- Hello everyone and welcome to Sunup.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

We begin once again this week talking about the challenges of farming amid ongoing and worsening drought.

Today, Dr. Amanda Silva is back chatting with Sunup's Kurtis Hair about some research into late planted wheat for all those producers who are still waiting on the rain, - We're here with Amanda Silva, our OSU extension small grain specialist with a weed update.

But first, Amanda, if things couldn't get any more tough with this dry weather, you're hearing some reports of fall armyworm already in the field.

- Yes.

Things could not get any tougher to, to our wheat producer.

So I start hearing reports this week that people are finding army worms in the field.

So finding that symptom, that window panning on weak leaves.

Of course, the wheats very small at this time in most of the fields that we are hearing reports or those fields that were planted before that rain we received in September 22nd.

So for those that wheat has already established, it has around three leaves maybe.

So those were the fields that are receiving insecticide applications.

And also most of the, the fields that we are hearing are in North Central, central Oklahoma.

- Well, we'll definitely be keeping our eye on that and we'll talk with Ashley Ferris, her new OSU extension of entomologist on that in a couple weeks.

But for right now, is your guidance just to be scouting for that?

- Yes.

Just keep on the lookout for it.

Those armyworms are very tiny.

They're, they're they changing in activity depending on the, on the time of the day.

So just especially for no-till look under the, the residue and, and keep the, the eye out.

- All right.

So let's shift to the weed update we had you on last week, which we wanna have to be back on just 'cause it's, it's that time of year.

So it, how's the, we looking, you can kind of see a little bit of baby wheat popping up here.

So is that kind of what's happening throughout the state?

- Yes.

We have some situations where the wheat that was planted earlier, it's coming up some, some fields we are, we are seeing it looking good.

Some areas we haven't seen any emer, any emergence yet.

And in some areas we are still dusting in.

We haven't made a lot of progress just because of the drought.

So, so in some situations we were able to find moisture at one, one and a half inch depth.

So it varies.

So it varies a lot.

But overall we are waiting and hoping, hoping to, to, to receive that rain that is forecasted for next weekend.

- Yeah.

And with that cool coming next week, hopefully some rain comes, but if there are producers in that situation who are wanting to hold off on planting and waiting on that rain, you actually have some research on what, what happens when they do hold off on that, right, - Yes.

So for our grain only producers and for our grain only trials, we are not in a very hurry to plant in, in, in this case.

Not, not for now.

And because this has happened, so drought has happened so often in Oklahoma, especially at time of planting, we started developing research to look at what happens when we delay planting.

So last year we conducted trials comparing planting dates in October, November, and December, and also different seeding rates.

And what we are finding is, well from last year, actually November was the, the month that showed to be the best.

Yeah.

As far as yield for planting date.

Now, like I said, it's one year of data.

So in our other trials where we compared planting date in October, in December, so we had a total of six environments in those trials.

Actually, it's not very consistent that we'll see a reduction in yield when delaying planting.

And so out of those six environments that we evaluated, four showed a higher yield when we delayed planting.

Oh wow.

Yeah.

And so, and, and that has a lot to do with the environmental conditions at the time of planting.

And so with that study, basically what we are seeing is the yield penalty that we see that we possibly see, or that we expect to see when delaying sewing, it's not very consistent.

So in some years like this, the conditions are not very conducive for re-emergence at, at the optimal time in October, if we delay planting maybe to November in some areas to December, we may not see that yield reduction not every year.

- So what about seeding rate though?

- Yeah, so there is also that question that, well, when you delay planting, we need to bump the seeding rate to compensate for that reduced time that we have for tilling.

In fact, what our research is showing that increasing seeding rate from the average sitting rate that we planned in the state, which is about 870,000 seeds per acre, increasing from that to A million, 1.4 million doesn't really help with yield.

So from our studies from those results as at this time, I would not recommend farmers to increase seeding rate.

- And when it comes to this research data, it's not available right now to the public, but it will be soon, - Right?

Yes.

