- Hello everyone and welcome to Sunup.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

Whether it's Halloween Trunk or treat, or any number of fall activities this time of year, candy is likely in abundance.

And as our OSU extension nutritionist tells us it's important to keep some healthier options in mind as well.

My name's - Janice Herman and I'm the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service Nutrition specialist.

And today we're gonna talk about trying to make Halloween a little more healthy and some alternatives to, particularly for children who have may have food allergies.

So Halloween can be a lot of fun, but it can be really tricky when it comes to nutrition.

Kids love getting a full bag of candy, but nutritionally that may not be the best thing.

So when you consider having trick or treats for children, there are some healthier treats you can pass out, like whole grain cheese crackers or small bags of pretzels or popcorn, or you could also include fruit bars made with a hundred percent fruit.

And these can be healthier choices.

Another thing that you can do around Halloween is talk to your children about mindful eating.

And that yes, it's good to have some treats, but we need to really spread those sweet treats out.

Some things that you can do with that excess candy are to think about maybe freezing some, some types of candy, some like m and ms or little small candy bars could be frozen and used maybe for the holidays in baking.

Another strategy might be to have the children go through their candy and pull out what they really, really like and then have the other candy as maybe a pile for the good witch who comes and then maybe replaces that candy with a small gift or, or trinket that's not a food treat.

And also they could donate some of that excess candy to maybe a, a shelter or a retirement home.

Another scary factor for many children with Halloween as well as parents are children who have food allergies.

Lots of Halloween treats contain nuts and peanuts, which are a leading allergen for children.

And so trying to avoid candies with nuts or peanuts can help, but also children are also have allergies to milk, wheat, and eggs and some candies also contain those.

So you might also think about passing out non-food treats that children like, like glow sticks or glow bracelets or some of the other bracelets or pencils or crayons or stickers or tattoos.

There's lots of things children enjoy that are relatively inexpensive that you can get from party shops and things like that.

And then safety is also a concern for all children make.

Have the rule that we don't eat anything until we get home from trick or treating, where you can look over the candy and make sure it's safe, particularly if your child has an allergen to check that candy over, but also pull out anything that's not commercially wrapped.

So I hope you all have a safe and happy Halloween.

- Good morning everyone.

This is Gary McManus, state climatologist for Oklahoma with your Mesonet weather report.

Well, things have gone from bad to worse and I'm not talking about my hair, I'm talking about the drought.

Let's get right to that new drought monitor map and see where we are.

Lots and lots of red on this map.

That's the second to the worst category.

That's extreme drought.

We have that across southwest Oklahoma, much of the northeastern corner of the state, and then the splotched down in southeast Oklahoma and up in north central Oklahoma that's surrounded by lots of moderate to severe drought.

Only the Oklahoma panhandle and far northwest Oklahoma are doing, I guess you'd say good at this point.

Here you can see the change in the drought monitor intensities over the last eight weeks, basically the last two months.

And you can see lots of two to three category intensifications across much of the state.

The only improvements we see are up in northwest Oklahoma and the western panhandle where they have actually gotten some rainfall.

So those deficits do have an impact on our soil moisture.

Here we can see from the USDA, the top soil moisture percent short to very short up to 81%.

Now, you know, very easy to see across the state if you're out plowing discing, lots of dust being kicked up.

That's really a bad situation right now.

So we did get our first freeze across the state.

Some folks had a hard freeze.

So we are going to switch over into the dormant season as we go forward.

We do see from the relative greenness map from the Oklahoma Mesonet, lots of red colors, very little green vegetation across the state, just really confined down to southeast Oklahoma, parts of East central Oklahoma, northeast Oklahoma.

Very alarming to see that the lack of green vegetation at this time of year.

So that's definitely reflective of the drought conditions up in that part of the state.

Now let's take a look at the outlooks for November through January, 2024, 2025.

From the Climate Prediction Center, we see all of Oklahoma seen increased odds of above normal temperatures, but especially southwest Oklahoma and the panhandle, and increased odds of below normal precipitation, all except for the far northeastern corner, but especially down in southwestern Oklahoma.

And again, the panhandle.

Well, it's the same story we've had over the last few months.

We have drought, we need rainfall, and we need it desperately.

That's it for this time.

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

- OSU Agriculture recently held the first ever range and livestock field day where producers got an up close look at research aimed at controlling woody plants among many other things.

