- Hello everyone and welcome to Sunup.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

When it comes to crops, we often talk about what's going on above the ground, from the weather to insects, stages of plant development, grazing, just to name a few.

But today we're spending some time talking about what happens below the surface when it comes to your soil health.

OSU Extension's, new soil and water conservation specialist, Dr. Daniel Adamson gives sun ups Kurtis Hair.

A quick tutorial.

- Well, we're here on this cold morning with our new OSU Extension Soil and Water Conservation Specialist, Dr. Daniel Adamson.

And Daniel first before you start jumping into what you have here.

Yeah, tell us a little bit about - Yourself.

Well, thanks Curtis.

I'm glad to be here.

So I'm Daniel Adamson.

I just joined Oklahoma State University this last September.

I'm from Wyoming.

I did my PhD there.

I have a background in agronomy.

I was a certified crop advisor in Wyoming and Northern Colorado for about four years.

I definitely have a love for soils and a love for extension.

So I'm enjoying my new role.

- So is extension what brought you here?

- Extension is what brought me here.

I, I grew up on a ranch and there's always need for more and better information for producers.

Right.

So that communication is really important to me when I was an agronomist, there's just always a need to for us to understand better what's going on in people's operations.

So the chance to mesh that with an opportunity to do research, to answer really important questions for people is what my aspirations were.

So I'm happy to be here and have a chance to work on that.

- Well, we're really glad to have you here and I'm sure the producers are gonna be glad to have you here in the state as well, because it's been a little bit since we've had this position.

Sure.

You know, active as an active role in extension.

- Yeah.

Something that I think is really great is, what I have felt so far is that Oklahomans naturally have a really good sense for what soil conservation is, right?

Because the state has experienced a lot of the ramifications in its history Yep.

For not taking care of its soils.

So I think people are really sensitive to that and they want to take good care of their soils.

So moving forward and understanding kind of what soil health is and what regenerative agriculture is and how those things mesh with practical management or some things I'd like to work on and focus on while I'm here.

- Yeah.

Well let's just dive right in.

You actually have some samples here to kind of show just I do some producers just to see what they actually have out in the field.

Right.

- So number number one thing about soil science right, is what is your soil's texture.

So remember texture is the proportion of sand, silt, and clay particles that are in the soil.

Yeah.

So sand are the big ones, right?

The ones that have the bigger grain sizes Yeah.

That we can really feel and that we sense and clay is microscopic, but it really drives like how sticky the soil is, or it's water holding capacity or nutrient holding capacity.

Right.

Yeah.

So sometimes you say, oh, I have a silt loam, or I'm farming in a heavy clay.

Right.

And you can do a formal test of that, but even simpler is you can just do it by feel.

Right.

So there's a process that we can do by fuel.

So we can try that today.

So I have some samples here, but you know.

Yeah.

Nice warm winter day like today.

Might as well get our hands even more colder.

Exactly.

Get your hands colder.

Yeah, let's do it.

You know, get out in the field, grab some soil.

Okay.

Wet it up until it feels kinda like Play-Doh.

Yeah.

So I've done that already.

So this is a very clay soil.

Okay.

And what you wanna do after it feels like Play-Doh, it's nice and plastic and malleable.

Yeah.

Grab about a ping pong sized ball of that.

- Yeah.

- And just feel it.

- Okay.

- So step one in this process is a, does the soil actually hold together and form a ball?

- Yeah.

- So clay obviously does, right, right.

So inherently we know that we can, we can form clay and it's very malleable.

Right.

So, you know, in the field this is it.

It makes, you know, farming in this difficult obviously - Right.

- But it does hold a tremendous amount of water and it does hold a lot of nutrients.

So that's the benefits of having some clay in your soil.

Yeah.

But what we wanna do is we wanna start squeezing it between our thumb and our forefinger and make it flat.

It's called making a ribbon.

Perfect.

Now clay obviously is very strong, so it makes a very strong ribbon and it holds itself together well.

- Yeah.

- So if a soil holds itself together more than two inches like this, that's the determination that it's a clay.

- Oh, - Okay.

So t we go.

Right.

Just feel like you're in kindergarten again - Making Right.

Exactly.

I'm, I'm having a - Good, that's a true clay.

Okay, let's take a step to the other end of the spectrum.

Right.

As a true sand.

Right.

So it's those big coarse particles.

Right.