Hopefully it'll be, we'll be soon.

So - All righty.

Thanks Amanda.

Dr. Amanda Silva, OSU extension, small grain specialist here at Oklahoma State University.

- We have a special Mesonet weather report today saying goodbye and happy retirement to a fixture on the show.

Sunup's Kurtis Hair does the honors.

- Well, normally in the Mesonet weather report, Wes Lee is sitting right in front of your TV in front of a blue screen and I'm not usually here, but Wes, this is a little bit of a different type of Mesonet weather report because you're officially retiring.

- Yes, it's been 35 years as of last week with Oklahoma State.

It's been a wonderful career.

I've enjoyed ever minute up, but it's time to move on down the road and let somebody else move into this position - As it happens.

But let's like reflect a little bit, you know, you've been on sunup for a long time, so talk a little bit about your kind of experience with Sunup and, you know, giving weather to producers or weather weather reports to producers out in the state.

- Yeah, well I, weather is not a formal training subject for me.

I'm an entomologist by training.

So seven years ago I got an offer to go to work for the Oklahoma Mesonet.

It's been a wonderful seven years.

Sunup is a big part of that, getting recognized around the states.

You know, every farm show I go to, there's at least a a dozen people say, Hey, I saw you this morning on Sunup.

So it's been a lot of fun learning about weather and learning how to present that information to farmers and ranchers around the state.

- And one thing that's great about Oklahoma that I just noticed, like we were talking about it off camera of just being in coffee shops, that weather is, I think maybe the number one topic here.

It's the only thing I talk about with my dad, - Right?

It's a, it's a ice breaker for anybody.

You go to any coffee shop in any farm community and it's gonna be the topic that's discussed more than anything else.

- So going forward, what, what are your plans?

- Well, I, I am ready to retire.

I do have some other ideals, other things in mind, but for the most part it's gonna be some relaxations, some increased vacation time and I'm really looking forward to playing and spending more time with my grandkids.

- Well, I mean, you definitely earned it, but before we let you go, we gotta have at least one more Mesonet weather report.

So is this warm dry weather gonna stick around?

- It sure appears that it is.

You know, we, we tend to flip flop back and forth between El Nino and La Nina.

Cool season weather pattern.

We're definitely in the female, the La Nina pattern right now that tends to give us those drier than normal, warmer than normal conditions.

So I do expect this warm weather and dry weather to continue through the cool season months this year.

Hopefully by next spring we can revert back to a normal weather pattern, whatever that is for Oklahoma.

- Do you think that this is gonna be kind of a normal thing going forward?

Is that something you're thinking?

- Well the, you know, our temperatures are definitely getting warmer, especially in the winter months.

We're seeing actually as a whole more rainfall for the state.

Unfortunately more of it's falling in the eastern half of the state and less in the western half of the state.

So it's just something we're gonna have to get used to.

It appears going forward.

- Alrightyy.

Thanks Wes, really appreciate all your hard work for Sunup, but I think you have one more thing to say before you sign off, huh?

Yes, one last - Time.

Here's Gary with a weather report on rainfall.

- Thanks Wes and good morning everyone.

Well for the worst kept secret in Oklahoma, yes we do have more drought on the drought monitor showing up and it's that severe to extreme drought.

So let's get right to the new map and show you the bad news.

Basically our extreme drought, that's the red color on the drought monitoring map.

The D three, remember it goes from D zero, which is not drought, it's abnormally dry conditions.

And then the drought intensification scale goes from D one to D four.

D four is the worst of course, but those red colors are showing up way too much on the newest drought monitor map.

We now have basically the entire northeastern quarter of the state in that extreme drought.

D three, we also have increases down in southeast Oklahoma and also in southwest Oklahoma.

And of course surrounding those areas we have more of that severe drought.

That's the, the darker brown color and of course more moderate drought, that's the lighter brown color.

And we have some more abnormally dry conditions showing areas in danger of going into drought if we don't get more precipitation sometime soon.

