Good morning, everyone.

I'm Lyndall Stout, and we have a great show lined up for you today on SUNUP.

Devastating wildfires this week in Oklahoma.

We're talking animal well-being and caring for your injured livestock, plus the importance of managing stress for yourself and your loved ones during trying times like wildfire season.

Then we're shifting gears and discussing the state's wheat crop as first hollow stem approaches.

Grab that fresh cup of coffee because SUNUP starts right now.

Hello again, everyone.

We begin today talking about wildfires, which impacted several counties in Oklahoma this past week.

We want to revisit a conversation with our OSU Extension Beef Cattle Specialist Dr.

Dave Lalman and Dr.

Rosalyn Biggs with some tips on caring for injured animals.

It's very important in these kind of disaster type situations that animal welfare needs to be our first consideration.

And how those animals that have survived, how are they, first of all, going to be able to recover from those injuries?

And in many cases, unfortunately, euthanasia may be the most humane decision that we have to make.

I've been in contact with producers and veterinarians in that area, and they're assessing that situation.

They're out in the pastures taking a look there.

And that's top of mind is the care and welfare of these animals.

And although we're beef cattle specialists, we do have other animals that need to be considered.

Certainly, our other livestock, as well as our pets, when we're talking about these kind of situations and things that we can see on down the road.

We need to make sure that we're keeping these animals hydrated.

We need to be handling them very, very carefully with stockmanship and welfare focused on those handling of those animals.

And then we need to be thinking about long-term repercussions.

Wildfires associated, you know, thermal injuries, burns can be a big issue on these animals.

We also need to be thinking about smoke inhalation and the systems that those affect, whether that be the airways and lungs, or whether that be the heart, or even, you know, we've dealt, Dr.

Lawman has mentioned, we've got cows that are very well into their pregnancies and thinking about their capacity to take care of either calves on the ground or calves that they will have in short order.

And so we want to make sure we're monitoring those animals very, very closely, providing them the supportive care that is appropriate.

And again, making those decisions focused on animal welfare if we have to make some hard choices.

What are the two different options of feed at this time with the situation?

They can feed around eight pounds of that.

They have to feed it every day, but they can feed up to eight pounds and that will minimize weight loss to about three quarters of a pound a day.

And yes, getting hay into that program as soon as possible is better, safer, but eight pounds of that 14% feed will get them by for a while.

Secondly, a real simple thing to do is to limit feed about 10 pounds of hay to these heavy pregnant cows and feed five pounds of the 30% or so supplement they already have in their overhead bins.

Ten pounds of hay, five pounds of supplement, no weight loss.

I mean, that works.

They have to figure out how to limit feed the hay.

Now I say limit feed the hay because I'm assuming it's going to be limited in, you know, access.

When we're dealing with these immediate feed needs and injuries, it is also important to think about the documentation piece of this.

Absolutely.

Being part of other disaster responses is something oftentimes that we forget in the immediate days following the disaster.

And so having documentation becomes very, very important from a financial aspect.

It can be as simple in many cases as, you know, if we have losses documenting those with photographic evidence, most people have the capacity with their cell phones, with their smartphones to take pictures that can be time stamped.

For many programs, emergency type programs, it's going to be necessary to have verifiable records.

And so producers need to be thinking about their existing records and then creating a line of documentation as they're dealing with losses on a day to day basis of making sure that they are documenting those appropriately should emergency funds become available to producers.

For those with livestock casualties needing to dispose of carcasses, guidance now from Dr.

Doug Hamilton, OSU Extension Waste Management Specialist.

Basically, the state has five methods that you can dispose of your livestock, the land filling, rendering, incineration, composting and burial.

And burial is really your only option.

The first thing I would do would get in contact with your local conservation district and they can help you find spots to bury the animals on your farm.

So start with the conservation district.

What do I need to do when I contact them?

Well, if you already have a management plan, they'll know your farm.

Otherwise, they'll come out to your farm and kind of look over the land, look in the soil surveys and figure out where's a good place to bury an animal.

And there really is some specific guidance there.

Go over that.

Yes, you need to be in a high spot.

You need to be well above a flood plain.

You're going to have to dig a hole four to six feet deep and you need to be about two feet, at least two feet above where the water table may rise.

Really there's going to be one or two spots on a fairly large ground that you could actually do the burial in.

