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

I'm Lyndall Stout.

Oklahoma wheat producers will soon have a new variety to consider.

To learn more about the latest release from OSU's Wheat Improvement Team, let's head to the greenhouse to talk with Dr. Brett Carver.

- I'm used to the experimental number, which is OK18510.

But we're going to be calling it now, High Cotton, to give it sort of a positive ring to it.

- Sure, that's kind of an old saying, right?

- Yeah.

- That just means things are going pretty well, right?

- Things are going well, and that's what we hope producers will be saying this spring.

You know, at harvest, we've had a challenging year.

But still, let's hope we have a good harvest, and whatever that variety may be, let's hope it's good.

But if it just happens to be High Cotton, all the better.

- We'll take it, that's right.

I love that Oklahoma optimism.

So obviously, there's probably a number of attributes that led to this one being selected.

Let's talk first about the ancestry.

- Yes.

This is where I think High Cotton stands apart from say the Doublestop, and anything with a lot of Jagger lineage, there just isn't any Jagger that's there to speak of.

What is there are lines from CIMMYT, the biggest breeding program in the world, okay?

And we picked one up in the country of Turkey and used that as a direct parent, which is very unusual.

Then we have, if you go three breeding cycles back, which it goes back a little ways, but still it's within the modern time, we see this plethora of Pioneer germplasm.

2174, 2163, 2180, and others that may not be familiar.

And so there's a definite Pioneer lineage and backbone to this variety.

And I think you might be able to pick that out.

- Let's talk about the yield potential and kind of the performance out in the field.

That's always important.

- Yes.

And so the experimental number is 18510.

I've been watching this variety since 2018.

It really caught my eye the first year we had it in yield trials.

And it's caught an eye ever since because it continues to rank either first or second in our breeding trials.

From 2018, that's five years of that.

One year, it went down to six, but that's out of 40.

So it's still pretty good.

It's really pushing, I think, the envelope for yield in our breeding program, and a lot of others.

Because we've also tested it in the Southern Regional Performance Nursery, that is an ARS nursery with other great varieties from other great institutions.

It finished tied for first in 2021, which was a really tough year.

A lot of of disease and we had freeze.

I'm really excited about that.

- I remember that freeze.

High Cotton actually spent a little bit of time in this nursery, more than 10 years ago, right?

- It sure did.

This is where everything starts in what I call our maternity ward.

It's where we make the crosses and create the new progeny.

So yes, over 10 years ago, right here.

- So we're talking about the attributes of High Cotton.

Let's talk disease resistance.

- Yes.

And so, you know, we want high yield potential, of course.

But we also want to be able to protect that yield.

And that's what High Cotton does provide.

I think it comes with a pretty good insurance policy, a genetic insurance policy, of leaf rust resistance, stripe rust resistance, and resistance to many other common diseases in Oklahoma.

The one that just doesn't hold a fair level of resistance to that we don't have a lot of, is powder and mildew.

So I would caution producers.

If you have a really lush canopy, watch the mildew.

- And it's also dual-purpose, which is, of course, very important for those who also have cattle operations.

- Right.

So yeah, I keep talking about the yield, and we want to grow it where the yield is.

We're gonna reach that yield ceiling.

Okay, if you want to go for the ceiling, go for the grazing.

And you can also tolerate that kind of treatment.

I have looked at it personally, many years under conditions of simulated grazing, so I can kind of control how much forage is removed and how it responds to removal of that canopy.

I think it's right up there with OK Corral.

- And I know OK Corral's been very popular for several years, right?

- Yes.

- Any downside to High Cotton?

- Well the one I would've mentioned is powder and mildew.

Also, low pH.

It has some tolerance to that condition.

It could probably go down to about five.

I wouldn't push it below five.

We don't have that certain genetics that's in varieties like Doublestop.

We don't have that gene that's present, allows it to really go down to the mid fours.

It's not like that.

So it's moderately tolerant.

