(bright music) (music fades) - Hello everyone and welcome to "Sunup".

I'm Lyndall Stout.

We begin today on the topic of wildfires and the recovery efforts underway, as well as the aftermath of widespread losses of livestock in both Oklahoma and Texas from the fire that's burned more than 1 million acres.

For some help with carcass disposal, we turn to our expert on the topic, OSU Extension's, Dr. Doug Hamilton.

- Basically, the state has five methods that you can dispose of your livestock, Landfilling, rendering, incineration, composting, and burial.

And burial is really your only option.

The first thing I would do would be get in contact with your local conservation district and they can help you find spots to bury the animals on your farm.

- So start with the conservation district.

What do I need to do when I contact them?

- Well, if you already have a management plan, they'll know your farm.

Otherwise, they'll come out to your farm and kind of look over the land, look in the soil surveys, and figure out where's a good place to bury an animal.

- And there really is some specific guidance there.

Go over that.

- Yes, you need to be in a high spot.

You need to be well above a floodplain.

You're gonna have to dig a hole four to six feet deep, and you need to be about two feet, at least two feet above where the water table may rise.

Really, there's gonna be one or two spots on a fairly large ground that you could actually do the burial in.

- And it's gonna take some heavy equipment, more than likely, and some logistics planning too.

- Yeah, you're gonna have to think ahead because it's not easy to move a 100 to a 1,000, 1,500-pound animal.

So you're gonna need, like, a box loader or a bucket loader.

Also, you're gonna have to dig a pretty deep hole, so you're gonna need a back hoe.

- And I'm sure producers have, we know that they lose animals from time to time, an adult animal or calves, of course, but when there's mass casualty like this, it really does require some extra planning and coordination and asking for support.

- Yeah, you can still use burial.

You can dig a trench as long as you need.

Put the cows, like, tail to nose, tail to nose in that trench not quite touching each other.

But if you have 20 cows dead, that can be a pretty large trench.

You might need to be able to dig two or three.

- Right, what kind of considerations are there for being near water sources?

- Well, it's pretty much no matter what the water source is, a pond, a stream, a lake, a well, 300 feet is gonna be the distance from your closest hole to that water source.

- So why is burial the best choice?

- Because really in Oklahoma, I don't know if it's even possible to find a landfill that'll take a dead animal, even in an emergency situation.

Rendering, particularly if you've had animals that have been dead for a number of days, rendering places are not gonna take that.

Incineration, you really need to be set up beforehand with very expensive and specific equipment to do that.

Composting, it's kind of like burial, except for you still need the same heavy equipment, but you're gonna need a lot of sawdust or wood shavings and it takes a lot of management.

The one advantage of composting is once you're finished composting, you can use that site again.

With burial, basically, that site is gonna be a burial spot for the end of time.

- So that is something you need to consider too when picking out the spot.

So this is kind of a high-level overview that you've given us today.

You do have some fact sheets on the topic that people can check out if they want to read more in depth.

- Yeah, there's two specific fact sheets, one on proper disposal of animals, which covers all the five methods, and then one specifically on composting of animals.

- Thanks a lot, Doug.

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

(bright music) - Welcome to another edition of the Mesonet Weather Report.

I'm Wesley.

Our recent temperatures have been very mild and well above the long-term average for this time of year.

This line chart shows how far temperatures have ranged above or below the 15-year average.

In the past five weeks, there were only a couple of days below average and the rest were above average.

Many of those warm days were 20 degrees or more above what would normally be expected.

For the month of February, temperatures average 6 to 11 degrees above normal, making this one of the warmest Februaries on record.

It was not just warm in Oklahoma, but the entire world.

- When all of the measurements are in, it will likely be the warmest February in at least a century of record-keeping.

The El Nino that has brought us some of the wintertime rains is also likely a contributing factor in the recent heat wave.

This warm stretch has, of course, had an impact on our soil temperatures.

This three-day average soil temperature map for four inches under bare soil shows 50s and even a few 60s for most of the state.

