- Good morning everyone.

We have a great show lined up for you again today on Sunup.

Oklahoma's Summer Crop Harvest is all but complete.

Find out how farmers fared with soybeans, corn, and more amid a pretty good growing season.

As the government shutdown lingers.

We're asking about the impact on agriculture and Oklahoma producers and guidance on selecting replacement heifers so you can build a more productive herd for the future.

Grab that fresh cup of coffee because an all new Sunup starts right now.

We begin this morning with Dr.

Josh Lofton, our OSU extension cropping system specialist, and Josh kind of that summer crop harvest winding down and we're kinda looking ahead to the next season, but let's start with those, those double crops and, and how things are going in Oklahoma.

- Yeah, so, so most of our crops, most of at least our summer crops are, are, or have been harvested for the most part.

I I think a lot of growers are probably still working through our double crop or those crops planted behind that wheat crop and we're still kind of getting initial indication on how those are going.

Mostly our summer crops, this well have done very well this year.

I think we had corn in places that we don't normally have corn, we have sorghum and soybean in places we don't normally have it.

And so overall, maybe in season growers thought that, that we could achieve a little bit higher, but I think compared to the last two or three years, I think we should be quite happy with, with the yields we've gotten as the double crops are are starting to come in our soybean, our sorghum, even some of our corn has, has been harvested double crop.

I think we are happy, cautiously happy with some of those yields.

Some of our, our double crop plots have, have yielded fantastic compared to the full season.

So if growers still have a lot and have a lot out there, I, I think they, they have a lot to be happy about this year.

- Let's talk about the rain.

We got some really good rain last week and, and now we're seeing some cooler temperatures.

Is that impacting kind of what's left?

- Yeah, so, so the, it was a, it was a double-edged sword.

We kind of needed the rain for our wheat crop and our canola crop and everything to kind of get up and get moving before the temperatures got too cold.

But it, it also, anything that was still holding on with those warmer temperatures, we did see a little flush of green.

The good thing is shortly thereafter we, we got a, a pretty good killing frost for most of the state and so I think that frost has kind of finished up what has kind of been hanging around and it's good because we, especially in this time of year where our humidity's really high and our temperatures aren't really high, we kind of need a good long time to allow these crops to dry down so we can take our combines through.

And so finishing those off and allowing maybe some of these windy days with still a little bit of heat to 'em allows us to get those combines in the field just a little bit earlier.

So we aren't getting a whole lot of loss at the end of the season.

So rain, great.

We're, we're never gonna complain about the rain.

The good thing is the frost came, came shortly thereafter and really terminated a lot of those crops that were, that we're trying to do a little bit of regrowing.

- We also wanna just mention cotton with harvest getting underway.

- Yeah, so I'm, I'm not as familiar on the day-to-day activities of cotton.

I know it has been a little bit behind for a lot of the season just with the cooler temperatures and, and the, the summer being cooler to start and then it really caught wind and really got going the later part of the summer.

Jenny's gonna be a better one to, to kind of talk a little bit about the cotton, but I know a lot of folks are starting to get, get moving on cotton and starting to pull a lot of those yields off.

So hopefully with these conditions in this weather we can kind of pull the rest of the summer crop off and, and get really focused on our winter activities.

- And let's touch base on canola planting.

And you've been out in the field and, and talking with producers.

- Yeah, I think we probably had a better setup for canola than we've probably had in the last several years.

The last three or four years we've really had really dry falls.

And so with canola having that really narrow planting window, if you just weren't blessed with a little bit of rain at the right time, we, we struggled to get that crop up and established.

So for the bulk majority of the state, when, when we got to that canola planning period, so that last week of September, that first week of October, we had some moisture hanging around and then shortly thereafter we got those, those started to get some of those rainfalls.

So I think we probably have a little bit more potential acres of canola than we've had the last couple years.

And the stuff that I've seen has looked really good.

The challenge is, is that it, some of those crops took a little bit of moisture to get going and what brings moisture is, is is also weeds.

