(upbeat music) - Hello everyone, and welcome to set I'm Lyndall Stout.

Oklahoma has saw some wildfires in some parts of the state this past week with the arrival of spring and drought still lingering.

That's where we're starting today with our extension fire ecologist, John Weir.

- You know, we're still dry.

There's been a little bit of moisture come through but so it's been pretty minimal.

We're still short (mumbles).

We're still in the drought.

You can see the dry, the drys actually starting to creep a little bit to the east from where it was.

And so, you know, essentially the, you know the Western half of the state is, is is really dry and the condition still exists for some some pretty climatic wildfires.

If, if the conditions get to be right, the situation you know, everybody's braced for a bad situation we've had a few, you know, pretty good sized wildfires but nothing like we've had in the past.

So that's the fortunate thing of it.

But again, we're still not out of it.

We're still, you know, prepared for that.

We still need to take precautions.

We still need to be careful with everything that we do and to watch out and we still need to protect our property and our valuables and things like that, and be prepared for that.

Cause the conditions are still out there.

Try to most keep everything's mowed down short.

If you haven't done it already around homes, out buildings things like that.

Again, make sure your, your hay storage, you know you've got that stuff kind of protected or you don't have it all in one spot.

You know, you wanna store that stuff on bare ground if possible or stuff that's been mowed or grazed really short to do that.

You, you know, keep all your equipment in the same kind of areas and make sure it's all cleaned up.

You know, one of the main things is, is, is when you're out and about and going, leaving your out buildings and barns make sure you have all the windows and doors shut all the time.

Whenever you're not there using it.

Cause that way if a fire does come up, you're not around embers don't blow in there and can cause a fire, you know hit something flammable inside.

So make sure you keep all that stuff was up and done.

And still the main thing is you gotta remember the safety part of it.

If a fire does occur, please, you know don't get out in front of it.

You know, don't get in front of it at any unburned fuel trying to do it.

Risking your life for, for stuff is not, you know it's not worth it.

One thing we are, we are entering March which is the wind is my, of the year that wind wind drives wildfires and wind drives big wildfires.

So we need to make sure you know that through the through this month of March through the first parts of April, you know hopefully we'll start getting rain when we normally do.

You know, we'll just have to see how that comes and things will start greening up and we'll get out of this.

But you know, we need to just be extra careful during this especially for this next month and a half with these high wind conditions and things and just still keep those precautions and don't get, you know, falsely comfortable with things just because we may get a little bit of rain.

That little bit of rain is not, you know it doesn't last, you know, it can rain, you know it can rain a half an inch and you know within a half a day, the wind's already got that dried out.

And so it's, it's back to flammable conditions again.

For more information about wildfire preparedness and wildfires in Oklahoma, go to the sun up website.

- Well, we're entering week four of Russia's war with Ukraine.

So Kim before we jump into the war, let's talk about Ukraine's agriculture.

How does that shape up?

- Well, if you look at Ukraine as a country, if you take Kansas, South Dakota and North Dakota and put them together, you've almost got identically the same size as Ukraine.

Ukraine is 233,000 square miles or 148 million acres.

Now, if you look at the wheat, 18.3 of that million acres goes to wheat production about a billion bushels a year, five year average.

Corn, 12.5 million acres of corn.

That's 1.3 billion bushels a year.

Barley, 6.6 million acres, 400 million bushels.

And then they're also big in sugar beets, they produce 9.2 million metric tons of sugar beets.

And sunflower, they're the number one exporter of sunflower oil.

They produce 4.4 million metric tons of sunflowers.

- You know over the years I'm sure some of our viewers have heard you talk about Ukraine.

So how exactly does Ukraine's agriculture impact Oklahoma's agriculture?

- Well it's gonna increase our risk.

You can look at the input cost, we've seen them go up for, because of this war but it also makes the prices more variable.

Look at wheat, before the war started Oklahoma wheat price was just above eight dollars a bushel.