Sun's, Kurtis Hair takes us there.

- So today we have a field day and we're just sharing a lot of the different research projects we have going on here around Stillwater.

You know, what we're covering today is mostly about managing rangelands and livestock folks from all over the state that that made it out to see what we're working on.

- This field day is a new one for Oklahoma State University.

The goal here is to show how different range land management strategies can impact the land.

While this field day is new OSU extension range, land specialist Laura Goodman and her team have spent years conducting this research.

- And then right up here you'll see our, our, so we added goats to some of our burn pastures back in 2020.

And the idea was that we were gonna try to help with some of our woody plant control for some of our resprouting species.

So we have done really well with our prescribed burning on controlling species that don't resprout like eastern red cedar, but we had other species that we were concerned about that, you know, grow back pretty easily after fire.

And so we added goats to those cattle pastures and we didn't change our stocking rates on our cattle or anything, we just added the goats in addition, - You see these practices here are a larger research endeavor that Dr. Goodman and her team are working on.

It's called the Prairie Project.

For the past several years, researchers from OSU Texas A and M and the University of Nebraska are collaborating to study a two-pronged approach of patch burning and grazing goats to control woody plant encroachment in the southern Great Plains.

This fact sheet, - Yeah, so we have, we have three pastures where we're, we're burning, we do patch burning, so we burn portions of the pasture and that focuses grazing as those animals are attracted to those burns.

And so we have three that are have just cattle and then we're comparing it to the pastures where we have cattle and goats also on patch burning.

The, on the woody control side, we are, we're getting good results with the, with the goats.

And actually the cattle do a really good job too when we're, when we have 'em on a pasture where we have burning our cattle and our goats are both eating a lot of recia and we're actually getting pretty, pretty decent control with just using that and no herbicide with some of these other plants.

We're seeing that we can keep them much shorter.

And so they're, they're not com the woody plants aren't competing as much with our grasses, - You know, whether it's eastern red cedar or smaller plants like scia, lasa, these small woody plants are overtaking grasslands, which has numerous negative impacts.

But these types of management strategies, well there's a lot of good that can come from them.

- We look at the plants and the animals, but we have entomologists that have looked at this and so they've seen that we end up with lower horn fly numbers on animals that are on a patch burning system.

We also end up with lower tick loads because the animals are grazing in an area that's had a burn.

And so the vegetation is short and the ticks, that's not a preferred habitat for ticks because they, there's not enough tall grass - While fire is always a topic of interest at events like this, Dr. Goodman says, showing the impacts of goats have on the land stirred up a lot of interest.

- So as it resprout the goats eat everything as they resprout.

So it keeps it short.

Folks, were also just wondering about the, the management for the goats.

What type of fencing, what are we doing for predators?

And so we have guard dogs that we graze that we have out with our goats, while they're grazing - For more information about this event or woody plant control methods, just visit sunup.

OKstate.edu from Payne County.

I'm Kurtis Hair.

- Our very own Dr. Daryl Peele works with people all over the US and in other countries and he recently caught up with his colleague Dr. Kenny Burdine from the University of Kentucky while Kenny was in town for a few days.

So today Dr. Peele is taking over the interview duties for a few minutes at least.

- I'm Darryl Peele.

Welcome to Livestock Marketing.

We we're doing things a little bit different today.

We have a, a special guest with us.

So joining me now is, is Dr. Kenny Burdine from the University of Kentucky.

My counterpart there.

Welcome to Oklahoma.

- Thanks.

Good to be here.

- Yeah, it's great to have you here.

We had the Rural Economic Conference and you were a keynote speaker at that.

Tell us a little bit about what you talked about at that conference.

Be - Glad to.

So we talked about the mechanics of how it worked, went through some scenarios, but then I also had to talk a little bit about how it fits into the, you know, greater, greater risk management plan.

So, you know, how can it be used with other strategies, what are some strengths and weaknesses and then just kinda some best practices for risk management programs involving something like LRP insurance.

- So how's your cattle market run, your calf market run been this fall - Been been spread out where it had been dry in early, you know, early, early fall.

So saw quite a few run in September.

Things had slowed down a week or two, but I noticed this past week the run was pretty big.

So I, I feel like we've seen a lot of that run.