So the moisture brought on not only the crop, but anything that was hanging on, maybe it's our traditional weeds like, you know, our, our grasses or, or our pig weeds or mare's tail trying to make that one last grass.

Or it could be, I've heard some growers have corn the previous year and the corn started to germinate.

Now the frost will take care of that, but so, so will it stop some of the growth that the canola?

So it, it has to be one of those things where growers kind of evaluate not only their canola crop, potentially their wheat crop on what's good and what needs to be managed here in the fall and what could wait to be managed till the spring and the weather's gonna dictate a lot of that.

Forecasts are kind of a little sure little foggy right now, but, but hopefully we have some time if we, if we have some of those conditions where we need to go out and manage those weeds, we have some conditions to where we can effectively do that.

- What do you think the motivation is behind seeing more potentially more canola acres this year?

- So I think for the most part the market has been promising.

Again, it's, it's fuzzy and it's, and it's kind of very unclear what we potentially will see at the end of the year.

I think there's overall been that intent that we need to get that rotation going back with wheat.

I think a lot of growers are, if you look back in the old, old canola days or when we brought in that canola, I think we're starting to see those weed problems get more and more.

There's, there's a lot more issues with herbicide resistant grasses.

Maybe we, we had those same issues but now we're aware of 'em.

So I, I think bringing in that other crop with other chemistries, that way we can control some of those grasses and some of our most important crops is, is something that is continuing to bring in that canola and maybe it's canola, maybe it's camelina, but a a winter broad leaf is definitely needed.

- All right Josh, lots of great information.

Thanks a lot and we'll see you again soon.

- Thank you.

- Talking ag policy now and the lingering government shutdown, Sunup's Kurtis Hair is with Dr.

Amy Hagerman, - The government shutdown is continuing and Amy, it's been over a month.

So has this been one of the longest shutdowns that we've had in recent memory?

- Yeah, it really has.

So previously we go back to that 2018, 2019 shutdown that lasted 35 days.

So as of now, we've officially rolled over that timeline and we're in the longest shutdown we've experienced and, and that has consequences because these things are cumulative.

The longer you go on a shutdown like this, the more effects begin to accumulate over time.

- And what are some of those effects that you had mentioned in a previous senate, but let's kind of walk through those a little bit.

- Yeah, so you know, we start to think about at least in that initial period, just the offices being closed.

There's a couple of consequences of that.

First I think for us in farm country is that the reports aren't coming out that we would expect.

Pretty critical timing in terms of harvest, marketing around harvest and, and planning how we're gonna market our crops over time.

Those reports are really important for those kinds of decisions and we're lacking that information right now.

Markets are lacking that information right now as well.

And that has effects I think, to the fact that offices aren't open in October.

This is an important month for us in programs, new programs coming up, deadlines that are coming up, decisions that have to be made generally by October 15th, which we've already passed those timelines or by December 1st we're shortening up our windows of time that we have to make those kinds of, but as we rolled past that, that one month mark as we rolled into November, then we have additional consequences in terms of just, you know, you have one month of funding available to you as of September 30th, but now we don't have that second month of funding for critical programs - And one of those critical programs is SNAP as well.

And there had been some news that a court issue, a judge ordered issue that to go out that some SNAP benefits should be distributed that might not be happening now, but Oklahoma has had some efforts to mitigate that a little bit.

So talk about that.

- Yeah, so you know, whenever you go past that window of time, you don't have the appropriations, you can do emergency appropriations for SNAP benefits and I think that's what a lot of the discussion and the conflict has been at the federal level is those federal appropriations, emergency appropriations to keep the funds rolling out the door.

Yeah.

But states have stepped in and Oklahoma is one of those states where we have emergency rainy day type funds that get shifted over to kind of keep, keep the money rolling, especially for our food banks and food pantries in the state that are bearing a lot of the burden of picking up that lack of benefits for SNAP recipients - And approaching holiday season as well.

- Absolutely.

This is a really, it's a big flux of demand for all of us, for all households coming into the Thanksgiving season.

