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

I'm Lyndall Stout.

We join you today from the OSU campus for the Annual Rural Economic Outlook Conference.

Lots of great topics on the agenda today as well as great speakers including Bart Fisher, a professor at Texas A and M talking about the farm bill.

- Sure, so, the last Farm Bill was the 2018 Farm Bill signed in to law in December of 2018, and it just expired just a few days ago at the end of September.

And so all the attention right now is on are we are we going to have a new one?

When are we going to have a new one?

If not, are we going to have an extension?

And for my part right now the biggest focus, I would say, is on the substance.

It's much more important that we get the substance right and that the timing of the farm bill takes a backseat in part because of what we've seen over the last several years.

You know, when we passed the 2018 Farm Bill we did not anticipate a pandemic coming at that point in time.

And we certainly didn't anticipate what would happen to cost of production following the pandemic.

And so we're in a situation now where the Farm Bill just hasn't kept up with the cost of doing business.

You have growers out there who are putting an extraordinary amount of capital at risk to produce crops and the safety net that's underlying all those crops is just not up to snuff.

And so we've got an opportunity now to make some improvements.

The challenge though is that, and everybody's seeing what's happening in Washington today.

As you and I are talking, we're still trying to figure out who the Speaker may be.

And so there's a lot of other bigger picture issues that are stealing the limelight from the Farm Bill.

- Gives our economists a lot to talk about for sure.

What kind of questions are you getting from producers and specifically things that might affect folks here in Oklahoma and in Texas?

- Sure, and a lot of a lot of the Farm Bill does not, it doesn't require a lot of input, right.

There's a lot of things that are working quite well in it.

And one example I point to early in my career I had the good fortune of working for Chairman Lucas, right from right here in Oklahoma.

And one of the things that he included in that bill was the Livestock Forage Program.

We didn't anticipate, yes, we were in drought at the time, but we didn't anticipate how long that drought would last.

And we certainly didn't anticipate that we would be hit with successive droughts after that.

And so a program like LFP and part of it because of his foresight, we permanently funded it in the 2014 Farm Bill and we don't have to do that again.

And so it's working quite well.

And so mainly what we're focused on is the more traditional income support programs.

Not to get way in the weeds, but for a lot of your listeners who deal with this things like the Price Loss Coverage program and the Agriculture Risk coverage program that were created under Mr. Lucas's Bill at the time there was a lot of effort put into making sure that those support levels were set relative to cost of production, but the world's completely changed over the last 10 years.

And so it's just time to take another look at it.

- I'm sensing some optimism in what you're saying.

Is that accurate?

- I think so.

I mean, look, we're not, I'm not naive to all of the challenges.

I lived them for almost a decade, right.

Of trying to navigate farm bills through Congress.

And so there's always challenges, but that's just part of the nature one's the part of the nature of this country.

Our country was designed, it was designed to be difficult to get through stuff, get stuff through Congress, because we didn't want things shoved through Congress.

And so, I mean, it's a democratic process that takes lots of input.

It's very messy.

Some of it right now is very much self-inflicted which seems a bit confusing.

But I'm very optimistic.

And one reason I am is because this Farm Bill is a bit unique in that several things have already been reauthorized.

Crop insurance is often a big part of the conversation and it's not to say it won't be this time, but it was reauthorized last fall with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.

You know, the president's signature climate legislation reauthorized almost all the conservation programs.

And so that's been done.

And so what it's really done is it's kind of brought the conversation to focus around Title one of the Farm Bill which despite the fact it's now a tiny share it's still the historic reason, the fundamental reason why we have a farm bill and why we do 'em every five years is to make sure the safety net is reflective of the risks being faced by growers.

- You and your colleagues and peers from other schools put out information all the time.

Tell us about what that is and how we can find it.

- Sure, so a little bit of over a year ago we started a new effort called Southern AG today and so it's at the website, southernagtoday.org.

And it's just a daily email and part of it grew, one, just out of a need to communicate, but probably the signature feature of it is that it's a group effort across all 13 Southern Land grant universities including the 1890.

We work with a lot of 1890 land grant universities as well mainly through the extension service.

And it's an outlet for those groups to be able to band together and communicate on topics.

And so on Mondays, we do crop marketing.

Tuesdays we do livestock marketing.

