(upbeat music) - Hello everyone, and welcome to SUNUP.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

This week, the governor signed an executive order to establish an emergency drought commission in Oklahoma to support those affected by persistent drought in all 77 counties.

We also have updated information about the USDA's drought assistance programs.

For some guidance, here's SUNUP's Kurtis Hair and Dr. Amy Hagerman.

- Well, moisture did come to some parts of the state, but drought is persisting for a lot of producers.

So Amy, let's kind of generally talk about some relief programs that are out there for those producers who are dealing with drought.

- So USDA has several programs that are available for different kinds of losses associated with drought.

For example, for our livestock producers that have had to reduce the number of days of grazing or had to supplement with hay, the Livestock Forage Program is available.

The LFP differs based on the type of grass you have on your operation, but then also differs by the county that you're in because it's tied to numbers of weeks in drought and how deep that drought was.

So if you're in western counties in the state that have had multiple weeks of deep drought, there's a different payment rate for those programs than in other parts of the state that have had multiple weeks of drought, but maybe not as intense as some of those other counties.

So, the producers just need to talk to their county FSA office to find out about what that payment rate is for their operation.

The other thing is that a lot of our insurance programs are gonna be really critical documentation right in this period of time.

Document losses quickly, communicate early for those of you that have insurance on operations, and that documentation is going to include not only what you see of the loss, but reporting and having those adjusters come out and document the losses as well to determine what the payment will be.

Again, that documentation is really critical for other reasons as well as we get into tax season, and, you know, USDA has a right, even under self-reporting, to ask for documentation at any time.

So that's really, really important.

Another area that producers can be thinking about is the consequences this is gonna have going into the future.

As you said, we've had some rain in certain parts of the state, but this has certainly affected hay cuttings in the state.

It's also affecting kind of grazing going through even into the further months, and it's affecting soil moisture for crops.

So, already planning ahead for that next crop season for the consequences in 2023 is really important as well.

- And you're also getting some questions related to another program that is, well, related to drought as well, so talk a little bit about that.

- Yeah, so we've gotten a lot of questions about the expansion of the Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees, and Farm-Raised Fish.

It's also called ELAP.

The acronym does not match the name.

But producers are asking about the transportation cost aspect of this program.

ELAP was expanded in recognition of some of the drought disasters that were happening across the country to allow producers to get some offset for the additional transportation cost for bringing in hay this year.

Because drought is so expansive across the country, people are having to go further to get hay.

And it's really costly to do that as you get out to 8 or 900 miles away versus 50 or 60 miles away for your hay sourcing.

What producers will need to report - again, good documentation- is what kind of hauling distance they had last year, how many bales of hay they had to purchase last year, and how that compares to this year.

The county level has a set transportation rate that they're going to use for producers that are eligible for this.

So you'll need to document your transportation rate last year.

They have the transportation rate they're going to use for this year, and they'll use that to estimate what that cost offset is if someone's eligible for the transportation reimbursement program.

- And in just a couple of days, you're actually gonna have a webinar about drought assistance, right?

- Absolutely, we're gonna address some of these very questions.

We're going to have a Mesonet update of drought outlook.

We're going to have some update on hay usage and grazing and strategies to reduce hay needs and supplementation on the operation for livestock producers.

We're also gonna have a market outlook for livestock markets as we're thinking about selling cattle, but then also buying cattle in the not-too-distant future.

And then we're gonna talk about these drought programs and the tax implications.

- Alrighty, thanks Amy.

Dr. Amy Hagerman, Ag Policy Specialist here at Oklahoma State University.

And if you'd like a link to the information about that upcoming webinar, go to our website, sunup.okstate.edu.

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

I'm Wes Lee.

We have shown you week after week just how warm and dry we have been this summer.

- For most of agriculture, this has been devastating.

However, there has been one bright spot, plant disease pressure.

In general, it takes a certain humidity and temperature level for diseases to develop.

This year, it has been mostly too hot and dry for ideal disease conditions.