This warmth is causing our plants to break dormancy very early this year.

Next week's forecast indicates that the warmth will not be ending anytime soon.

Now here's Gary with a broad look at our moisture situation.

- Thanks, Wes, and good morning everyone.

Well, drought's known as a creeping hazard, it just sort of sneaks up on you, and all of a sudden, you're looking at deficits, and then eventually, you're looking at impacts.

Is that what we're seeing now?

Let's take a look.

When we don't have a large outbreak of drought per se, we do, however, have growing areas of what's called abnormally dry conditions, those yellow areas, so more of that yellow spreading up into far Northwest Oklahoma, North Central Oklahoma, and again, down in Southeastern Oklahoma.

So not drought just yet, but we are starting to get a little bit concerned about flash drought, and let me show you why.

From the mesonet, the number of days without at least 1/4 inch of rainfall in a single day have continued to grow.

We're now seeing those days up in Northwest Oklahoma from 30 to 50 to even more than 80 consecutive days.

Down across Central Oklahoma, we're getting close to 22, 23, 24 days.

Now, hopefully, this goes away if we get some rain this coming weekend.

However, we are still looking at this growing dry trend across the state of Oklahoma.

Just take a look at the 30-day rainfall map from the Oklahoma mesonet.

We do see, again, those conditions continuing to deteriorate.

We have had some rainfall.

The green areas are basically more than an inch.

We don't really have any place more than two inches over the last 30 days.

And in fact, some places up in Northwest Oklahoma, North Central Oklahoma, less than 1/10 of an inch.

That shows up quite well on the percent of normal rainfall map.

So it is a dry time of the year, but is it drier than what we'd expect even for this time as we go through February into early March, the last 30 days?

Well, yes, it's quite drier than normal, what we would expect, in some cases, less than 25% of normal across a large area of Northwest Oklahoma over into East Central, into Southeast Oklahoma.

Very, very small area of surplus over the last 30 days down in far Southwestern Oklahoma and far Western Cimarron County out in the Oklahoma panhandle.

That's it for this time.

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

- Talking ag policy now.

Today, the program deadlines that are right around the corner, and what to expect if you're applying for disaster relief.

Here's Dr. Amy Hagerman to get us up to speed.

- Springtime is a busy season for a lot of reasons.

A lot of planning happens in March, but not least of which are the programs that we sign up for that provide protection for the year ahead, and that prepare us to respond to any kinds of adverse events that could happen.

So let's start off with the farm bill, farm bill programs, where are we at in that?

We are still under a continuing farm bill that was put into place last November.

We'll continue into that farm bill through the rest of this year.

Now, what that means is that most of our programs look exactly like we have seen in the past.

So let's start with disaster programs, which are so critical for our producers in the West who are looking to recover from wildfires in the last week.

The Livestock Indemnity Program, the ELAP Program, the Emergency Conservation Program, these are all very similar to what we've seen in the past.

They're permanently authorized, so talk to your farm service agency and get those pieces of documentation in place as soon as you possibly can.

It's also the time of year to talk to your crop insurance agent about summer crops.

What do you need to have in place?

What kinds of protection makes sense this year?

And a critical deadline is March 15th for the Safety Net programs of Agricultural Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage.

These are national-level programs.

What this means is when you're thinking about, "Do I need price protection, or do I need revenue protection," you're looking at that national-level price.

Last week, Kim Anderson talked about the ranges of prices that we can expect for the coming year at that national level.

So look at those prices and look at what kinds of coverage you think you might need in the coming year.

So for example, the reference price for wheat is 5.50, and it looks like our national price is expected to remain above that level.

But if you feel like there is a chance for some kind of yield damages in your county in this coming year, maybe the Agricultural Risk Coverage Program would be the one that you would wanna look at.

So talk to your farm service agency office about what your options are, what would work best for your operation, and get that paperwork in place.

And I'd urge you to do that sooner rather than later just because of all the paperwork and all the deadlines we have coming in the coming weeks.