They went up to 11 dollars and 50 cents or so and now they're back down just below 10.

So you got the variability there.

They export about 10 percent of our wheat and 15 percent of our corn.

So you know that's gonna have an impact on corn and wheat prices and make that price more variable and increase our risk.

- So in regards to Russia's actions, like how is that impacting just overall in the world in regards to food?

- Well, Russia is the number one or number two, depending on the year, exporter of wheat.

If that wheat doesn't come down on the market, we're gonna have higher wheat prices while a higher bread and flour prices.

The big news there is the exports.

They're a major exporter of nitrogen and potassium or potash.

Russia is the a number one supplier of fertilizer into Brazil.

If Russia can't get fertilizer in there, Brazil is gonna go to our sources of fertilizer, drive those prices up.

You drive up fertilizer prices, you're driving up food prices because fertilizer is used on all agriculture commodities and increases input cost, higher food prices.

- That's a lot of information there in, a lot of changes.

So do you expect any other changes in regards to wheat markets in regards to this war?

- Well, India has spent the last two or three years building its infrastructure, its storage, increasing its grain inspection services so that they can export wheat.

They have wheat in the bin since 2014 and they're ready to export it.

And they may offset a significant amount of this wheat we're not gonna get from Ukraine and Russia.

- So in your expert specialist, grain marketing specialist opinion, what's gonna happen to wheat and corn prices?

- Well, they're gonna be higher.

However, we don't know whether they're gonna go on cause we don't know what's gonna happen with this war.

We don't know when it's gonna end or how big it's gonna get.

However, even if the war ends, we're gonna have higher prices over the next year or so.

So it's gonna take a while to get that sector and get that flow of goods and services back in the process especially fertilizer it's gonna take a couple years to do that.

- All right, thanks, Kim.

Kim Anderson grain marketing specialist, here at Oklahoma State University.

(soft music) - Welcome to the Mesonet weather report, I am Wes Lee.

We are still waiting on that rain event that brings most of the state out of our current drought conditions.

In the West rainfall of any significance has been hard to come by.

This is best shown on our map of consecutive days since a quarter inch of rain was received in a single day.

The map from midweek shows that we have now accumulated, over 200 days at our Kenton site.

Other Western sites are not far behind with five months being commonly reported without that big rain event.

Over the past 30 days from Wednesday, we see way less than an inch of rainfall in most far Western counties.

Two inches or more are commonly seen in the far East with over six inches reported at Broken Bow.

The impact of this rain or lack thereof is easily seen on our soil moisture maps.

To begin with, soil moisture is available on our website primarily in two different forms, plant available water and as a fractional water index.

Plant available water is calculated to estimate the amount of water available to plants in a slice of soil.

For example, to calculate the four inch plant available water, the model utilizes the two inch soil sensor.

It then uses an algorithm to estimate soil water in the two inches above and two inches below the sensor.

- [Instructor] A drawback to plant available water is that it is highly soil texture dependent and therefore you can't readily compare one site with another.

Three different depths of soil slices are available on the plant available water maps, four, 16 and 32 inches.

The map from Wednesday shows the inches of available of water in a four-inch slice of soil.

As with the rainfall, low numbers in the west and pretty good numbers in the east.

We then can look at the plant available water as a percent of maximum capacity.

To me this is easier to read.

We see numbers as low as 10% at Hollis and most of the eastern half of the state at or near max capacity.

The other method, fractional water index, is simply how wet or dry a sensor can read at a specific depth in the soil.

The scale is from zero to one, with zero being as dry and one as wet as the sensor can read.

Fractional water indexes are available at four different depths, two, four, 10 and 24 inches.

Here is the fractional water index at four inches on the same date.

At this depth, we see a lot of ones in the eastern half and somewhere less than one in the west.

All these maps so far have been under sod conditions.

We also present a bare soil situation but only at the fractional water index at four inches.

With this one, we see the worst situation being in the panhandle currently.