Probably the next two or three weeks will be big and then I feel like most of our calves will probably move by that point, which is fairly normal for us.

- Right.

Again, here in Oklahoma we've had big runs the last couple weeks a little bit, you know, bigger year over year a little bit, maybe a little bit ahead of schedule for us.

And so I think the dry conditions here is probably forcing some cattle to move and yet despite that, these calf prices have remained awful strong, haven't they?

- They have.

You know, we, we saw, we saw a pullback from I guess late July to maybe about three weeks from, from late July to maybe late September, saw something similar in 2023 actually from like September to November.

- Right.

- But the bounce was more, was the bounce was encouraging this year and you know, the last few weeks, basically from the end of September to about mid-October, things have improved.

- You know, we normally would still be moving to a, a seasonal low for these calf prices in late October, early November.

We've actually been moving counter seasonally higher despite the fact that we don't have any stocker demand really because of the, the drought conditions here.

So I, you know, that's a good sign.

I think these markets are fundamentally strong and, and even though we're seeing somewhat bigger runs, it's a timing issue more than anything.

There's not more cattle out there, there's less cattle.

And so, so you know, what are your, what are your expectations for your cow herd in that part of the country maybe this next year?

- You know, de despite the fact that calf prices have been high, you know, so have cull cow prices and I think the fact that heifer values are so high, you know, at the weaning level, there's not been a lot of interest in retention.

And I, and I think that's been the case in a lot of states, but that's true in Kentucky too.

The other thing that's a little bit unique about us, and this is, you know, become a, it's, it's become more of an issue the last really several years, you maybe even like 10, we have lost a lot of pasture ground to row crop.

- Yeah.

- So it constrains us a little bit.

I'm not saying we can't add cows, but we've got probably a little bit more constraint than some parts of the country because of that.

- Right.

Yeah, well it certainly, there doesn't seem to be a lot of appetite for heifer retention and then when you add on the drought threats and the sort of reemerging drought conditions just really doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in that, in this part of the world and I think nationally as well.

So, you know, I'm expecting to see a lower beef cow herd this next January.

I think we've gotten smaller this year and, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna see higher prices going forward into 2025.

So we're in a very unique situation going forward.

But anyway, it's great to have you here and have a chance to visit with you in Oklahoma.

- Thanks for the invite.

I enjoyed it.

- Alright, thank you very much.

We'll see you next time on Livestock Marketing.

- Hello and welcome to the Market Monitor.

I'm John Michael Riley, ag economist with Oklahoma State University.

We're at that time of year where, you know, most of the summer crop is, is being harvested and we're in the midst of planting with our, with our winter wheat.

So we'll start here, there with winter wheat looking at, at planting across the us 73% of the crop is in the ground.

That's really on pace with where we're normally at at this time of year in Oklahoma, a bit of a different story, 51%, or excuse me, 55% of the crop is planted and that's behind schedule.

Obviously that has a lot to do with, with our weather conditions here in the state.

Still still dealing with, with continuing drought conditions and I think it's most likely got some producers a little bit hesitant to, to put the crop into the ground until there's a little bit more knowledge about what the, what the weather conditions are gonna be moving forward.

Understandably so, prices for wheat have been on the decline over the past couple of weeks.

We started October really strong.

Really if you look at from, from late August until the 1st of October, prices had been improved about 90, 90 cents a bushel.

And since, since the start of the month, we've dropped about 40 cents off of that price at the futures market basis.

Levels across the state for, for wheat right now are pretty much on par.

We, where they are normally at this time of year in the eastern part of the state, about 50 cents behind the futures market, western part of the state, 60 to 90, 90 cents behind the futures market as it looks across across Oklahoma for our wheat crop.

Moving to the summer crops, we're looking at, at, at, you know, similar story.

Prices have declined since the start of the month.

Soybeans picked up about a dollar and 15 cents from late August until the first of the month.

And since that time we've dropped about 90 cents off of soybean prices.

A lot of that has to do with pressures on, on US crop conditions and US harvest.

So 81% of the soybean crop is harvested.

That's well above average for, for this time of year.

And you know, for the most part, that's putting a lot of pressure on prices.

Looking at the most recent crop production report, US yield, excuse me, Oklahoma yield of 25 bushels an acre.

That's about where we were at this time last year.