- [Narrator] Donation efforts are underway for those affected by the wildfires.

In addition to monetary support, supplies are needed to help injured animals as well as orphaned calves, and provide feed, hay, fencing supplies, salt and minerals, and much more.

If you would like to give financially, or drop off supplies, we've rounded up several ways to do that via the Oklahoma Cattlemen's Association and through local contacts in the affected counties.

We have a link for you with all the information at sunup.okstate.edu.

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music swells) - We're here with Dr. Darrell Peel, our livestock marketing specialist.

So, Darrell, feeder cattle prices have continued to move higher in the past month.

Is this just a seasonal trend or can we expect this to keep continuing to rise?

- You know, it's probably a little bit of both, and it depends a little bit on which class of cattle you look at.

For the calves, they normally are going up this time of the year seasonally, and that would be in a market that's not trending.

But we've had such a strong uptrend in this market for many months now.

I think most of what we're seeing is probably that trend continuing.

And if you look at the bigger feeder cattle, it's even more obvious, because they're normally actually declining to their seasonal low through the first quarter of the year, and they've been going up as well, they've been recovering from a correction last fall.

So I think across the board you can say that it's probably mostly the trend, and that means that the seasonal patterns will be more or less offset by this up-trending market.

- So what are we looking at for the cow-calf industry in 2024?

- You know, the cow-calf industry is in the driver's seat right now.

The market is focused on trying to provide incentives to rebuild the cow herd, and so these calf prices keep going up.

They're going up the farthest and fastest.

And so, you know, cow-calf producers have an opportunity for basically record-level profitability in 2024.

Now, obviously we still have to manage cost and some other things, so it's not completely a given, but the market is certainly providing more opportunities for those cow-calf producers.

- Yeah.

So what about stocker and feedlot operations?

- You know, everybody above the cow-calf level is a margin operation.

So they're buying something and then selling it at a higher level in the market.

So whether you're a stocker producer or a feedlot producer, or even on up the chain, all of these margin operations are getting squeezed because all of the price pressure is coming from the bottom up.

So we're gonna see, you know, more challenges for stocker producers, for feedlot producers in general, and even packers and retailers as we go forward with these margin squeezes going on.

They will eventually see their output price go up as well, but it's with a delay and usually not quite as much proportionally.

- So it's gonna look good for producers, but how does it look for the consumers?

- Well, you know, for consumers, you know, all of this goes to the top, right?

And so consumers, with declining beef production and with these higher-trending prices up through the cattle industry and the beef industry, consumers are gonna continue to see high prices.

They'll probably move even higher.

But again, you know, obviously, there will be some resistance to higher prices, so they won't move as much at that level.

But I don't think consumers are gonna get a real break on beef prices anytime soon.

- Okay, well thanks for updating us this week, Darrell.

Darrell Peel, our livestock marketing specialist here at Oklahoma State University.

(bright upbeat music) - Good morning, Oklahoma, and welcome to "Cow-Calf Corner."

This week we get into the topic of taking a look at how good our cows are reproductively, and specifically how well they fit our production environment.

And it's the time of year where we're making selection decisions on bulls.

We typically would think, "Well, we need to watch that calf crop grow out and see how it may alter our selection and mating system in the future," but in reality, calving season is an excellent time to take a look at some things that are a pretty accurate barometer of how well our cow herd matches up to our production environment and the amount of forage we can grow, and the management that we're able to provide.

In what we refer to as calving-season analysis, if we've got a good herd health management program in place and we did not provide an excessive amount of energy input in the prior breeding season, and we've got that short 60 to 65 day calving season that we like to see, if we are seeing 70% of our cows calving in the first 21 days, about 20% calving in the next 21 days, and we're only at about 10% of the cows that are calving in that final heat cycle or corresponding calving cycle of that short calving season, it's a good indication that our cow herd, in terms of mature size and milking ability, is a good fit for our production environment.