Mesonet has three disease tools on the website.

One for pecan scab, great black rot, and peanut leaf spot.

Looking at these three tools gives us an overview of the disease pressure.

On this graph for pecan scab at Ardmore, you can see the green line for this year is much lower than the last two years, or the gray 15 year average for peanut leaf spot shown here for Fort Cobb, the green line again is much lower than the other three lines that show the last two years and the long-term average.

Lastly, shown here, is the last five years of great black rot for the Perkins Station.

The disease pressure for 2022, shown in blue, is lower than each of the previous four years.

Expect warm weather to continue for at least a few more days before maybe breaking at the end of the week.

Now, here's Gary with the latest drought map.

- Thanks, Wes, and good morning, everyone.

Well, unfortunately we find ourselves in another bad situation with the drought.

We're back once again, increasing the drought across the state with no improvements as we go through another dry period here in the State of Oklahoma.

Let's get right to that newest drought monitor map and see where we're at.

Unfortunately, we have increases in that exceptional drought, that's that dark red color, that's already existed for the last few weeks in southwestern and parts of the panhandle, but now we have, it started to encroach into Southeastern and East Central Oklahoma.

You see those little splotches there, centered over Centrahoma, and up into the northern parts of that area.

So, again, we have the worst of the drought situation increasing in the state.

I see no areas where drought has decreased.

We didn't recommend any of those decreases, even though we did get just a little bit of rain up in Northwest Oklahoma.

Drought is on the swing upward, again, across the state.

We can, sort of, see that in the consecutive days with less than the quarter inch of rainfall in a single day map from the Mesonet.

Now, some those areas up in the north central and northwestern parts of the state, going on 45 days or more now, without a quarter inch of rain, at least, in a single day, but you see other areas of the state, we're up to five, 10, 15, 20 days without a quarter inch of rain.

So, this is another dry spell, hopefully, not a long one, but we are starting to see that increased day by day.

Areas without significant rainfall.

With each passing day, some of those rains fall off the 30 day rainfall map.

We can see that on the percent of normal rainfall map for the last 30 days from the Mesonet, those oranges, those reds, they are starting to increase across the state.

Now, they cover most of the north central and northwestern part of the state, and now, they extend down into much of east central over into central Oklahoma, as well, and with each passing day, as I said, more of those colors of the blues, the greens, even the yellows are going to start to get into those reds and oranges, meaning increasing drought conditions.

As we look at, for the next three months, unfortunately, the outlook from the Climate Prediction Center is not good.

It shows drought developing or persisting across the entire state, at least through December, so, this covers the October through December timeframe, and their estimation drought is, probably, going to increase.

That's it for this time, and we'll see you next time on "the Mesonet Weather Report."

(upbeat music) - Continuing on the topic of drought, here's Dr. Dave Lalman with ways to save on feed cost, while still maintaining your production goals.

- Feed costs are high this year, but there's still opportunity to grow calves, weaned calves, at home, if you have intention of retaining those calves for 45 60 days, or something like that, but with commodity prices the way they are, even though they're expensive, there is still an opportunity to put a ration together and grow calves at a modest cost.

For example, now, this wouldn't work for everyone, necessarily, because you just about have to be able to handle a semi-load of, whether it be, in this case, we're gonna talk about a ration that's rolled corn.

So, a load of corn, distillers grains, and then some moderate quality hay, but a ration of about 34% hay, 33% dried distillers grains, and 33% rolled corn, which is what this ration is here.

Actually, winds up being a ration that's fairly well balanced for calves weighing around five to 550, and with the anticipation of, if you're not sure if you want those calves to go to wheat pasture, or if they're gonna go on to market after about 60 days, somewhere in that pound and a half to two pounds a day gain target might be optimal.

That way they're still gaining weight at a cost effective cost of feed gain, and so, that might still work for some folks, but that third, third, and a third diet.