Wednesdays we do farm management.

Thursdays is AG policy and trade.

That's primarily where I write.

And on Fridays is miscellaneous topics like AG law, you know, things like LOTUS and Prop 12 out in California where we'll weigh in on those topics.

- Bart, thanks so much for being with us.

Great information about the Farm Bill, and of course we enjoyed your presentation today at the conference.

- You bet, thanks Lyndall.

- And for a link to the newsletter signup, just go to sunup.okstate.edu.

(light country music) - Welcome to the Mesonet weather report.

I'm Wes Lee.

The high temperature peaks this year were somewhat delayed as compared to the long-term average and has been dropping slower than normal since then.

Here, the long-term average highs are shown in blue, and this year's temperatures in red.

This chart uses smooth data to look at trends and not individual daily changes.

We have been mostly warmer than average since late July, but things seem to be finally changing.

This week, we dropped below the average high of about 75 degrees, and it is likely we will stay there for awhile.

Freezing temperatures are also being discussed as now a possibility as well.

To-date, we have only had one site, Beaver, reach down to the 32-degree mark.

While it is still early, it is not that uncommon for the first freezes to occur in October.

This map shows the date for the first freeze in the earliest 10% of the years using a 30-year data set.

The median freeze date is shown here, which has late October dates in the north and early November dates in the south.

But in the latest 10% of years, they ranged from early November in the panhandle to early December in the southeast.

Regardless, it's time to dig out the jackets.

Now here's Gary with the latest changes to the drought map.

- Well, I promised you some changes on the U.S. Drought Monitor map, and we definitely got 'em.

Let's take a look at that new map.

We can see down in the south-central and southeast Oklahoma, we did get a little bit of eraser out, change some of those colors from the bad to the not so bad.

But we still have a large area across the southwestern half of the state in that flash drought situation.

And then in far southwest Oklahoma, in that area of red, which is extreme drought, that's a long-term drought.

Also, up in north-central Oklahoma, we have long-term drought situation up there.

And if you look there in Oklahoma, Logan, Payne County, that area, we do see those two areas of abnormally dry conditions, the yellow, starting to come together.

So this is another sign of another building dry period.

So we need to get some rain to stop that in its tracks.

Speaking of that building dry period, here you can see the consecutive days with less than 1/4 inch of rainfall map from the Mesonet.

Look up there right around Stillwater in Payne County, up to 29 days.

Other areas, up to 29 days.

So by the time this comes out, it'll probably be up to over a month.

Again, these things don't help.

They intensify drought, but they also let it start to spread as well.

So something we need to remedy with just a decent bit of rainfall.

The current flash drought's working on just over 80 days worth of dry weather.

So when we look at the 60- and the 90-day, it's a little bit in between there.

But we can see it on the 90-day map from the Mesonet.

Here you can see that area across the southwestern half of the state, a little bit farther into south-central Oklahoma versus the southeast.

You can see those areas with less than three inches of rainfall, less than four inches, less than five inches.

So those are areas that are hurting right now.

And you look at that on the departure from normal map for the same timeframe, last 90 days, and you can see those deficits over that three-month period.

Basically, three to four to five to six inches, as many as seven to eight inches in some parts.

So definitely that flash drought still going strong in parts of the state.

So each one of these dry periods kicks that drought along just like a can down the road.

We do need to get some rainfall to interrupt it and maybe start to curtail it a little bit.

That's it for this time.

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

(light country music) - It's time to check in on the livestock markets with our livestock marketing specialist, Dr. Derrell Peel.

And Derrell, you're here at the Rural Econ Conference.

So what are you talking about today?

- Well, the question posed to me today is the same one I've been doing at a lotta meetings recently, and that is sorta where are we at on herd rebuilding?

And you know, are we starting that process?

Where do we go from here basically?

- So where are we going from here?

- (laughing) You know, it's interesting, if you look at the data right now, I have no indication that we have yet started herd rebuilding.

In fact, on an annual basis, the beef cow herd is getting smaller in 2023.

So we'll start 2024 maybe at the lowest level, depending on what happens next year.

And maybe we'll begin that herd rebuilding process, which means that we would pull a lot of females, heifers, out of the feeder supply and into the breeding part of the industry, excuse me.