So this is moist, but you'll notice it.

It doesn't hold together at all.

Right?

Yeah, not at all.

Yep.

So if it doesn't hold together at all, it's a sand.

Right?

Okay.

Obviously sandy soils have problems on the other end of the spectrum.

They have poor water holding capacity and poor nutrient holding capacity.

So what does it mean?

Like everybody says, oh, I want a good silt loam or a loam.

Right.

What does that mean?

It means there's a nice kind of an even mixture of the, the sand silt and clay particles.

So it gives you better workability, right?

But you don't sacrifice good water and nutrient holding capacity as well.

So tell me what you feel in that one specifically compared to the clay that we looked at first.

How, how does - It Well, it's compare, it's definitely breaking apart, - Right?

It's more like fryable, - Right?

Yeah.

- And malleable.

But it holds together still.

Yeah.

Right.

So next is try to make that ribbon.

Okay.

You can already see it's just crumbling and it it, it doesn't really want to make a strong ribbon.

Nope.

So the determination of the loams are the ribbon tends to break off in chunks less than an inch.

So here's a a nice example Yeah.

Of one that's broken off in, in about a chunk that's less than an inch.

So that tells you you have a loamy soil.

Oh, okay.

Now you can have soils in the clay loam type area.

So it's kind of a mixture of a loam and a clay.

Those ones break off in inches in bands between one and two inches.

Okay.

So it's moderate between that clay and that loam field.

Right.

We have a lot of loams clay loams in Oklahoma as well.

Okay.

So obviously good deep soils that hold a lot of water help us in our dry land ag.

So if folks wanna take a minute and just go out and see what they have and what of in the backyard, great.

You know, you know what time of year right now, you know the ground's really, really hard.

The soil's really is frozen.

We don't wanna do that.

You can't, can't get the process done.

But for me, even as a soil scientist, I feel like I'm much too lazy about doing this.

I should always do it more than I do.

Right.

I think that's how everything is, everybody.

So when you're just kicking around the field, if you got your water bottle or if it just rained, just grab some soil, pick it up and feel it.

And texture changes across the field.

Right.

- So - You probably know why does this part of my field always perform poorly?

Do a little hand texture.

It might be sandier there, right?

- Yeah.

- And also note that the texture changes as you move down the soil profile with depth too.

So there's a lot of power in digging a hole.

- Yeah.

- So it's good to have as much information as you can.

And when in doubt if you don't feel like you're strong at texturing and you're a little confused, there's a lot of good resources.

The NRCS soil web survey is an online resource you can look at in the local county extension office.

Exactly.

- Yeah.

Alright, thanks Daniel.

Daniel Adamson, OSU Extension Soil water Conservation Specialist here at Oklahoma State University.

- Now to our naturally speaking segment, here's our longtime OSU extension aquaculture specialist Marley Beam with Sunup's, Elizabeth Hokit.

- We're here now with our OSU extension aquaculture Specialist Dr. Marley Beam.

So Marley, we're doing something a little bit different today than the normal naturally speaking, because you are retiring.

So tell us a little bit about your retirement plans.

- Plan to slow down, spend more time with my grandchild in Atlanta.

Do a little more work with my public speaking club Stillwater speakers, a little writing and just maybe spend a little more time outdoors than I've been able to during my busy career years.

- So Marley, how long have you been working for OSU?

It's been a while, hasn't it?

- It's been 36 or so years that I've been here.

I started off in Ada, worked my way up to campus about 20 years ago and throughout, it's been a pleasure working with people in the Cooperative Extension Service serving the people of this great state.

People are welcoming and receptive and appreciative and that makes for a great experience to have great clientele to work with.

- It does.

So what's one of your favorite projects that you've been able to work on while you were at OSU?

- I've certainly enjoyed the stream trailer.

It is a, and and working with the 4H folks around the state.

It's a aesthetically pleasing and highly engaging educational tool to help people understand the importance of protecting streamside vegetation in order to prevent some serious bank erosion.

- Yeah, that was a really cool, and I got to experience that firsthand at one of the 4H events I went to, so that was really cool to be able to see.

So going into your retirement since this's the last time you're gonna be on Sunup, do you have any last minute advice for, for landowners that are dealing with winter ponds?

- The big warning and advice on ponds, even though I say it every year, is to do everything you can to keep, do people pets and livestock off of the ice.