And you can see on the one week change for the drought monitor, this is the map that shows basically the one class intensification or one class improvement in Oklahoma.

It's probably the worst across most of the country, maybe down there in Nevada and Arizona they have a bit more, but basically the entire eastern half of the state saw an increase.

So not good news for Oklahoma, but you know, we have to keep pushing these drought intensifications until we get precipitation.

Unfortunately, I tend to show you a lot of really bad looking precipitation maps.

Here's some other indicators of drought in Oklahoma.

This is called quick dry.

This sort of looks at the vegetation on a satellite map and determines those quicker changes and those basically degrading of the, the vegetation to show where those more rapid drought changes are occurring.

And you can see from this map up in northeast Oklahoma, that scale looks really bad.

A lot of the worst looking colors in that region, but really across the state we're seeing indicators of at least the last, you know, 30 days that we're seeing some drought intensification going on in the state of Oklahoma.

And finally we take a look at the relative greenest map.

Again, just a sort of a snapshot of the vegetation across the state.

Really very few areas showing green vegetation, at least relative to the greenest that we've seen over the last 10 years.

So down across southwestern, up the north, central Oklahoma, and even across northeast Oklahoma where those worst drought areas are, we see really bad vegetation conditions in the state of Oklahoma.

So I don't see any indications of big time precipitation anytime soon.

So expect more of these bad changes on the drought monitor map and until we get some of that rainfall.

That's it for this time.

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

- It's not too late to register for the OSU Agriculture Livestock and Range Field Day Thursday, October 17th from 8:30 in the morning until one in the afternoon, the field day will take place at the Range Cow Research Center just west of Stillwater.

There's a jam packed agenda with great topics like pasture, weed control, goat grazing and patch burning, virtual fencing, sire selection, cow efficiency, and parasite resistance.

There's no charge to attend, but you do need to register in advance and lunch is included for information.

Scan the QR code on your screen or visit sunup dot OK state.edu.

We hope to see you there.

We are talking crop markets now with Dr. John Michael Riley.

And it's the time of year when really a lot of numbers are coming in you and you and your peers are sorting it all out.

Let's, let's talk about that.

But first start with how harvest of summer crops and then of course wheat planting are going.

- So as you mentioned, a lot of information coming in markets trying to make heads and tails of of everything.

And we'll just kind of, as you mentioned, kick things off overall across the us 51% of the wheat crop is in the ground and you know, in Oklahoma a little bit behind that at 32%, 14% emerged.

I was driving around this weekend, saw a little bit of of green out there in some of those fields, but most of 'em are still fairly bare or just planted.

So we're behind schedule in regard to where we're typically at at this time of year.

A lot of that has to do with dryness that we've been dealing with.

We're still have that taking place, but I think we're gonna continue to move forward with, with planting here in Oklahoma.

Looking at some other crops, 30% of the corn crop is harvested, that's right on par where we typically are at 47% of the soybean crop is harvested.

Again, we're a little bit ahead of schedule on that one, so our summer crops across the US have really been strong all year and that's put some pressure on prices, we'll get some of that later on, but it's still shaping out to be pretty decent.

- Let's talk some of the numbers now and the report that came out last week.

What did you see in the stocks report?

- So last week got the quarterly grain stocks report and for the most part, less, less grain overall in, in commercial facilities and on-farm storage than what the market was expecting.

Heading into that report, which gave a little bit of a boost of price, wheat grain stocks of 1.985 billion bushels, that was down about 7 billion or million bushels from what pre, pre, pre-market analysts were thinking corn, 1.76 billion bushels down pretty drastically, 84 million bushels from what the market was anticipating.

And then for soybeans, 342 million bushels in commercial facilities and on farm just slightly below what the market was anticipating.

So overall, our our stocks are lower than where we were thinking they were gonna be.

As we look forward now at the, at the end of this week, we're gonna get a, a World X plan demand estimates report and it's, it's gonna be incorporating a lot more of this information that we've been discussing, how harvest is shaping up with actual boots on the ground as opposed to projections so that world acts, supply demand's, estimates report is gonna bring some of this new quarterly grain stocks information into it.