- So do you think that that's primarily due to drought, or are there other factors that are going in with that?

- You know, there's a whole list of reasons why this herd rebuilding is slow to start.

I think it will continue to be slow.

Part of it is drought.

Part of it is the fact that producers that maybe are not in active drought, and we do have a lotta drought still, but producers that maybe are not as much in drought or are barely out of drought, so they're still recovering in terms of their forage space.

- Or they're recovering financially.

Producers have had a lot of financial stress through the drought, and so for all of those reasons, producer, you know, older producers are looking at this, maybe more as a way of figuring out when they're gonna exit or cut back on the cow herd rather than rebuild it, you know, so we've got just a lot of questions going forward about when we get started on this process and how fast it will accelerate.

- So let's kinda shift just like in, you know, general discussions with livestock markets.

You know, I mentioned the drought a little bit and like you said, there's still a lot of areas in Oklahoma that are like drought-stricken and there for a while we thought the prospects for dual-purpose wheat were gonna be pretty good.

What are those prospects looking like now and how is that impacting the markets?

- You know, what I'm getting from producers now is it's spotty.

There are a few places where some wheat is getting planted, and in some cases, coming up nicely I think in some areas, but all in all, I would say we're probably still struggling to get wheat planted, to get it up.

I think all in all, we're probably gonna be a little bit behind or short on the amount of wheat pasture that we have the potential to get into before the end of the year.

- And how's that gonna impact in prices?

- Well, you know, if we had wheat pasture prospects that looked a little better, it would certainly be adding another component of demand to our feeder cattle markets.

Now they're a little bit lower in the last couple weeks but most of that's due to external market volatility and some of the global things that have been happening.

But you know, maybe it's a little bit of seasonal pressure on these calves as well.

And so, you know, maybe the lack of wheat pasture is playing into that a little bit.

But you know, honestly we haven't seen a lot of impact on the markets at this point in time.

- Alrighty, thanks Derrell.

Dr. Derrell Peel, livestock marketing specialist here at Oklahoma State University.

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

This week's topic is manure scoring.

It's an interesting topic and an interesting title.

Let's talk about how we get there and the purpose of this week's topic.

It is the time of year in Oklahoma where we're weaning calves.

If we haven't done it already, we're getting ready to wean calves.

If we've just weaned a calf off, it's that time of the year when she's gonna be at about her lowest body condition.

She'll put some back on going into calving season.

We know at the beginning of calving season, we'd like to have our mature cows in a body condition score of five-plus, our bred heifers at a body condition score of six, and that's gonna enable them to turn around and have prompt breed back so that they're breeding up quick enough to repeat the process and wean off another calf in that 12-month window.

So monitoring body condition scores, as we've talked about before on this show, is a very important method to manage cows, keep 'em in in the right plane of nutrition, but manure scoring is something we can look at more in the short term and on a day-to-day basis, have a better feel for whether or not we're meeting particularly the protein requirements in our cow herd.

Now, looking at manure out of our cows can indicate a lot of things and some of 'em are health related, but just with respect to where we're at right now in Oklahoma, if we've got ample standing forage, it's a pretty safe assumption that that forage is in the process of going dormant.

The quality, the nutritional content, and particularly, the crude protein content of that grass is going down.

And so it's the time of year, if we need to be giving our cows a bit of a nutritional boost, some protein supplementation is gonna be key in helping them utilize and maximize that digestibility of that standing forage we've got on hand.

If we look at manure scores, basically, if we are seeing a manure score of about one, and manure scores range from one to five where one is something that looks like what we may identify in Oklahoma as the consistency of calves growing on wheat pasture, a manure score of one has got more moisture in the manure than it does solids.

It's about the consistency of cream soup.

Splatters, makes a really flat pat.

We go on up in how solid it gets to a manure score of three, which is typically something that only piles about two inches deep out of a mature cow, actually pools a little bit in the center, and that's the manure score we're looking for this time of year.

It means that nutritional quantity, quality, everything in terms of requirements are being met.

The rate of passage is about where we want it, and we'd like to see a manure score of three, and then all the way out to a manure score of five which is what we're prone to see more of this time of year.

A manure score that indicates we're not getting enough protein in the diet.

There's a lot of fiber, rate of passage is slow.