It's a real hazard.

Our ice just doesn't get thick enough here to ever be safe and it would be a, a terrible situation to lose somebody through the ice.

And every year or so we do do have that sad occurrence happening.

So keep an eye on those kids and, and everything else that might be at risk.

- Yeah.

All right.

Well thank you for the advice, Marley.

We'll hope to see you around in the future and good luck.

- Thank you.

- Good morning everyone.

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

Now I'm filming this on Wednesday, so if it hasn't rained over the last few days, then something's gone terribly wrong.

Wouldn't be shock since it is Oklahoma.

But I do have faith that we did actually get some rain over the last few days.

So keep that in mind as we talk here.

Now we're gonna start with the US drought monitor report as usual.

And as we can see still the same basic colors on the map down in south central, southwest Oklahoma.

Some dry areas also up in north central and Northeast Oklahoma.

But again, still less than 10% of the state in drought.

We do have 26% of the state, at least in abnormally dry conditions.

But nothing to worry about just yet because we are in the driest part of the year.

So hopefully this map has reset, but it did get up over 70 days without at least a quarter inch of rainfall in a single day over much of the northwestern half of the state.

And it was getting up to over two weeks down across the southeastern half of the state.

So we certainly needed this dry spell to end and end in a hurry.

How's the winter been so far?

It seemed like a wet winter, and that's really because of November.

It was the wettest November on record, but winter in Oklahoma, climatologically speaking, we're talking about December through February or January rather, and it was actually pretty dry.

If you look at this table for the nine sections of the state, we do see the panhandle region there at the 10th driest winter on record.

And this goes back to 1921.

They were about an inch below normal on average, and you get down there to southwest Oklahoma, you can see they had their eighth driest winter on record.

Oh, close to two inches below normal.

Now southeast Oklahoma, they were at least above normal and had their 34th wettest winter on record.

So those folks are certainly not in danger of being in drought anytime soon.

And of course, as you average it over the state as a whole, about two inches across the state, about an inch and a third below normal, that was the 29th driest winter on record for those folks.

Let's take a look at those Winter rainfall amounts from the Oklahoma mes net we see up there in the panhandle, in some cases in 10th of an inch, less than a quarter inch, it gets a little bit better in central Oklahoma, still not great about an inch to two inches.

And then we get down there into far southeast Oklahoma where it ramps up to over 10 inches.

But by and large must most of the state was actually pretty darn dry.

Take a look at the departure from normal rainfall for that timeframe.

Again, this goes back to December 1st, the start of climatological winter.

We do see deficits across the state of one to two inches, getting a little bit up there, close to three inches over there in Northeastern and east central Oklahoma.

Now again, southwest or southeast Oklahoma rather up above two inches above normal.

So not bad for that part of the state, but the rest of the state pretty darn dry.

It is the driest time of the year, as I've said many times during the cool season.

So how do those deficits stack up at least percentage wise, relative to what we would expect for this time of the year?

Again, going back to December 1st, till much of that southwestern area of the state, less than a 25% of normal and much of the northwestern or western half of the state, less than 50% of normal, and in most cases, less than 25% of normal.

Again, southwest, southeast Oklahoma rather the best shape of all the state above a hundred percent above normal.

So good, good, good fortunes for those folks.

But the rest of the state, I hope that we've alleviated this to a large degree over the last few days.

Okay, now it's no kidding around time.

If we didn't get rain and if we didn't get enough over across parts of West central, southwest Oklahoma, we are going to see drought start to flourish once again.

So hopefully we're in better shape.

We do need to keep our eye out on February as we start to get dry cold fronts, we're gonna start worrying about fire danger, of course.

We'll keep an eye on that for you.

That's it for this time.

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

- We are joined now by our Ag economist, Dr. John Michael Riley, and John Michael.

This past week we saw prices jump possibly with the change in the administration.

Lots of lots of big news for sure.

- Certainly we've got the new administration in place now and a lot of executive orders came through on, on that, that initial day.

And since then.

And we saw our crop prices really jump on the following day, obviously, that that inauguration day was a holiday.

So the, the next trading day prices on the futures market jumped and that flowed into cash markets.

In fact, as the futures market went up, our cash markets here in Oklahoma went up about the same amount.

And then it since then has fallen off a little bit.

But, and our cash markets in Oklahoma have followed that same pace.

So for the most part, what happens in the futures market's been happening here in in Oklahoma.