- And then seed availability later this year for High Cotton, will there be some around?

- We're counting on a pretty good harvest.

If we get that harvest like we're counting on, yes.

3,000, 4,000 bushels of foundation seed should be available.

- Well, great.

Well thanks for telling us about the new variety, Brett.

Congratulations to you and your team.

I know it's a labor of love and many, many years to get to this point.

- Thank you so much, we enjoy doing it.

- And, for more information on high cotton as well as OSU's wheat breeding program, just go to sunup.okstate.edu.

(country music) - This is the Mesonet Weather Report.

I'm Wes Lee.

Rain chances for Oklahoma have been in the forecast now for several weeks, but where it has fallen has not been equally distributed.

This five day rainfall map from midweek shows that all of the rains were south of I-44.

Soil moisture in these areas is now very good.

While in the northwest, they are still critically low.

Mesonet reports soil moisture levels in three primary methods.

First, is plant available water.

This estimates the soil moisture in a slice of soil such as this 16-inch map shown here.

It is reported in inches and is very soil-type dependent.

To illustrate this, focus in on the amounts reported in Oklahoma County where Spencer has 2.35 and OKC East has 2.58 inches.

Now, let's look at the percent plant available water, the second method we report.

Here we see that Spencer is the wetter of the two sites at 98% due to differences in soil type.

The third method, fractional water index, is simply how wet or dry the sensor is at a particular depth and is not dependent on soil type.

This map is at 10 inches and shows green near ones in the east and zeros in the panhandle.

This illustrates areas where we need the rain the most.

Now, here's Gary with some yearly rainfall numbers.

- Well, we have more progress on the US drought monitor report for this week.

Seems like that's becoming a weekly occurrence.

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

Well, let's start off with the northwestern half the state.

Unfortunately, no improvements in that part of the state.

We're really talking about roughly aligned from the I-44 corridor to the Northwest.

But, when we go to the southeast of that line and it's a little bit skewed up into north central Oklahoma down into south central Oklahoma, we see that much of the southeastern one-third of the state up into the northeastern part of the state is now free of drought.

The yellow is abnormally dry conditions that also signals an area without drought.

It's either generally an area going into drought or coming out of the drought and in this case it's coming out of the drought.

So, we are continuing to make progress across the southeastern port part of the state.

Unfortunately, we just need more rainfall in the northwest to see similar improvements.

Nothing shows the divide between the northwest and southeast more than the last 60-day rainfall map from the Oklahoma Mesonet.

Here we go from less than a quarter inch up in the panhandle to more than 14 inches down across southeastern Oklahoma and right there, right along the I-44 corridor, roughly, we see a mass transition, a fast transition from about two inches to more than four to five inches.

So, a two to three inch difference in that small strip of land.

Unfortunately, this has continued over several months.

So again, that's the difference between the southeast and northwestern parts of the state.

When we look at the departure from normal rainfall map again for the last 60 days, We see that divide once again.

We go from deficits of about an inch to surpluses of about an inch, again across that southwest to northeast line across the state.

So, in those areas that have the big surplus over the last 60 days, that's where we're without drought and the areas where we have deficits over the last 60 days, those areas still in drought, pretty obvious.

Now, let me talk to you a minute just about the long-term drought situation.

So, if we look back at the last 365 days, we see really over most of the state, we have deficits of five to 10 inches.

In some case more, some case less.

Some cases we're, we're above normal greatly above normal in in the, in the example of East Central Oklahoma and far southeast Oklahoma.

But, by and large we do have those long-term deficits.

So, why are we without drought in some of those areas?

Well, those short-term surpluses have overwhelmed the impacts of the long-term drought, but it does show you that if we go back into a, a loss of rainfall in the future, we would probably go back to those drought conditions in southeast Oklahoma.

That's it for this time.

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

(upbeat music) - It's 80 days from when Oklahoma starts cutting wheat and in a hundred days that harvest is going to be going full blast.