And also as we think about look projecting forward beyond the marketing year, it's gonna be one that we're keying on very, very heavily - With these factors that you talked about.

How is the market reacting this week?

- So starting here with wheat, had some strength there, poked its head above the $6 mark for a little bit.

It's right there at $6 as we're talking right now across Oklahoma, we're about 50 cents below that in most of the state outside of the panhandle.

It's a little, it's a lot strong or excuse me, it's a little bit lower than that in terms of, it's about 85 cents below that $6 mark.

Most of the rest is just about 50 cents below corn.

We're trading just above $4 at four 20.

Most of, of Oklahoma is slightly below that, but Panhandle's a lot stronger obviously because of the feedlots and soybeans.

We're at 10 20, so we're staying above that $10 mark, but it's been the most under pressure shipments.

Exports are what's putting the pressure on soybeans and everything else is kind of a little bit, a little bit better on the, on the export side of things.

- Okay.

Some promising news sprinkled in there.

That's good to hear.

- Yes.

- All right, John Michael, we'll see you next time.

Thanks a lot.

- Good morning Oklahoma and welcome to Cow Calf Corner.

This week's topic is load density and trying to reduce stress when we're hauling calves and just presenting some of the BQA guidelines that help to facilitate keeping stress down on those calves as much as possible, along with weather.

Transportation is one of the two primary stressors or things that can cause stress.

We also know that this time of year as we go through weaning, most of those spring born calves are gonna be on at least one trailer ride to a new destination.

Good handling technique.

Being as quiet as possible in the loading and unloading process is gonna be important to try to reduce stress on those calves.

But along with that, we want to think about load density and just how much area in terms of square feet do calves of various sizes need in order to ensure their health, their comfort, their wellbeing during transportation, and accordingly minimizing that stress as much as possible.

Typically, we think of the rules of thumb according to BQA guidelines.

A 200 pound calf needs about three and a half square foot.

A 400 pound calf needs about six and a half square feet and a 600 pound calf, about eight and a half square feet.

How do we take that into account relative to hauling calves?

If we say, for example, we've got a, the inner dimensions of our trailer are 20 foot long and eight feet wide, that gives us about 160 square feet in the trailer.

We would just take those numbers for different sizes of calves into account to figure out how many we could haul on a particular load.

Safe, good rules of thumb to follow when we're hauling calves.

Other things to keep in mind, you can look through a chart here at the BQA website, but other things to keep in mind are, if it is really hot, we probably wanna reduce the load density just a little bit.

We've kind had heat, hang on with us here as we move into October in Oklahoma this year.

And if we're hauling calves that have horns or tip horns, we need to reduce that load density by probably about 5%.

As a general rule of thumb, always take into account the load capacity of the trailers that we're hauling in, the trucks that we're hauling in.

We don't want to be overloaded in that regard either.

I hope this helps.

Remember load density the next time you're transporting calves in order to minimize stress on those calves as much as possible.

Thanks for joining us on Cow Calf Corner.

- Do you have any unwanted pesticides laying around that you need to get rid of?

While OSU extension has some good news for you, there are two pesticide disposal dates coming up in just a few weeks.

The first one will be October 22nd at the major county fairgrounds and the second one will be October 24th at the Atoka County Fairgrounds.

If you would like any more information about this event, just go to sunup dot OK state.edu.

- Now to OSU extension Soil Nutrient Management specialist, Dr. Brian Arnall, who has a new fact sheet to tell us about that you may find useful, - I'm excited about a release of three new fact sheets onto the OSU Fact sheet system.

They're all about forages and really looking at the data coming into the Oklahoma State soil water forage analytical lab.

Each of the fact sheets will be either the, the warm season, perennial warm season, annual or fall cool season grasses.

And what we're looking at is the data coming into the lab so a farmer and rancher can look at your forage results and see how well am I doing.

We give you the protein a DF and NDF numbers coming from the labs.