The rain forecast looks pretty good right now for next week with lots of green showing up maybe there is a drought ending rain in there somewhere.

- Gary is on vacation this week, but join us again next week for a other edition of the Mesonet Weather Report.

- We're joined now by Dr. Dave Lawman, our extension beef cattle specialist.

Dave, we wanna talk today about the continuing impacts of drought and how that affects cattle nutrition specifically vitamin A.

Why don't we start off with the importance of vitamin A to cattle especially these babies that we see down around here?

- Vitamin A is the most important vitamin to be concerned about in a beef cattle operation.

You know, ruminant animals are unique in that they can basically manufacture most vitamins in the rumen.

And you know, non ruminant and people don't have the capability to do that.

So that's pretty interesting and fortunate.

Vitamin A has to be supplied.

Generally it comes in the form of of leafy green forage pigment has beta carotene which is a precursor to vitamin A.

Okay so, the issue though is so animals consuming leafy green forage or green hay that's not, you know, just been harvested recently.

They're probably getting plenty of vitamin A the issue with baby calves is that vitamin A does not cross a placental membranes.

And so they're born with, with basically no reserve of vitamin A, it has to come from mother's colostrum.

- So when we're in a situation like this, which is not it's not too green out here yet, and it may not be if we don't get enough rain.

- Exactly.

- What does that mean for these new calves?

- Yeah so, so the important thing is is that mother has access to good mineral supplement or a feed product that has added or supplemental vitamin A if she has adequate vitamin A prior to calving she'll have plenty of vitamin A in her colostrum.

Now, beyond calving because a lot of people are right in the middle of calving now, but that means that, you know breeding season is right around the corner.

And so, vitamin A is very important in terms of fertility getting those females to breed back early in the breeding season as well.

And so making sure especially if the drought continues making sure that those animals have access to fresh mineral supplement or a feed with vitamin A is critical now up for the next couple of months.

- And you've been getting calls from producers and veterinarians kind of mapping out this scenario, given the conditions especially the Western half of the state.

- Yeah.

In particular there's considerable concern cases where calves have night blindness aren't very healthy when they're born and so on.

And in some of these cases, when they've checked for serum vitamin A levels, they've been very low in the babies.

And so that tells us that there's some of this going on and you know, Lindell the key to good vitamin A nutrition it probably is, is keep it fresh.

Unfortunately, vitamin A is not very stable in feed or mineral.

And so over time it can decay in terms of its vitamin A activity.

You want to protect it from the sunlight.

So keep the lid on the mineral feeder not only to keep the water out but also to keep the ultraviolet light out so that it it won't decay as fast.

- [Dave] And then keep it fresh.

So don't feed a mineral supplement that's laid around for a couple of years.

The vitamin A activity in a product like that is probably dramatically reduced.

The same thing in old hay.

So if it's, you know, if we're going into the drought or the spring here without a lot of forest left over people may be having to feed two-year-old hay to kind of get 'em through to green grass.

Well, vitamin A supplier availability, in that old hay is gonna be next to zero.

- And this is something in terms of management and implementation of this to do now not wait until there's an issue with a cow or calf.

- Absolutely.

You know, and it's pretty simple, easy to fix but you have to keep it at the top of mind.

Don't let the mineral feeder this time of year in particular, don't let the mineral feeder go dry and the cattle be without, for several weeks in a row.

Mature cattle have the ability to store vitamin A in their liver for two to three months.

So there is some supply there in the cows.

- In the meantime, while we hope for more rain in the forecast, you and the team have a fact sheet available with more details.

- 3036 is the fact sheet number.

And it provides a lot of helpful details about vitamin nutrition, beef cattle.

- Okay, thank you very much Dave.

And for a link to the fact sheet that Dave mentioned, just go to sunup.okstate.edu.

(upbeat music) - Wheat is a very important commodity in Oklahoma.

And wheat is also damaged by several different species of wildlife.

One of those that producers are often concerned about are Canada geese.