Moving on to corn, similar story as it was with soybeans, but seeing some pressure here since the start of the month, corn had picked up 50 cents a, a, a bushel from late August to the first of the month and then dropping about half of that over the last couple of weeks.

65% of the US corn has been harvested above, above schedule, much like soybeans.

And then wrapping up with cotton.

Cotton has is 44% harvested across the US That's a a little bit ahead of schedule from, from where we're normally at this time of year here in Oklahoma, a 442 pound an acre yield estimate in that's most recent crop report in mid-October.

That's off pace from where we're at a year ago with a 5.60 pounds per acre yield here in the state.

Cotton prices on the futures market about 72 cents a pound.

And that similar story to our, to our other summer crops.

Picked up some steam from late August to to October one, about 8 cents a pound.

Since then, we've dropped about two and a half cents a pound.

Well, that's a quick recap of what's going on in our summer and winter crops.

Look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks.

- On September 30th, the 2018 Farm Bill extension expired.

So that means currently there are farm bill programs that don't have authorizations that are available right now.

Usually in October you start getting some notifications about programs that can be signed up for.

You're not gonna get those right now.

So as we wait to see the outcome of the election and whether or not we get a farm bill in this lame duck session of Congress, we'll all be watching to see timelines and when these new deadlines occur.

So keep an eye out on Sunup for more information.

- Good morning, Oklahoma and welcome to Cow-Calf Corner.

This week's topic is estimating our hay needs for the rest of the winter.

I know a lot of Oklahoma cow calf operations, we've already found ourself in the situation where we're feeding hay.

We've been dealing with some dry weather.

The good news story is that hay inventories are pretty adequate.

It looks like at this point we've even got some carryover hay from last year.

But it is the point in time to be securing that hay supply for the winter.

And what we're gonna work through today can help us to know if we've got adequate hay inventory or if we need to be contracting for more to get our cows on through.

There's three things fundamentally that we need to know in order to make this estimate.

One, what is the average mature cow weight in our herd?

We're gonna learn that from weighing our four to 7-year-old cows.

Whenever we wean calves off of them, that's gonna give us an adequate representation of the cows from two to 12 across the herd.

And from that average weight, we can make a good estimate of how much hay a cow needs to consume each day or how much she's gonna need to consume over time.

Along with that, we want to estimate or not estimate, but actually get an inventory of the amount of cows that we're gonna be taking through the winter.

And the third thing we need to know what is our expected duration of time that we're gonna be feeding hay.

Like I said, a lot of operations are already on hay.

I know we are at my house, so we're just gonna take a look at this over the next 200 days as we go from say mid-October, well into the month of May, a 1400 pound cow herd and a hundred such cows to work to an example of what we actually need.

So at 36.4 pounds of hay a day, a hundred cows are gonna consume about 3,640 pounds of hay.

Now, along with that, we need to take into account all of each bale is not gonna be consumed.

Cows are gonna waste or lay on a good percentage of that hay and all of each bale is not gonna be totally good.

We're gonna deal with some spoilage in those bales.

The good news story, if we're talking about hay that got bailed in the summer of 2024, because of our drought, we're not gonna see as much spoilage in those bales.

If we're going back to feeding hay from the summer of 23, we're probably dealing with a healthier amount of spoilage.

But for the sake of our example, we're gonna bump up by 10%, that 3,640 pounds of hay we need on a daily basis to take that up to around a ton per, excuse me, 4,000 pounds or two tons a day that we know we're gonna need to feed those cows.

So if we need 4,000 pounds of hay a day, we're gonna be feeding that hay for 200 days.

That's 800,000 pounds of forage dry matter we're gonna need from now until next may.

If we put that on a ton basis, that's 400 tons of hay that we're gonna need to feed.

Now I encourage producers, if possible buy hay, buy the ton, and that leads to a little less error in these calculations.

If you're buying hay by the bale, we need an accurate representation of what each of those bales actually weigh, and a good estimation of how much spoilage there is in each bale, which we'll get a feel for once we actually start to feed the hay.

So we know that stage of gestation wet cows are dry cows and weather is gonna impact the daily nutritional needs of a cow herd.

So along with this forage dry matter requirement that we think about on a daily basis, we're gonna have to add some supplemental feed in to accommodate weather stage of gestation.

And we know those cows are gonna need more energy, particularly more protein, once they actually calve at some point later in the spring.