- Fed, limit fed to about 12 to 13 pounds to those five and a quarter to five and a half pound growing calves, will get you real close to around two pounds of weight gain per head per day.

So we calculate the cost based on delivery costs here, close to Stillwater, Oklahoma, of those two commodities.

And then I think we priced the hay in that ration at $125 a ton.

The cost of gain was 88 cents a pound.

So that might work for some folks, obviously not everyone's got the storage capacity and the feeding equipment and so on that you'd need to have to make a program like that work.

The other option that would be available to some people would be to put the hay in a drylot pen, have adequate hay feeder space for the set of calves, open the gate and let the calves in there to consume hay for about an hour, push the calves out, shut the gate and then feed the concentrate portion of that ration somewhere out in the pasture in lined up feed bunks or something like that.

So if you don't have the opportunity to blend hay in the ration, that'd be one way to get that done and still drastically limit the utilization rate of the hay and get those calves to gain efficiently.

Hopefully that would work for some folks that wanna add some value to their calves after weaning.

(upbeat country music) - With us now is Derrell Peel.

Derrell, how are the livestock markets looking right now?

- You know, markets are holding up very well this fall.

Feeder cattle markets are quite strong, we're running about 15 to 16% above a year ago, across the board, from lightweight feeder cattle all the way through the heavyweight feeder cattle.

And of course, fed cattle markets have been holding pretty steady, too.

This is normally, for fed cattle markets, about the seasonal low of the year and obviously we've got some stronger underlying trends that are helping support these markets.

The feeder cattle markets, the calves may come under a little bit of seasonal pressure here in the next month, but it's actually looking like we may not see too much of that seasonal pressure this fall.

- Well, obviously, you know, we've been in a drought and so typically this time of year, we're talking about wheat pastures in September.

Is there anything to talk about right now?

- Well, it's quite spotty.

Obviously we do have a lot of dry conditions.

USDA's crop progress, the latest one shows that we are planting some wheat in Oklahoma.

In fact, we're a little bit ahead of schedule.

It's just getting started and I don't know how much of that is producers dusting it in, if you will, hoping for a rain.

There's a few spots that do have some moisture, so obviously there's some interest in that.

And you know, we're not sure this year whether we're gonna use wheat pasture for stocker cattle, like we normally do, we're short on feed in a lot of cases.

So we may be interested in using wheat pasture for cows and calves as much as anything this year.

So it's a little uncertain right now in terms of what we'll see for wheat pasture, but there's certainly some interest in it.

- So if we have winter grazing, what do the budgets look like for that?

- If there is a possibility of doing some stalker, winter stalkers this year, the budgets actually look pretty attractive right now.

The way the feeder cattle markets prices are from lightweight to heavyweight, the value of gain right now looks pretty good.

If you look at the futures market for feeder cattle out into the spring and into next year, there's an up trend in there.

There's actually a significant premium built in there.

So you could lock in an even better value of gain, if you will, at this point in time.

So if we can do it, the budgets look pretty attractive right now.

- So what can we expect to see with the markets in the next few weeks?

- Well, again, we've got kind of competing forces, if you will.

Normally we see a fall run of calves, that puts pressure on the market, especially for the lightweight feeder cattle and we'll have some fall run, but we know that the runs this summer have been bigger than usual in terms of volume of feeder cattle through auctions.

So there may be a little bit less of that fall run than normal.

At the same time, we also count on having things like wheat pasture in the fall to generate demand for feeder cattle.

We may or may not have that this year.

So it's a little bit uncertain, but underneath it all, again, there's this general trend of stronger prices because cattle numbers are working their way tighter and tighter and so there's probably gonna be, generally pretty good support for feeder cattle prices over the next few weeks.

- Well, thank you, Derrell.

And we'll be sure to keep an eye on those markets.

(upbeat country music) (guitar strums) - Dr. Kim Anderson, our crop marketing specialist is here.

Now, Kim, the latest WASDE Report came out this week.

Did you see any surprises?

- I don't think there was any surprise in it.