And food pantries receive a lot of demand in this time of year, so they are already in a high demand season and then having an increase in the number of people because they can't receive their snap benefits just adds additional burden.

And I've seen such a warm outpouring in Oklahoma and I know you have two of individuals stepping in trying to help with those funding shortfalls in our food distribution centers across the state.

- And even if, you know, as you know as this is airing a deal could have been reached, who knows?

But even with that, even if the deal, if the government opens, there's still, you know, a backlog of things that can still cause a lot of issues.

So talk a little bit about that.

- You know, there's a certain inertia, right?

Yeah.

In a big federal agency like this that's across the country in keeping business rolling over time, the longer that whole machine is shut down, the more it takes to get it rolling again.

And so we shouldn't expect, even if the doors reopen, even if appropriations happen in the next few days, we really shouldn't.

Just like mass - Yeah.

- Onto those offices.

Take the time to make the appointment, let them tell you when they're ready to start bringing in folks to do regular business.

Again, I know crop reports are due in this window, that's a big flux in this time of year too.

And obviously we need those crop reports in for different programs, but just call the office, make that appointment, let them tell you when they're really back up and fully running.

Because you know these folks, they haven't been able to check their email, they haven't received like all the mail that's in the office and so they've just got a backlog.

Yeah, it's like the worst vacation ever, right?

In terms of the backlog.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

We'll check back in with you in a few weeks and hopefully some things have changed for the better.

All right, thanks Amy.

Amy Hagerman, OSU extension ag policy specialist here at Oklahoma State University.

- A quick reminder now about the next ranchers Thursday lunchtime series.

A free zoom webinar session on November 13th at noon.

Dr.

Darrell Peele will talk about livestock markets in an expanding cow herd.

For more information, scan the QR code on your screen or go to our website sunup.OKstate.edu.

- Hello Oklahoma Emma White here with your weekly Mesonet weather report.

Since October is now over, let's take a look back at the interesting month we had.

The first map is departure from average of the air temperature in October.

We can see that the entire map of Oklahoma is showing above average values.

In several places, we experienced over five degrees above average maximum air temperature in October.

Next, this map shows the total rainfall departure from average in October.

The north part of the state shows some near average values in grays and above average values in greens with few oranges and browns.

But the south parts of the state were not so lucky.

The southern areas are showing below average values with the oranges and browns across the entire southern and even central parts of the state.

Thus, rainfall was generous to the northern half, but not so much to the southern half of the state.

The plant available water in the top four inches of the soil in October shows scattered above average values in the green.

But the central part of the state did not have above average values as showcased with those orange and brown colors.

Most parts of the state could use rain, but most certainly central Oklahoma.

The plant available water in the top 16 inches of the soil shows a fairly similar story to the top four inches, but does show that just to the east of the panhandle the soil moisture is quite above average there.

The average two inch soil temperature below vegetation was above average in the state, which makes sense based on the high air temperatures we experienced in October.

Only the very southeast part of the state experienced average soil temperature near expected values for October.

Overall a fairly warmer and drier October for the state than average.

Gary McManus is up next with your state climatology report.

- Thanks Emma and good morning everyone.

Well, another week without rainfall unfortunately.

And another change on the drought monitor map.

Not a good one, let's take a look.

Well you can see we have basically the same type of picture, the southern half of Oklahoma and the yellow and the browns.

Those are areas with abnormally dry conditions and drought and unfortunately those tans and browns got bigger, so that means more moderate drought across the southern half of the state and also more severe drought.

Unfortunately, it's looking more and more like we're going to see more of these colors as we go forward unless we get significant rainfall.

Why is this going on?

Well, unfortunately we're working on another dry spell across the state here you can see the consecutive days with less than a quarter inch of rainfall map from the Oklahoma Mesonet.

We're now up to more than 10 days across much of Oklahoma.

Of course this will be longer as we get to the weekend.

And if you look down there in southwest Oklahoma, it's up to more than 44 days.

So another dry spell, it's certainly not welcome.

Also a little bit out there in the western panhandle getting a little bit dry too.