And what the farmers are asking now is what's my yields gonna be and what's price gonna be?

Well, I don't know about yields and I don't believe anybody knows about price, but there are some indications what price will be.

If you look at the forward contract price for harvest delivered wheat and say in the Pond Creek/Medford area, that's about $7 and 50 cents.

Now, research has shown that that, that price is about the best price to use for a prediction of harvest price.

Now, we know it's not gonna be... - [Narrator] $7 and 50 cents.

It's gonna be somewhere in my opinion, oh, between 7.50 and 8.50.

If you look at those prices and go back to Thanksgiving we could forward contract for $8 and 50 cents.

It walled around 8.35 to $8 and that for a month and a half and then it fell down to 7.40.

If you'll look at the panhandle they're a nickel higher.

At southern Oklahoma's about 40 cents lower, but 7.50 to 7.75 is the best estimate right now.

Now there is a possibility that we could see wheat prices as low as $6 or as high as 10 or $11.

If you'll go back to 2010 and look at prices, daily prices in the Medford Pond Creek area from 2010 to present you'll see that in '10, '11, '12 and '13 that wheat prices ranged between $6 and $8.

We had increase in production, increase in any stocks, and prices fell below that $6 level.

And then for '14, '15, '16, '17, and '18, prices ranged from $2 and 60 cents and $4 and moved in those areas.

I think that's the two areas we gotta look at as we're looking at prices out to the future.

Now if you look at '21 and '22 prices you had COVID prices increased around $4 to 4.50 to $8 and then you had the war, they went from 8 to 13.

I think COVID is out of the market now, but we still have that war impact.

I basically throw away those prices when I'm looking at what prices could be in the future.

'21 and '22, throw those out.

Now if something happens, we could see $13 wheat again.

But if we'll get the war taken care of and we get COVID taken care of I think that 6 to $9 range is good as long as we got relatively tight stocks and when we get more stocks it's gonna fall below 6 and maybe even go down the 4.

One thing to look at to justify that price range is the world's wheat production and use.

You go back to 2013, you had use at 25 and a half billion, you had production at 26 and a half billion.

For '13, '14, '15, '16, and '17, you had production a billion bushels higher than use and so we had a dramatic increase in stocks and prices fell in the tank as we just talked about.

What's going on now is with COVID and the war, use increased dramatically relative to production.

Every year, '17, '18, '18 was a bad year, but '16, '17, '18, '19, '20 was record production, but we had larger increases in use and prices went higher.

For the last few years, use has actually been higher than production and that's why we've had the 7, 8, $9 wheat prices.

If you look at those ending stocks you go to '15, 9.1 billion, '16, '17, 10.5 up to 11 billion bushels and down to 9.9.

That tells me that the use is declining a little bit.

Production's holding relatively stable and our prices are going to come down and that's why I'm comfortable with this all 7.50 to $8 and 50 cent price for harvest coming up and the 6 to $10 price range.

Well, thank you for joining me on Tailgate Talk on Market Monitor.

I look forward to visiting with you next week.

(country music) - Good morning, Oklahoma and welcome to Cow-Calf Corner.

This week's topic is retained placenta.

I've had a few phone calls from producers in the last couple weeks saying we're seeing a little higher incidents to this one place or another this spring in Oklahoma.

We're gonna talk a little bit about it and potentially why we're seeing that this year.

Retained placenta typically is when we have got the fetal membranes that didn't become unattached and actually pass on after the birth of the calf by 24 hours after we've seen the birth of the calf.

Typically that placenta gets shed within 8 hours of calving, and that's pretty normal.

So if we're seeing it there for a few days post calving what are the potential problems we get into?

It is not the placenta itself that's the issue, but it is the fact that it's still attached inside the uterus that leads to potential uterine infections.

We've got a cow actually defecating down onto that.

The manure, the microorganisms in the manure potentially having a pathway into the uterus.

