed and cleaning, just in investing in a good cleaning system or purchasing certified seed that we know is clean weed seeds, is a good start to your season.

(cheerful 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.

(music continues) (gentle music)