So we refer to that as calving systems analysis or calving season analysis, the 70-20-30 split over three breakdowns of 21 days through that season.

Some other issues that can be an indicator that we maybe got cows that are too big or they give too much milk, if we are seeing cows that are calving in a timely fashion.

- But we're really seeing 'em crash in terms of body condition.

And we're just not able to get enough nutrition into 'em to keep 'em in good shape in the early part of raising that calf.

It can be a sign that something isn't matching up or isn't fitting.

If we are routinely seeing replacement heifers that are coming out of our own operation, and they are not getting ready to breed and calve on time as two year olds, or potentially over time we're seeing more of our cow herd fall into the later part of the calving season, we may have some things to address.

And so, a couple of easy selection tools that we can get into in terms of trying to moderate that mature cow size or potential milking ability.

If we take a look at the milk EPDs, mature weight and mature height EPDs can be an effective means of selection if we need to address some of these things.

Other things to keep in mind in this regard.

We know that bigger cows are gonna transmit more growth.

Higher milk cows are gonna provide more nutrition and lead to heavier wean calves.

But in reality, there becomes a practical limit to how much of each of those things we can have.

And ultimately, the combination of mature cow size and milk is going to show itself in the form of reproductive failure.

If we can match up the right size and the right maternal potential in our cow herd, most commercial cow calf operations are gonna increase the profit potential in the form of reproductive efficiency and a higher percent calf crop wean.

As always, thanks for joining us on "Cow-Calf Corner."

(bright string music) - I'm Kim Anderson and this is Tailgate Talk on SUNUP's "Market Monitor."

With the wheat harvest about 90 days away, let's talk about wheat prices.

If you look at this chart between 2009 and current prices, wheat prices have averaged about $5.84.

The lowest price was in July of 2016 at $2.55, and of course, the peak in 2022.

Wheat prices have came back down.

Across that magic $6 line, you notice that it tends to trend above or below six bucks.

And right now with wheat prices down around $5, it looks like we may be starting a price pattern down in the $4 to $6 price range.

If you look at the stocks-to-use-ratios around the world, oh, it's about average right now.

US stocks-to-use is a little below average, so you'd expect prices to be up around that $5.84.

However, when you're looking to '24, right now current projections are for US stocks-to-use-ratio for wheat to go to average or above average.

If you look at the seedings, our plantings, there's about 6% below last year, but the crop condition is significantly better than last year, and so we're expecting higher production than last year.

And that may support slightly lower wheat prices.

Right now, you can forward contract wheat for about $5.

We expect it may go higher.

If you look at corn, corn's in a downtrend like wheat.

We were up near $5.

As we got into November, they've trended down, got as low as $3.85, up around $4.05 to a four and a nickel right now.

The stocks-to-use-ratio for the United States, 15% versus 12, well above average.

You look at the forward contract price for harvest for '24 corn, $4.34.

And given the stocks-to-use situation, it's probably about what you'd expect.

Soybeans, they also trended down to $10.75 recently.

They've been in a 25 cent move over the last couple weeks, and we know beans are gonna move more than that.

But looks like they may have bottomed out.

Stocks-to-use-ratio around the world, slightly above average in the world, right at average for the United States.

So, with a $10.75 '24 harvest forward contract price, a $10.80 average, that looks like it's about right.

On Friday, the USDA released the March WASDE Report.

The supply and demand estimates.

Not much change was expected as we look at the '23, '24 crops.

Of course, the '24, '25 estimates will not come out until May.

Right now, we're not expecting much movement in prices or changes, but I think the odds are that wheat prices are probably gonna bottom out in the next couple weeks and move higher.

Corn prices, they're relatively low.

I'd say the odds are higher that they'll go up than go down.

It's just a wait and see situations.

Soybeans, right at average.

The stocks-to-use and everything else is at average.

Beans can go either way.

The one thing we know with certainty that over the next couple months, prices are gonna show some dramatic moves and we'll just have to wait and see what makes 'em move that direction.

I'm Kim Anderson.