You look at ending stocks to summarize everything.

Wheat at 610 million bushels, same as it was last month, so no changes in the wheat at all.

You look at corn, came in at 1.22 billion bushels.

Last month, it was 1.39 billion.

The five-year average is 1.5, so tight the corn stocks.

But again, with expectations, soybeans, 200 million bushels.

That's down from 240 million.

Last year, the average is about 500 million bushels.

So tight soybean stocks.

Cotton, 2.7 million bales.

It was 3.8 million last year.

So cotton is also tightening up.

Now, you look at the world situation.

9.9 billion bushels for wheat.

That's the lowest since 2015.

Corn at 46.2 billion bushels, down from 48 billion last year.

Soybean six, 3.6 billion bushels, a 3.7 billion average.

And cotton at 84.8 million bales.

And that's down, the lowest since 2019.

- As you were taking a look at this, kind of what aspects stood out for you?

- Well, if you look at the numbers, I think they're near expectation, and we've got tight stocks nearly on every commodity.

Also you look at Australia.

If they're fixing to harvest the second largest crop ever, and Canada is fixing to harvest the third largest crop ever, but that's already factored in the market.

I think what we don't see is the uncertainty in the market caused mostly by Russia and Ukraine and the war, the uncertainty of supply, the uncertainty of demand, you know.

With supply, you just don't know how much is gonna be produced in Ukraine and Russia and how much can get on the market.

Demand, you don't know if the importing countries are gonna continue to make, to maintain higher stocks.

And then, of course, there's disruptions in the transportation system that we could see.

- Obviously, input costs are part of this conversation as always.

What are you seeing there?

- Well, nitrogen prices were coming down a little bit, but you look again, go to that Russia-Ukraine War, Russia is cutting off the natural gas to Europe.

It's impacting their nitrogen fertilizer productions.

And I think those prices are coming up.

I think we're gonna see our chemical, our fertilizer prices stay relatively high.

Fuel prices are down, and that's a good thing, but they're still 25% higher than last year.

- Where are prices now?

- Well, if you look at wheat, they've been moving sideways.

We did get a little rally about 50 cents this last week.

They got up to $9.05, leveling out, backing off there a little bit.

You can go to corn.

You know, corn had been on a tear.

We had about $2.10 price increase in corn.

Looks like it peaked out.

It got up to, oh, about 7.65, something like that.

Backed off a little bit later in the week.

And then, sorghum $6.90, significantly less than corn.

Soybeans, we had an 80 cent increase in soybean prices early this week.

However, at the end of the week, it looked like it was trying to back off a little bit.

Got up around $14.40, came back down to around $14.

Cotton has just been sideways on that ICE December contract at a dollar and 2 cents, so not much happening there.

- What kind of guidance then do you have for producers amid all this uncertainty?

- You just don't know what can happen to prices.

So don't try to capture it all at once.

Just stagger it into the market dollar cost averaging.

- Okay, Kim, thanks a lot.

We'll see you next week.

(easygoing country music) - Good morning, Oklahoma.

Welcome to Cow-Calf Corner.

This week's topic is about getting a feed analysis report on your hay, and we all know what we're going through this summer in Oklahoma, the flash drought that started in June really abruptly shut off our forage growth, and a lot of us are struggling to secure that hay supply as we think about the onset of winter just a few months down the road.

At this point, we know that we are not only in a drought ourselves, but most of our surrounding states are way down on hay inventories because of persistent drought.

And so, it can come as a relief to find somebody that says they've got hay to sell you, and yet, it is a really good idea to ask for that analysis of the content of that hay before you actually purchase it.

But what can you learn from a feed analysis report?

Well, you're gonna be able to get back information on the dry matter content of your hay, the crude protein content of the hay, the energy level that's in the hay, the simplest form and way to look at that is a total digestible nutrients or TDN content.

We can also see information come back on net energy for maintenance, net energy for gain, and net energy for lactation if we wanna look at more precise estimates of energy content.