And that's another layer to this management mix that we've gotta add in at some point along the way.

So estimate your hay needs, think about the amount of time you're gonna be feeding hay.

I know it's a tough time in Oklahoma right now, but it sounds like there's still a lot of hay in the country.

Be securing that hay supply and get ahead of the management curve.

I hope this helps and thanks for joining us on Cow-Calf Corner.

- Finally, today we learn what makes Dr. Ron Elliot a 2024 OSU Agriculture champion.

Video Production Manager, Craig Woods brings us this story.

- Few OSU professors can say their work impacted virtually every ag producer in the state as well as saving lives.

But Dr. Ron Elliot can.

- Probably, as a junior in high school, I had already figured out what I wanted my major to be.

I liked math and science and, and I liked ag background, so I put those together.

- Ron Elliot received his bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.

- I decided that when I was in my master's program, I thought it looks kind of cool to be a faculty member.

I, I think I'd enjoy that.

And being with the students all the time, I was getting near the completion of my PhD.

So I, I went on interviews and I interviewed four different places.

The first one was Oklahoma State.

It turned out to be my, my winner.

I felt like there were great opportunities here.

It just felt like a good fit.

And I focused primarily on irrigation topics and specifically crop water use rates.

How much water do plants need, how often should you irrigate and things like that.

- Dr. Elliot was frustrated by the lack of accurate and timely temperature and rainfall data within the state.

He began to think of a better way to help Oklahoma producers - At the same time.

There was a group in Norman National Weather Service and other federal employees along with the University of Oklahoma meteorologists that had the idea of a statewide network, primarily in response to some floods in Tulsa, some severe flooding there.

- Working with Governor Henry Belman.

That group created the Oklahoma Mesonet, which is considered the gold standard in weather monitoring across the nation.

- Mesonet is an automated weather system for the state of Oklahoma.

We've been operating for over 30 years, collecting real-time weather information out in the field from every county in the state.

- We're the only weather network for the whole country that is a joint operation between the two state universities.

That partnership has allowed us to combine the weather expertise from the University of Oklahoma with the agricultural expertise from Oklahoma State University.

- In honor of his work, the Mesonet dedicated a demonstration site at the Botanic Garden at OSU to Dr. Elliot.

And together with his irrigation research, he's been involved in more than 167 published scientific works.

The American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers made Dr. Elliot a fellow in 2002, and he received the John Deere Gold Medal Award back in 2011.

However, Dr. Elliot's commitment to his department and the university was not limited to his teaching and research.

- I started to think maybe I could make a bigger impact in administration and I found that I took enjoyment out of the success of others.

And I thought in a department head role, I could help facilitate that success of students, faculty, staff.

And I guess the clincher on it was my colleagues asked me to apply my fellow faculty members.

So it, I took the plunge.

- Dr. Elliot started in 2001 and remained department head until his retirement in 2010.

During his time, he more than tripled the total number of student scholarships per year.

Dr. Elliot returned to administration for a few years by serving his interim department head for horticulture and landscape architecture.

- He did such a good job that we just couldn't keep him away and ask him to come back and be the head of horticulture and landscape architecture.

And that's pretty unique.

You don't see many individuals that have the skillset not to be much less, to be the head of one department, but to come back and be the head in entirely different department in a different discipline.

And I think it really speaks to Ron's unique talents and skills as a leader and as an administrator.

- He and his wife have also established the Ron and Judith Elliot Endowed scholarship.

- Well, we saw firsthand the, the students that we had in the department and, and felt a, a sense of ownership, I guess, in the department and, and wanted to, to continue to succeed.

And we just thought it was a, a good way of, like I said, before, investing in the future, but really a lot of others donated to it.

And, and that humbled us a great deal.

So the principle and the scholarship is not just money from our family, it's, it's a lot of different donors and that was really gratifying.

- I think Ron is is highly deservative of any kind of appreciative award he gets with all of the hard work all of the years he put into to OSU, the Mesonet program.

Irrigation and other aspects.

Well deserved award for Ron, - Celebrating Ron Elliot 2024 Champion for OSU Agriculture.

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

A reminder, you can see sunup anytime on our website and also follow us on YouTube and our social media and stream us anytime at youtube.com/sunup tv.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

Have a great week everyone.

And remember, Oklahoma Agriculture starts at Sunup.