The 30 day rainfall map looks good if you're across the northeastern, one third of the state, not so good in other parts.

By and large, we had less than two inches across much of that area of the southwestern quarter of the state up into central Oklahoma and also over in southeast Oklahoma.

And of course there are other areas in those blue regions where they got less than an inch or two inches of rainfall.

So not a good look for the state right now.

And much of that area across the southwestern quarter.

Basically the southwestern half of the state, less than 50% of normal across a large area.

So definitely not good if you're tracking drought for the state of Oklahoma.

It's a pretty simple message.

We need rainfall, especially across the southwestern half of the state.

Hopefully we'll get some soon.

It's not the weather part of the year, but we can get good rainfall.

I'm not sure it's showing up yet, but we will certainly keep an eye on it.

That's it for this time.

We'll see you next time on the Mesonet weather report.

- We're here now with OSU extension livestock marketing specialist, Dr.

Darrell Peele.

And Darrell, there's been a lot going on in terms of politics recently.

How has that been impacting the cattle markets?

- Yeah, you know in the last couple weeks we've had a whole series of comments, statements, proposals and so they've had a pretty, pretty big impact on on cattle futures markets especially, but cash markets as well, you know, and it's been sort of a piling on we, you know, one thing they, a variety of different things going on, but all of them had a negative impact and, and kind of combined to really create a a fairly big pullback in in cattle prices.

- Yeah.

So has this been impacting every sector of the industry?

- You know, it, it hasn't been actually feeder cattle markets have taken the brunt of it.

Both futures and cash fed cattle markets, futures markets were impacted through some of this, but actually cash prices didn't change very much.

And box beef markets really weren't impacted at all.

So it just depended on which sector were talking about.

- Yeah.

So what do we see looking forward?

- Well, you know, markets are trying to recover.

If, you know, if it settles down a little bit, we don't get more headlines and, and more social media posts, markets will bounce back.

The fundamentals of the market have not changed.

And that's one of the things I keep reminding people is that, you know, these are short term shocks depending on exactly how they play out the impacts probably won't be anywhere near like the initial reaction is.

So the market fundamentals are still strong, markets are already trying to recover.

Probably take another week or two if they're, if they're relatively quiet at least and the markets will bounce back, you know, substantially to where they were before.

- Yeah, that's good news.

So what can producers do, if anything, to manage these situations?

- You know, we've talked about this before, but the, the, these kind of markets are very volatile.

They're very subject to this kind of outside reaction, if you will, to to to politics or, or whatever.

And so, you know, producers have to think about when they're marketing cattle, you know, we're still pretty bullish on the market in general, but you don't market on averages.

You market at specific points in time, specific types of cattle.

So you need to think about that ahead of time and you know, flexibility is, is worth a lot in this market because generally if you can wait a week or two from what you might have initially planned, the market typically recovers quite a lot.

But also it's good to use risk management tools, whether it's LRP insurance or or something like an option market to put a, some sort of minimum on these markets and and be able to protect yourself from these short term negative market reactions.

- Yeah, and if people have any questions they can always talk to their extension specialists.

- Absolutely.

You know, we've got information in extension, there's insurance agents out there that can help you with some of this as well.

- Yeah.

And so last week we talked specifically about buying beef from Argentina.

Have we seen any updates with that?

- Well we don't have any new data 'cause the government's still shut down.

But you know, I think people understand now that Argentina is a very minor supplier of beef to the US market.

The changes that were made or proposed for the tariff rate quota would allow if, if it was fully filled about a doubling of the, the recent imports of beef from Argentina.

But it's still gonna be only about 4% or so of our total beef imports.

So pretty minor impact.

Don't really expect it to have any impact on domestic prices.

- Yeah.

Alright, well thanks for the information Darrell.

And for more information go to sunup.OKstate.edu.

And now here's Paul Vining to tell us about Oklahoma Quality Beef Network.

- The Oklahoma Quality Beef Network or OQBN is a partnership between Oklahoma State Extension and the Oklahoma Cattlemen's Association.