And Canada geese typically roost on large bodies of water, sometimes in urban areas like this but also large watershed lakes across the state.

And if you're near one of these lakes wheat fields are more likely to be damaged.

They're herbivores like a cow and so they eat a lot of green growing plant material.

And in the wintertime there's not a lot green in this state.

So wheat is very attractive to them.

During the winter period when we have lots of geese that damage might not create a whole lot of conflict, it can compete with livestock.

But the period when producers really become most concerned is when we have that critical first hollow stem in early spring.

Because at that point heavy grazing pressure can damage grain production.

And so about late winter, early spring, a lot of producers are seeing all these geese on their field and they're starting to get concerned about that.

The good news is most of these geese are migrants and they're going to head north to the Arctic to breed very soon.

So most of 'em will depart.

So it's a high probability that your wheat field is going to see a lot less damage as we get into that critical period for wheat.

But if you are still seeing damage as we get into those critical periods, then you might reach out to USDA Wildlife Services to see if you can get some assistance out there, to help get those geese off that field, as we enter that critical period in spring.

(upbeat playful music) - Hi, I'm Dr. Kris Hiney, the Oklahoma States University Equine Extension Specialist.

Today I actually wanted to chat a little bit about maybe some feed math and understanding.

We really have to know what's in our feed or in our supplements when choosing the correct thing.

So today I wanted to use biotin as an example.

So biotin is a supplement, a lot of horse owners will use if their horse has poor quality feed.

But just because we see a product has biotin in it, doesn't mean it's always meeting our horse's requirement.

So what we're gonna do today is show you what that might look like.

So we know from research that a horse needs somewhere between 15 and 20 milligrams of biotin per day to actually see a difference in hoof growth.

So to illustrate this principle I just grabbed a feed tag from our local store from a popular feed that actually had biotin in it.

And so in this example, this feed contains 0.45 milligrams of biotin per pound.

So on the label, I see it as biotin, what does this mean for me as a horse owner when I'm feeding this product?

So let's assume that maybe I'm gonna feed my horse eight pounds of this feed per day, four pounds in the morning, four pounds at night.

Well, if I do my math here and use my eight pounds of feed, multiplied times the concentration of biotin in this feed.

I figure out that I'm actually only giving my horse 3.6 milligrams of biotin per day.

So that's pretty well short of my 15 to 20 milligrams that I actually need.

And in fact, it's only about 18% of the horse's requirement.

Well, just for fun, let's see what would happen if I wanna feed this as my source of biotin to see how many pounds of feed I would need.

Well, I can take my... - My requirement.

So we're gonna use 20 milligrams as kind of that upper end.

And if I divide by my 0.45 milligrams of biotin per pound, I actually find out that to meet the horse's biotin requirement I would need 44 pounds of this feed to hit that target.

So clearly, even though on this particular example biotin is listed on the feed tag.

It doesn't meet that requirement if that's your goal of trying to improve hoof health.

So bottom line when you're choosing a supplement to try to add something to the horse's diet, you've gotta target that you wanna get to it's important to understand the basic math to know if you're choosing the correct thing.

- The USDA's latest Oklahoma Wheat variety report is out.

Here's a look at the top 10 that were planted last fall.

OSU developed wheat now fills the top eight slots.

Doublestop CL Plus is number one followed by Gallagher, and newcomer Green Hammer.

Then there's Smiths Gold, OK Corral , Endurance, Iba and Bentley rounding out the OSU varieties.

This map shows the top three variety choices for growers in each region of the state.

The rankings are from a December survey of wheat producers by the Oklahoma City field office of NASS, the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service.

To read the report and learn more about OSU wheat improvement team.

Go to sunup.okstate.edu.

(upbeat music) - Good morning, Oklahoma.

Welcome to Cow-Calf Corner.

Due to weather we joined you this morning from the 102 Conference Room in the Animal Science Building on campus.

And we follow up on the topics we've been on the past couple of weeks.