When she lays down the bacteria in the dirt has a means to get into the uterus.

Now, this can potentially cause some serious infections.

The cow may become ill, she may start to lose weight.

We may need to seek immediate treatment.

In severe cases, his can even be lethal for a cow, but rarely that happens.

More likely occurrences that long term this cow doesn't clean up, repair herself, and isn't quite ready to breed back as soon as she needs to in order to turn around and calve within 12 months.

We usually find the long-term repercussions of retained placenta with cows that are later to get bread will potentially come up open whenever we're bread checking in the fall.

- What are potential causes?

Well, long term if we've had inadequate energy protein supplementation during pregnancy and cows are calving too thin, this can lead to a nutritional problem there.

There's other vitamin and mineral deficiencies that can lead to retained placenta.

The two most common things that we track it to is a lack of vitamin A, and a lack of the vitamin selenium.

Now, where does that come into play in a year like this?

We'll get to in a minute.

The other big thing that causes retained placenta is just a prolonged or... Let's just say dystocia.

We have prolonged calving.

Again, this can be...

This problem can become exaggerated as a result of cows that are a little thin and poor going into calving.

But anything that causes difficult birth and dystocia a calf that's too big, an abnormal presentation, maybe she's trying to give birth to twins.

If it causes a problem in calving, wears the cow out, we're more likely to see retained placenta.

There are diseases that can lead to retained placenta.

Something like lepto, brucellosis, can all lead into retained placenta.

So typically what are our best management practices to avoid this?

Make sure our cows are calving in a body condition score five to six, make sure our heifers are calving in a body condition score six.

In that case, they're strong enough, charged up enough that just being worn out through the calving process should not lead to extended amount of time actually giving birth to the calf.

Vitamin and mineral supplementation can be really important.

Making sure we got an adequate amount of vitamin A, and selenium in that ad lib fed mineral can be a real important long-term solution to avoiding retained placenta and proper herd health, obviously.

So if we're seeing retained placenta in our cows and we need to address it, if we've got some immediate sickness or problem there, we need to consult our veterinarian.

Why is it more of a significant issue this year potentially?

In a year that we have been more likely than not to have fed some non-traditional hays.

Hays that might not have been as green and leafy as what they have been in years past.

What is the primary source of vitamin A in a cow's diet?

Green leafy vegetation.

Non-traditional hays, maybe a long-term lack of vitamin A in the diet, could have led to some potential issues this year.

Again good nutrition, proper herd health, are kind of the silver bullet best management remedies.

It can be a genetic issue in some cases that can lead to retained placentas.

That's a little bit on retained placentas this week and I hope it helps.

And as always I appreciate you joining us on Cow-Calf Corner.

(lighthearted music) - We're joined now by Dr. Kevin Wagner, the Director of the Oklahoma Water Resources Center here at OSU.

Kevin, last week on SUNUP, we saw a research project that has been underway for a while now on well water in Oklahoma, and you and your team are looking to expand that project in Oklahoma.

Let's talk about that effort and what's underway.

- You bet, well we're really excited about this new well owner education program that we're about to kick off in a big way.

We spent a little bit of time over the last year piloting this program, and seeing what tweaks we needed to make to it, and we're ready to really kick it off.

So really the main components of the project or the program, are to provide some free or low cost well testing to people that depend on their private wells for drinking water.

And it's not real testing, it's really screening.

So one of the things that we always tell the homeowners is, if we get a positive hit for nitrates or for bacteria, the first thing you want to do is go get it retested.

But we also want to start giving the homeowners some tools on what they can do to address some of those issues that we find.

- And you have been studying this for quite a while, really since you got to Oklahoma, and did some initial surveys to determine where this ranked in priorities for Oklahomans.

- Right.

So back in 2018, we did a statewide survey of one of the biggest issues that citizens of Oklahoma are concerned about related to water, and drinking water quality was their number one concern.

Since then, since 2018, I've been working to find some ways that we can address those issues and those concerns.