But yes, a big jump on the day after the inauguration, it's hard to really tie that directly to what happened on, on that Monday.

But we did see the dollar weaken and that certainly brings about some, some optimism of potential exports for our grain markets.

And certainly that that's, that was partly in play.

The, the dollar, the dollar falling is probably the more direct relationship to that.

But all of that is, is certainly intertwined with one another.

So over the course of, of, you know, the last week we've seen, you know, a, a big 25, 20 7 cent jump in wheat prices, cotton prices really popped that same day a lot.

Both of those are very export heavy and so definitely helped at the dollar weakened.

Since then.

They've fallen off a little bit, but for the most part, a good, a good strong day.

And even though they've fallen off a little bit, still pretty decent prices relative to where we've been.

- On that note, let's run the numbers and kinda see the, see what those commodities are looking like at this stage.

- Absolutely.

I'll stick with Dr. Anderson's Medford benchmark.

I don't wanna have too many changes, but in Medford, wheat prices yesterday were right at $4 and 98 cents a bushel.

Corn prices, 4 62 soybean prices, $9 and 60 cents a bushel.

And then nationally cotton prices are hovering right around 70 cents a pound.

So that's where we currently are at.

Again, north central Oklahoma area.

- Let's talk about basis and how that kind of factors in and then where we are as compared to normal.

- Right?

So I've talked a few a little bit about futures markets, brought in some cash prices.

Obviously cash price minus futures price is what basis is.

And we, I talked about toward the end of last year how basis was weaker.

And we're still experiencing some of that right now.

In, in, you know, across most of Oklahoma wheat basis is 60 to 85 cents lower than the futures market.

So that's cash prices.

Relative futures for corn, it's 20 to 30 cents lower, and for soybeans it's 80 cents all the way up to maybe a dollar lower in some spots in Oklahoma, that's cash prices, relative futures.

And so that is, that is lower than where we typically are at.

And based having a futures price that's higher than a cash market price is certainly okay, but it's just more, you want a reliable basis.

You want your cash market relative to the futures market to be very consistent.

And right now it's just, it's our cash prices are a little bit lower than where we would expect them to be based on normal.

Some of that has to do with the, the strong crops that we had coming outta last summer and that really lowered cash prices as a result of that.

And I think we're still experiencing some of, some of that, that result.

But for the most part it's, it's something that we're still keeping an eye on - Even though it's still cold out.

We're, we're talking about spring already on the show, we heard from Dr. Adamson and, and now is the kind of the time of year when in the, in the crop marketing world, we're thinking ahead towards spring as well.

- Yes, absolutely.

We got the February Outlook conference, which USDA host every year to kind of have a, a, a rundown of where we're at nationally with, with our, our crops.

And so that's coming up in, in early February.

A lot of preparation for that.

Farmers are probably either filling out their surveys or maybe they're have, have done it or will be doing that to, to think about how they're gonna allocate those acres.

Something that the market is certainly keying on and we're certainly keeping an eye on here in Oklahoma - And you keep an eye on those reports when they all come out and interpret them for us, which we very much appreciate it.

- Happy to do it.

- Okay, John Michael, thanks a lot.

We'll see you again soon.

- Good morning Oklahoma and welcome to Cow Calf Corner.

This week's topic, what is the value of a good bull is one that we do.

Each year we take a look at current calf prices and as we get into the spring bull buying season, it gives us an idea of what a good bull is worth in 2025.

This is an age old question that all of us ask regardless of which side of this business we're on, if we're in the purebred sector, we want some idea of what the value of the bulls is we're gonna sell.

If we're a commercial cow calf producer, we want some kind of an idea of what we're gonna have to spend on those bulls.

And so we always begin as we do this update each year of how do we define a good bull?

And there's a couple of important criteria, a good bull we would define as a bull that sells with a registration paper.

On that registration paper, we've got pedigree information and we've got a full set of genetic values reported on there, genetic values in the form of EPDs and bioeconomic indices.

And in modern animal breeding, we know that there's gonna be 20, 25 or 30 of those values.

We as producers who are bull buying, want to take a look at those to see which of those are most important in terms of adding value to our next calf crop.

Second criteria that we use to define a good bull's gonna be a bull that's passed to breeding soundness evaluation and sells with some sort of a breeding soundness warranty.