And we can get just a relative feed value of that hay as well.

We're standing in a hay barn here this morning, and it's a good example.

We could go look at a couple bales of hay, crack 'em open, and actually find hay that has been put in this barn over the past few years.

It may appear very similar to the naked eye.

- Something like Bermudagrass hay, we may look at two big bales.

They appear to be very similar.

We may find that they vary a great deal as far as crude protein content and energy content.

If we've got that information, say on two potential sources of Bermudagrass hay, it's priced the same, we may find one is 15 to 20% crude protein, maybe total digestible nutrient values of 60, and another one that appears the same maybe at 5 to 7% crude protein content and be down around 50 to 55% TDN.

It helps us to make a more informed purchase if we've got that feed analysis report.

I think you're gonna find most of your better hay vendors are gonna provide that information.

So you can take that into account and making hay purchases.

The other thing in a year like this where we're gonna see some failed, say corn or milo crops that got turned into hay, it's a good idea to get that nitrate test.

Various nitrate levels leading to nitrate toxicity can cause us a variety of issues.

When we start feeding those to beef cattle, particularly pregnant cows, we may get to a level of nitrates that are high enough to actually cause abortions.

We may get all the way up to levels that can cause death in some extreme cases.

But it's a very good idea to get that nitrate test back and take a look at the nitrate content of those hays before you actually make that purchase.

And our nitrate toxicity fact sheet actually is a little more informative of what we can do if we've got some of that hay on hand or potentially purchase it.

So just some ideas to keep in mind.

By getting a feed analysis report of our hay, whether it's already on hand or we're purchasing, it helps us to plan so that we end up with maximum livestock productivity out of our feeding program so we can feed accordingly.

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

(gentle instrumental music) - Finally today, late summer and early fall is always a special time in Oklahoma because it's fair season.

This week, Seth Fish takes us to Cleveland County for the sites and sounds of the fair.

(upbeat instrumental music) - We are here at the Cleveland County Fairgrounds at the first sort of big day of the Cleveland County Fair.

We have, of course behind me, the carnival, which is open today and tomorrow.

We have our livestock shows, our youth livestock shows, which happen Saturday and Sunday as well as a lot of fun events like wiener dog racing, arm wrestling, tractor pools.

We also have our exhibit hall, which is where members from the community create crafts and they grow fruits and vegetables and bake pies and cookies and things like that for some friendly competition to be judged.

And so that's always a great thing to check out and see what the community has come up with this year.

- Right now we're in the exhibit hall and this is the OHCE area, the exhibits.

So all around us, we have where the different OHCE groups have set up their individual exhibits.

And we have eight different groups, OHCE groups, in Cleveland county.

And OHCE is the Oklahoma Home and Community Education groups.

They're all volunteers.

Over in the back of the room, we have their country store.

So at the fair, they set up a table where they sell different products that they've made and donated.

And then the money from that goes towards scholarships for high school seniors.

Then we have an Indian taco kitchen that's in the corner.

And it's the same thing.

They come and they volunteer their time and they sell the food then the money goes towards scholarships.

- We are in the the ag barn at the Cleveland County Fairgrounds.

We're actually right in the middle of the dairy goat show.

If I can get out of the office for a little bit, I love coming to the show.

I really hope to see the dairy cattle show.

That is my background, is in dairy.

So I always love seeing the dairy cattle.

And this is, just in general, it's a great opportunity for the public to see agriculture.

They're not really gonna get a opportunity to really get a peak at what we do and what these kids are working so hard on.

It's of cultural importance, tradition, also for the industries that these kids will actually end up going back into.

So there's all kinds of different skills that these types of of activities and these types of hobbies and these types of interest actually improve our children and the next generation.

So it's a wonderful experience.

(gentle instrumental music) - That'll do it for us this week.

Remember you can see us anytime on our website and also follow us on YouTube and social media.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

Have a great week everyone.

And remember, Oklahoma agriculture starts at "SUNUP."

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