I'll see you next week on SUNUP'S "Market Monitor."

(bright string music) - Finally, today we learn what makes Terry Tippens a distinguished alumnus in the Ferguson College of Agriculture.

Video Production Manager Craig Woods brings us this story.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] A client of Terry's once said, "I have God and Terry Tippens on my side.

"I can't lose."

But for a man who was voted the best lawyer in America, he started on a very different career path.

His father was an ag teacher in Weatherford, Oklahoma, and wanted to teach his son ranching.

So much so, he had his young son walk to the local bank and take out a loan to buy his first show steer.

- You know what?

I can remember that like it happened yesterday.

A little boy going in and borrowing $100.

And he typed up the note and handed me a check, and I walked out.

I don't know if my dad ever co-signed that, but I borrowed $100 to buy a show steer when I was seven years old.

- [Narrator] Terry enrolled in agricultural economics at Oklahoma State University and paid his way through school by selling Bibles door-to-door.

He also met and married his wife, and they had their first child before he graduated.

- I was in AGR, and Donna was a Tri Delta.

In our freshman year, they had a dance hour, and that's how you can meet people.

They would line you up by height.

We both happened to be short, so basically love at first sight for both of us.

We got married the next year, and my junior year, we had our oldest daughter, Heather.

- [Narrator] With a new family and degree, Terry received several job offers after graduation, but none interested him.

- I went to law school as a defensive measure.

And man, was that a great decision.

- [Narrator] He received his Juris Doctorate in 1971 and joined a firm immediately out of law school.

- Not even a year out of law school, I tried my first jury trial and won it.

I'd never even seen one before.

And I started winning all of my jury trials.

And I thought, well, this is easy.

But then I was hooked.

I knew I was going to be a jury trial lawyer.

- Terry Tippens is one of the best lawyers in the last 50 years in the state of Oklahoma as a trial lawyer.

He's won huge cases, many maybe he shouldn't have, but he was a dynamic trial lawyer.

- [Narrator] He eventually became a named partner, and the firm became Fellers, Snider, Blankenship, Bailey, & Tippens.

Terry handles some of the most high-profile cases in business, energy, finance, and even equine.

Steve Stephens was once a young lawyer with the firm.

- The true measure of somebody like Terry Tippens is when times are not the best.

He's right at your side.

He's always supportive.

- [Narrator] But for all his success as a lawyer, he's still a rancher at heart.

Terry is not only a true ranch cowboy but a true OSU cowboy.

He and his family annually contribute to the Tippens Family Scholarship in the Department of Agricultural Economics.

- Me and my three brothers that graduated from Ag Econ, we sponsored a scholarship just for Ag Econ students.

That's been rewarding.

I get a nice little letter or card or photo from a student every year.

- [Narrator] Terry is also remembering his time at the university through a New Frontiers gift.

- I wanted to honor Dr. Plaxico, who was the head of the department when I was there.

Even though Donna and I put up the money, we just call it the Tippens family, you know, in honor of Dr. James Plaxico.

- We've learned over time that a degree in agricultural economics is often a good stepping stone for a career in law.

And it's great to see the career that Terry has had and how he continues to give back to agricultural economics and his alma mater.

- [Narrator] Now semi-retired, he has time to write a little cowboy poetry.

One of his favorites is called "God and the Cow."

- So, when you go to bed every night.

You have to thank our Father above for the grass and the cow, and His eternal love.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Celebrating Terry Tippens, 2023 Ferguson College of Agriculture Distinguished Alumnus.

- We've recently learned that the man that Terry Tippens is honoring in the new agriculture building, Dr. James Plaxico, the former head of Ag Economics, has passed away.

We want to send our sincere condolences to his family and friends as well as his former students.

And that will do it for our show this week.

A reminder, you can see "SUNUP" anytime on our website and also follow us on YouTube and social media.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

Have a nice week, everyone.

And remember, Oklahoma agriculture starts at SUNUP.

(upbeat music)