These are the pats of manure that can literally get four to six inches tall.

An eyeball score of manure pats this time of year can tell us if we need to be adding some protein to the diet.

A little bit of protein supplementation, and if we see those really liquid manure scores of one and two, we know we may be overdoing it and we can back off a little bit in those cubes that we're actually supplementing into the cow's diet.

If we're looking at something that's about a three, we know we're getting what we need into those cows, and if we're seeing manure score fours and fives, those ones that pile really deep, we know we need to be getting.

- More protein supplementation into those cows' diets.

Manure scoring is a quick and easy-to-use management tool, something we can take a look at with the naked eye on a day-to-day basis, and it's pretty informative in terms of helping us make some nutritional management decisions.

Thanks for joining us this week on Cow-Calf Corner.

(light country music) - We're joined now by Dr. Kim Anderson, our crop marketing specialist.

Kim, we're here at the Economic Conference today.

What kind of message do you have for those folks inside?

- Well, the first thing we walked about was benchmarks.

A number, say, the price of wheat in northern Oklahoma is $6.10.

That doesn't mean anything to a decision maker unless they've got the past to compare it with and have an idea of how it may change in the future.

We talked about that producers don't sell or market their corn, their wheat, their cotton.

What they market is their land, labor, capital, and management.

They sell the commodity that they produce.

We talked about it's almost impossible to predict prices, but you've got to estimate prices so that you can develop budgets and you can compare different crops and different enterprises to see which one would be the most profitable for you.

And then we talked about the change in land use in Oklahoma over the last 40 years.

- With that in mind, how are you answering that question in terms of land use?

- Well, if you look at crop land, since oh, the mid '80s, crop land has declined from about 14 million acres to a little less than 12 million.

You look at the pasture, the range, the hay land, it increased from 16 million acres to 22 million acres.

Wheat planted acres has declined from eight million to 4.5.

Corn has increased from 100,000 acres to about 400,000 acres.

And soybeans from 300,000 to 500,000.

Cotton, it declined from the '80s into the '90s and then increased here the last couple of years.

- You mentioned benchmarks earlier.

What are some of those benchmarks?

- Well, the numbers I talked about for wheat were like $6.10.

That's the current price of wheat in northern Oklahoma.

If you go to the panhandle, it's 25 cents lower.

If you go in southern Oklahoma, it's about 40 cents lower.

If you're forward contracting for '24 harvested wheat, you got about $6.20 northern Oklahoma, 15 higher in the panhandle, 30 lower.

We talked about corn, $4.70 now.

'24 crop, about 4.95.

Soybeans, 11.90 now.

11.70 for the '24 crop.

And cotton, about, oh, 80, 81 cents now, and around 76 to 78 for '24.

So we talked about those prices and how they could change over the next few months and over the next year.

- With all of this in mind, what is your guidance for producers watching and those in the audience today?

- Well, that it's essential that you have a strategy and you have plans, several plans to go with each strategy.

So be flexible.

We talked about a Peter Drucker quote.

"There are no solutions with respect to the future.

There's only choices between courses of action, each imperfect, each risky, and each uncertain, each involving different cost.

But nothing can help the manager more than to know what alternatives are available and what they imply."

- So put pencil to paper, do your homework, and make informed decisions, right?

- That's exactly correct.

- Okay, Kim, thanks a lot.

We'll see you next week.

(light country music) - [Narrator] And just a quick reminder about the upcoming OK-Fire Workshops coming up this fall.

The first session will be split into two parts on October 25 and 26 and will be held over Zoom.

Workshops will consist of a combination of presentations, website demos, and question and answer periods.

Now, these workshops are free, but registration is required.

For more information about this event and how to register, just go to sunup.okstate.edu.

(light country music continues) - Today I thought I'd share a little bit of info about jack-o'-lanterns.

Along with trick or treaters and candy, it would be hard to imagine Halloween without jack-o'-lanterns.

However, both the holiday and the lantern were heavily influenced by Irish immigrants.

Early Northern European Celtic cultures had traditions of using fruits and vegetables to represent human faces, though their purposes at that time is unknown.

These traditions would merge with pagan harvest celebrations to form the holiday known as Samhain, which would have been the equivalent of New Year's Day and was celebrated on November 1st.