Now, different purebred breeders are gonna put different terms in in terms of that breeding soundness warranty, but from the buying side of that equation, we wanna make sure that both those boxes are checked before we invest in a bull.

So what is a good bull worth?

The age old adage, the answer to that that I would've learned as an undergraduate here at Oklahoma State University, a good bull's worth the value of about five calves that he sires.

So what does this translate to?

Well, depending on when we intend to market those calves out of a bull, we've gotta dig a little deeper to see what their current value actually is.

And right now, if we look at the current market report in Oklahoma, we see five weight steer calves selling at about three 50 a pound translates to a value of a little over $1,800 per weaned calf.

So if we sell calves at weaning, if that's our marketing endpoint in our cow calf operation, a good bull's worth a little over $9,000 to us right now.

What if we retain ownership and turn those into yearlings?

Well, right now, yearlings have a value of around two 50 a pound.

A nine weight yearling translates to a value of about $2,300 a piece.

Five of those calves means that, well, we're looking at $11,000 plus on a bull, if that's our marketing endpoint, what if we retain ownership through all the way through finishing right now, 1500 pound finished cattle bringing about $2 a pound or worth $3,000 a piece.

Five of those means that a good bull's worth about $15,000 to us.

Wide range of values, somewhere in there between 9,000 to 15,000.

But a takeaway message from this is equally important.

The longer there we're going to own the offspring out of a bull.

The more value that the genetics of that bull has to us in our operation, the longer we own those calves, gives us more opportunity to capture the value of those genetics.

The next part of this that we haven't discussed, and it's harder to put a dollar figure on, is what if we're gonna retain daughters to turn into our next generation of cows?

Well, if we do that, we're then looking at the genetic impact of that bull in the form of the replacement females Z sis being with us for about 10 years down the road.

If we only keep one set of heifers that further magnifies the economic impact that the value of a good bull has.

If we think about retained ownership, I encourage producers this bull buying season, evaluate your own management.

Think about those intended marketing endpoints.

Arrive at a budget and what you wanna spend and invest in genetics of bulls that are gonna add value to that next calf crop.

I hope this helps and as always, thanks for joining us on Cow-Calf Corner, - Even though it's the first part of February spring, we'll be here before we know it.

And our OSU extension equine specialist, Dr. Chris says, now is a great time to start thinking about a deworming program for your horses.

- Deworming practices for horses have certainly evolved over time from our traditional every two months and maybe rotating dewormers to now thinking about a more strategic approach based on how many eggs that we actually find in the feces of the horses.

But even so, if you're following a strategic program, we recommend that we do deworm horses in the spring, typically March or April.

That's because as temperatures warm up, those worms inside the horse start to lay eggs.

And so we don't want those female worms passing a large amount of eggs onto the pasture of the horse.

One of the reasons that we recommend strategic deworming is actually due to the growing incidents of anthemic resistance or essentially the parasites are evolving to not really be susceptible to the drugs that we use anymore.

So it is important that we do things practically logically what is best for the horse health, but think about our long-term efficacy of these drugs.

So in general, we're always going to recommend deworming the horse at least twice a year, spring and fall.

Typically in the fall, we're going to use something that's a bot aside to take care of the stomach bots.

Beyond that, the frequency of deworming is gonna be based on the horse's age as well as their fecal egg count or how many parasites they're actually holding.

So we always think about targeting a deworming for March or April, followed by some checks to see if your dewormer has been effective, and then doing our frequency of deworming based on what we find in the horse's manure so you can set it on your calendar.

This is the time of year to start that first Deworming of the Year, - Finally today to the classroom and a history lesson on the OSU campus this week about an event 30 years ago that forever changed our state.

It's called the Journey of Hope.

Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum staff members are visiting all 77 counties this year, telling the story of the bombing of the Alfred p Murra Federal Building on April 19th, 1995, A day Oklahomans will never forget, including Oklahoma Secretary of Agriculture, Blaine Arthur, who spoke from the heart with students and faculty in the Ferguson College of Agriculture about losing her mother, USDA veterinarian Dr. Peggy Clark.

On that fateful day, a story of tragedy without question, but also amazing resilience, the embodiment of the Oklahoma standard and tremendous service and kindness to support those affected the Stop and Still Water was part of Dr. Jason Lusk's Dean's dialogue series.

That'll do it for our show this week.

A reminder, you can see us anytime at our website 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.