And so you can see, hey, I got my bermudagrass forage results back.

I'm doing really good on protein A DF and NDF, maybe I should market my, my Bermuda grass hay as a high quality.

Or if you look at it and say, man, I'm on the lower end of the spectrum of protein.

What am I doing?

Or what can I do to improve my protein quality?

That might be management as far as swathing timing or just management after swathing, or maybe we need to look at our fertility management on that ground.

If you guys want to get a hold of these fact sheets, go check out the sunup website.

- Finally, today we turn to Dr. Paul Beck for some tips on managing your livestock during the drought.

- Hi, I'm Paul Beck.

I'm state Beef Cattle extension specialist for Oklahoma State University.

Today I am gonna talk to you about some steps we need to take to get ready for the prospects of worsening drought and the lack of prospects of wheat pasture.

In many areas in our, in our state range conditions are getting worse in, in many areas of the state.

We've got D one to to D three drought in, in quite a few areas across the state.

And the prospects of rain are very limited, at least for the next two weeks.

So what we need to do, we need to outline, make sure we have enough hay if we have to start feeding hay a couple of months earlier than what we normally would.

We need to outline our, our, our best supplementation programs for our cows, and we need to go ahead and wean our calves to get them off from the cows because a cow that's not got a calf on 'em takes a lot less nutrients and will consume a lot less hay and require a lot less supplement.

Therefore, we can feed our calves and potentially keep them through weaning and, and hopefully get some wheat pasture later in the year.

But we need to go ahead and define a feeding program for those calves to keep them growing and keep them healthy.

We need to go ahead and get our cows palpated to determine pregnancy and get rid of any open cows.

And open is just a drag on your or on your feeding program.

The the things we need to do is, is really minimize what we can of our feed bill in order to keep our most productive cows and go ahead and get those, those calves off from the cows.

The one good thing that even with our lack of, of prospects of wheat pasture is the calf market is really strong.

So if we don't feel like we can afford to feed our calves hay and supplement to keep 'em gaining a pound and a half to two pounds a day through the winter, marketing them right now may not be a bad decision because those markets are fairly good right now.

Keeping them longer may not add more to the bottom line unless we have some, the ability to have a low cost feeding program for those calves.

I've got producers that have called that have access to some higher quality hay, some alfalfa, and just simply mixing that with an energy supplement like corn, we can get these calves to, to grow at a pound and a half, two pounds a day.

One other major consideration when we're trying to feed our beef cows through the drought is we need to ensure that those cows don't get too thin, have bred cows this winter and we let them get thin by the time they calve in the spring.

We can have some severe implications on colostrum yield and colostrum quality.

And that's that first passive immune transfer from the cow to the calf.

And that's gonna have long-term implications on the health of that calf.

If you need assistance in developing either a supplementation program for your cows with limited hay or to match a lower quality hay with, with a supplement for those cows, or develop a feeding program for those calves, contact your local county extension office or us at OSU and we will help you with any of those nutrition considerations on feeding cattle through the winter.

- One of the main challenges as a veterinarian if I go out to a new producer's operation is evaluating their facilities.

One of the big challenges facilities that are not adequate, they don't have to be fancy, they just need to be functional and safe.

So encourage producers, particularly those that are maybe looking at either starting an operation and don't have facilities currently, or taking a look at what you do have and modifying those to visit with your veterinarian on how, how best to meet the needs of what you're gonna need to be doing at the operation.

When it comes to animal health, treating medicating, I, I always joke with, with with some of my previous clients, like I'm not, I'm only gonna catch a cow if she runs through my loop.

I'm not much of a roper.

And so we've gotta have good facilities in order to be able to be effective in treating these animals.

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

A reminder, you can see Sunup anytime and our website and also stream us anytime at youtube.com/sunup tv.

And as we leave today, I wanna say a very special, happy 100th birthday to my great aunt Bernice Gates, who still lives on the farm in Osage County.

Happy birthday, Aunt Bernice.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

We'll see you next time at Sunup.