Samhain Eve was celebrated on October 31st and would have been what we now consider Halloween.

It was on this day that spirits were thought to move among the living as they passed into the afterlife.

The Celts would build bonfires, dress up in costumes, and carve scary faces into root vegetables, such as turnips, to help protect themselves from the spirits.

Eventually, these vegetables would later serve as lanterns, as metal lanterns would've been expensive and out of reach to many.

Carving faces and designs into the hollowed out turnips would allow light to pass through while protecting the candle or ember inside.

The name jack-o'-lantern may have originated from an 18th century Irish folktale about a man named Stingy Jack who enjoyed drinking and mischief.

He would eventually be doomed to forever walk the earth with only a turnip lantern to light his way.

- This would inspire the nickname Jack of the Lantern or Jack-o-Lantern.

When Irish immigrants arrived in the United States in the 19th and early 20th century they brought these traditions, folk tales and holidays with them.

They would also find a winter squash that was much larger and easier to carve, the pumpkin.

So just a little bit of information about Jack-o-lanterns.

Happy spooky season.

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

- Finally, today we're on the road to Muskogee County to go grocery shopping at the mobile market.

Sunups, Seth Fish brings us this story.

- Today we're at Haskell.

We're at the public library.

This is just one of the markets one of the six markets we do in Muskogee County.

We try to keep 'em rural.

It's for our rural residents 'cause they don't have access to the same food that people do that live in the bigger cities and towns.

So that was one of the main reasons why we started doing the farmer's markets was to bring it out here.

Well, EODD, area Agency on Aging, we work with just seniors 60 and older.

We are a senior citizen resource service.

We started this because we were tasked with fighting social isolation since the pandemic, and we teamed up with Hona and we teamed up with TSET because this was just a good way to fight the isolation, bring in nutritious food and access to fresh produce.

- [Seller] Acorn squash as new item.

- We teamed up with OSU extension.

I think last year was when we started in the spring and then it's just grown since then where we could barely scrounge five to 10 people, now, like here, we have a wait list, we have a waiting list for this one usually.

And they get here first thing in the morning.

They're out before anyone even knows we're here nine times outta 10.

- So thankfully we have a great relationship with farmers.

We've been working with them since 2018.

Also, we've made a partnership with Langston University and their research that they're doing and their horticulture center, and so we're able to procure vegetables from them as well in order to redistribute to food desert areas throughout the state.

Partnership's amazing.

We have such great synergy within these partnerships.

I think it's one of those things where I've actually never been involved with community partners that have worked this well together.

I've worked with community partners and other entities that were wonderful.

We know it's important, bringing fresh fruits and vegetables and produce to communities that may not have, some of the communities that we reach don't have a local grocery store at all.

But everyone deserves the right to have access to fresh fruits and vegetables that are affordable.

And I mean, honestly, if we were talking about the big scheme of life, there's not many things more important than that.

Oh, just the comradery that's built through food.

So it's a high access, low stigma point, and so we're really able to distribute other information as well besides just nutrition education.

- Yeah, okay.

- I think it's the social aspect in the sense, like I said, they get to come out and they come, they ride three or four in a car sometimes and come out here and they hang out and they talk.

And then also, we're not pre assembling anything.

We're not saying, here, take this food.

You get to choose what you want.

If you want the beef, if you don't like this, okay.

You don't have to take that.

You pick what you want.

And I think they like that more as just giving 'em a box and saying, here take this and have a good day.

- I'm sure you saw today how some of the people just really appreciate and love the fact that we're here.

They are coming out.

Some of them, it's probably difficult for them to make it here.

Maybe they don't have transportation, maybe they can't get around very well, but they are making an effort to be here and most of them probably really need this service.

And so to see the look on their faces, I mean that's the best part, but really there's no bad part about it.

- Well, this is a very good program because it doesn't only just provide us with vegetables and meat.

You know, we get the fellowship with the young people and they're all so nice.

We just love it.

We love coming here and fellowshiping with people and getting freebies while we're at it.

(upbeat music) - That'll do it for our show this week.

A reminder, you can see more on the great topics we cover today on our website and also our YouTube channel.

I'm Lyndall Stout, have a great week everyone.

And remember, Oklahoma Agriculture starts at "Sunup".

(upbeat music)