And this week we start a two-part segment on the impact of bull selection.

Again, this follows up to some of the material we've been covering.

It's the a time of year.

There's a lot of bulls on the market.

There's the opportunity to improve your genetic base through bull selection.

A couple weeks ago, we talked about several steps we could go through to see how EPDs and genetic values could be applied to our herd goals.

And so we actually walked through some of those steps this week.

So let's say for example, we have evaluated the level of performance in our operation and last fall at weaning we weighed our four to seven year old cows and found that on average, those cows were weighing 1400 pounds.

As we preg checked we had an 85% pregnancy rate and those exposed females.

And as we looked back over a couple years records we saw that we had an 82% calf crop weaned.

Those cabs that were weaning are actually weaning off of 500 pounds.

If we do the math, take that percent calf crop weaned into account with that weaning weight we arrive at 410 pounds of weaning weight per exposed female in our operation.

So what does that identify to us that we need to improve at this point?

Well, I would say, we'd like to see more pounds of calf weaned per exposed female.

And if we want to take that a step further maybe even see those cows weaning off a higher percentage of that mature weight.

And so it identifies some areas we potentially would like to shave a little off that mature cow weight.

Maybe add some to that 500 pound weaning weight, potentially improve upon that pregnancy rate that percent calf crop weaned, all of which are gonna contribute to that bottom line figure of 410 pounds per exposed female.

The final thing on this slide tells us an important thing to remember.

EPDs are directly comparable across time and geography.

What does that mean to us?

It means, if we pull the registration papers and find that five bulls over the past 10 years are responsible for siring that cow herd and that set of calves that are performing at that level we just took a look at.

If we look at individual numbers in here that are relevant to us.

First one, we see that those five bulls have an average weaning weight of 71 pounds.

That's what we can equate to that 500 pound weaning weight.

We see a HP column over here which is a heifer pregnancy EPD.

If we wanna improve the fertility in our cow herd, long term see more cows getting bred and a higher percentage of females weaning off calves.

That is an EPD we can select for a higher number indicates we should be improving fertility in the future.

The mature way to 1400 pounds on the cows equates to this 88 overall average on these five sires that we used.

So those four columns that we have bolded there, the weaning weight EPD, the heifer pregnancy.

We're taking a look at milk EPD as well.

And we know it's an average of 20 because we are gonna be keeping daughters.

And then we've got that 88 average mature weight EPD.

Those are the things we're gonna focus on and take look at after we've looked up the average of those bulls we've been using relative to the bulls that are options for us to bring into our operation this spring.

So we look at a couple particular options.

We've got two new herd bulls here to consider.

Herd bull number one, the weaning weight column, his weaning weight set it's at 71 pounds.

It's the same as the weaning weight of the bulls we've been using.

We take a look at his heifer pregnancy EPD, it's 15.

That is six percentage units higher than the bulls we've been using, that's a good thing, that should improve fertility for us.

We take a look at the milk EPD, we see is a 20 same as the bulls we've been using.

We're not gonna see a much difference in that milk level in the mature cow herd long term.

We look over here at the mature weight EPD, he's at 68, that is compared to the 88 of the bull that we have been using.

He's gonna shave about 20 pounds per female off our mature weight in that next generation of cows.

So that's bull one.

Bull number two, in the weaning weight column, he sets that a 30 pound advantage compared to the bulls we've been using.

We go over here to the heifer pregnancy.

He's not gonna lead to any change there in terms of fertility, he sets it a nine, he's got a milk EPD of 20.

And then we take a look at that mature weight column.

He's at 122, he's actually 34 pounds heavier.

And it leads us to the question of which of those two bulls potentially adds more profit potential to us.

If we let 'em go to work for us in our operation.

And that is the cliffhanger that we end with on this week's episode, is it bull one or bull two?

You've got a week to think about it, and we'll see you next week when we talk about part two of the impact of bull selection.

Thanks for joining us.

- 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)