- So you all have piloted this for a while in a...

Some certain areas of Oklahoma, what did that involve?

- We've been able to work with the students from the Environmental Science program, and the Rural Renewal Initiative to carry this out probably in five or six counties in Western Oklahoma, Central and Western Oklahoma so far.

And so the students have really worked closely with the county educators in those counties to carry out the programs.

So they'll go to the counties, work with the county educators to advertise the program.

Then when homeowners brought the water samples in, they did the testing of those.

And then the evening after we've done the testing we deliver the results back to the homeowners through a short 30 minute to one hour education program just to talk to the homeowners on how to interpret the results.

And if they've got a positive, like I said earlier, then what are some actions that they can take to improve or protect their water.

- And I'm sure it's a case by case plan based on what those screening results are.

- It is, you know, some things are more difficult to address.

Like if you have bacteria, you need to do some things to probably chlorinate or decontaminate your well.

If it's nitrate, then you probably need to install, you know, a water treatment system to help remove that.

We're over the next year we're gonna be putting together, hopefully, some short videos on water quality as well as treatment methods that a homeowner can employ.

- And this is all part of a grant, right?

So you gotta make sure the funding is here and then you can implement it more widely.

- Right, and the grant is all focused on human health.

And so, you know, that's a major focus of what we're gonna be doing is to ensure the quality of the water from those homeowners.

And most homeowners probably don't recognize that, you know, really their water quality is their responsibility.

If you're on a public system, there's rules and regulations in place to make sure that the water quality is maintained at a high level.

But, if you're on a private well, it's up to you to maintain those.

So, you know, part of our job is just getting the word out about that, that they need to be testing it and, you know, if they need to treat it we want to provide some assistance to them on that.

And then the other piece is, you know, just educating them and making them more aware of water quality.

- Well sure, lots of wells in Oklahoma, of course, and that one health initiative that deals with lots of aspects of health, human health, and animal health is super important to the citizens of our state.

Well, thanks for telling us a little bit about this project.

As it starts to unfold, we'll be glad to catch up with you more and see how things are going.

- Sounds great.

- All right, thanks a lot Kevin.

And, to learn more about what's going on at the Oklahoma Water Resources Center, we have a link for you at sunup.okstate.edu.

(upbeat music) - Today, I thought I'd share a little bit of information about induction stoves.

When a food is cooked, there are various mechanisms that transfer heat into the ingredients.

One of those mechanisms is conduction.

This occurs when heat is transferred from the cook surface into the food.

For example, when hamburgers are cooked in a cast iron pan using either gas or an electric stove, the heat from the gas flame or electric coil is transferred into the cast iron pan, and from the pan into the hamburger.

If we were to cook the hamburger with an induction stove, the heat transfer mechanism would still be conduction.

However, it would be achieved in a slightly different way.

Rather than heat being generated by an external source, such as the gas flame or the electric coil, the heat is generated within the pan itself, and then transferred into the food.

How does this occur?

An induction stove has a coiled copper wire located directly underneath the cook surface.

When an electric current is passed through the wire, it generates electromagnetic energy that produces heat within the cookware itself.

If you were to turn on an induction stove and place your bare hand on the cook surface, it wouldn't be hot.

However, if the appropriate cookware were placed on the surface, the generated electromagnetic energy would cause the cookware to heat up.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to use all types of cookware with an induction stove.

Non-ferrous metal pots and pans won't work.

In other words, anything made from copper or aluminum.

Cast iron cookware and, generally, stainless steel cookware will work.

Often the packaging of cookware that is suitable for use on an induction stove will be labeled as such.

An easy way to determine if cookware will work with an induction stove is to check if a magnet will stick to the base.

If it does, the cookware will work.

If it doesn't, it won't.

So, just a little bit of information if you're curious about induction stoves.

For more information, please visit sunup.okstate.edu or food.okstate.edu.

- 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.