It's a VAC 45 calf preconditioning with the following requirements.

Calves must be weaned for at least 45 days, vaccinated twice for respiratory illness, vaccinated twice against black leg.

They must be de-horned castrated bunk trained.

And we also require beef quality assurance certification or BQA certification.

OQBN is unique in that we offer third party verification in which an extension agent will come out to your ranch and verify that your calves have met our required protocol.

You can find a list of sale dates on our webpage or by visiting your local extension office.

- Good morning, Oklahoma.

My name is Parker Henley and I am filling in this morning for Dr.

Johnson here on the cow calf corner.

This morning's topic is going to be about selecting replacement heifers for the success and long-term future of our cow herd.

The first thing I think we need to consider is how many do we need to keep?

And if we look at data, it suggests that cow herd needs to be replaced at the rate of five to 10% annually.

We know also that heifer rep development is not a hundred percent successful.

So we also want to take into consideration that we probably need to keep around another five to 20% of heifers so that we have enough to replace our cow herd.

When we consider that, I think the selection starts way earlier than the breeding season.

In fact, I would consider you to begin thinking about this.

Prior to weaning, I would look at things like selecting heifers that are born earlier in that calving season that ultimately allows us to do a couple of things.

First things, it picks heifers from cows that br earlier.

And even though fertility is somewhat lowly heritable, I think this indirectly allows us to select for those cattle that have more success at breeding and longevity built into them.

Secondly, it better equips those heifers to calve at two years of age.

The second thing that I would look for is I would select heifers from cows that have great TERs and have milked well and have stayed in the herd for a long time.

We also in today's era, have some other great tools available to help us select really good heifers and that is genomics.

There are a lot of commercial companies out there that have genomic tests available for crossbred or commercial cattle if they are pure bred cattle.

We have genomically enhanced EPDs that combine phenotypes with pedigree information that allow us to make really good selection decisions.

Once we have those heifers selected and we have an appropriate number then comes in the next stage of developing them until the breeding season.

If we know that our cow herd the mature size is somewhere near 1400 pounds, that means that we need to develop our heifers to two thirds of that mature weight at the start of breeding season.

And if we have those heifers that we're gonna calve at 24 months of age, we're gonna breed them.

They need to become pregnant at 15 months of age.

So we need those heifers to weigh a little over 900 pounds from that cow herd at the start of that breeding season.

So I would consider targeting heifers that have an appropriate growth rate and we wanna develop those at a slow and consistent rate so that we don't over condition them.

We know that heifers that have been pubertal more than once prior to the breeding season have a better success and chance of getting pregnant.

And we know that pubertal status is highly heritable and it is correlated to long longevity of the cow herd.

And so once we have those heifers properly developed, I would suggest turning them out with a CESE bull that can breed those heifers as well as prior to the breeding season, I would have a pelvic area measurement done.

So we can eliminate those extremes, those small or infantile reproductive tracks.

So as we wrap this up here, I encourage you to put some extra time into thinking and selecting our replacement heifers.

As we know and the the droughts that we have been through.

It is important to have cows that are equipped to handle your environment, select good replacement heifers, develop them properly to two thirds of their mature weight by the start of the breeding season, and then ultimately coal out any of those heifers that don't become pregnant early in that breeding season.

So we can market them as yearlings.

And I think you'll set yourself up for success in your cow herd down the road.

Thank you again for joining us here on the Cow Calf Corner this morning.

- That'll do it for our show this week.

A reminder, you can see Sunup anytime on our website.

Follow us on social media and stream us anytime at youtube.com/sunup tv.

As we leave today, we are really celebrating after Oklahoma brought home 10 national titles from last week's national FFA agriscience Fair in Indianapolis more than any other state.

And the Stillwater chapter had seven of those and was recognized as the National Premier chapter in strengthening agriculture out of 94 chapters from across the country.

And last but not least, the new national FFA President and the Western Region Vice President are both OSU students.

Congratulations to all of these amazing young people.

The future of agriculture easing great hands.