And it's going to take some heavy equipment more than likely and some logistics planning too.

Yeah, you're going to have to think ahead because it's not easy to move a hundred to a thousand fifteen hundred pound animal.

So you're going to need like a box loader or a bucket loader.

Also you're going to have to dig a pretty deep hole.

So you're going to need a back hole.

And I'm sure producers have, we know that they lose animals from time to time, an adult animal or calves, of course.

But when there's mass casualty like this, it really does require some extra planning and coordination and asking for support.

Yeah, you can still use burial.

You can dig a trench as long as you need.

Put the cows like tail to nose, tail to nose in that trench, not quite touching each other.

But if you have 20 cows dead, that can be a pretty large trench.

You might need to be able to dig two or three.

Yeah, there's two specific fact sheets, one on proper disposal of animals, which covers all the five methods, and then one specifically on composting of animals.

As you are handling these and other very stressful details related to the disaster, a reminder to care for yourself and look out for others.

Here's Dr.

Amy Hagerman.

So it's important to understand not just how to check in on our own mental health, but also to check in on the mental health of others.

And that begins by assuring safety, of course, first and foremost, physical safety, making sure the person has some reassurance.

We're not pushing anyone to talk about something that's incredibly stressful to them at the time, but making sure they know that we're open to having those conversations and knowing the resources that we have available in the state that they can reach out to for help if they're going through an incredibly stressful time.

We've got some great resources that we've put together through the Disaster Assistance Response Team to help people navigate some of these situations, whether it's mental health first aid for themselves or mental health first aid for somebody else that they know and love.

We're joined now by Josh Boushong, our OSU Extension agronomist in the western part of the state.

Josh, today we want to talk about wheat and our winter crops and then think ahead to spring as well.

So give us an idea of how wheat is looking.

Well, wheat's starting to grow like crazy if it has moisture.

So we've seen that some parts of the state are still very dry, so droughty for the winter months.

We started off with some moisture, we lost it, and then we haven't replenished a lot of it.

But for the most part, stands are still there, we're starting to get some spring green up and start making those decisions on whether or not we want to invest more in the crop for a grain or if we're going to maintain it as a forage crop and we either graze it out, hay it off, or try to get both and have dual purpose crops.

Quite a bit of the state had some decent snow a few weeks ago.

Did that help with moisture and was there any kind of cold damage that is longer term?

Any moisture is received in welcoming hearts right now, but it was a dry snow, it wasn't as much as we desired.

Some might have got a half inch of moisture out of the snow events, but the cold, we lost a little bit of leaf tissue, some leaf burn, but overall the tiller stayed alive.

We haven't lost too many tillers or plants, so I'm pretty pleased with that for the most part.

So the moisture was a help, obviously we don't want those freezing temperatures like we did, but we'll take it any way we can right now.

With some of these warmer days that we're seeing, are we also starting to see first hollow stem arrive?

So we're starting to break dormancy and hit that first hollow stem stage.

So we have several factors that kind of drive that.

So first hollow stem is a growth stage that we kind of use at OSU to determine when to remove those stalkers, that cattle, to maintain a grain crop.

And so first hollow stem is that growing point, it still might be under the soil surface, so it's protected there.

But as it starts to elongate, so when we're out there checking, we're digging up plants, we're not just pulling off the tillers off the top of the ground.

We're splitting them and looking at the oldest tiller, ideally in a non-grazed area of the field, so outside of the hot wire, but looking to see where that crop wants to be.

Okay, let's switch gears now and touch on canola, what you're seeing in the western part of the state and what you're hearing from growers.

So canola, there's decent acres this year.

From what I've seen out in the fields, the stands survived the winter, so that's always a concern in winter canola, winter hardiness.

So a lot of variables, just like the wheat we were talking about, pretty detrimental to canola.

The big difference in wheat versus canola, canola's growing points above the soil surface, so it's more prone to losing that stand throughout the winter because of freeze events.

But for the most part, stands have maintained over the winter, we're starting to break dormancy just like the wheat on canola, but we're seeing more insect pressures in the canola fields that I've been in.

Dimeback moth larvae is always an issue, and also some aphids, so we're trying to keep track, make sure we have some beneficials, try to keep those aphid populations in check.

But if you are seeing some dimeback moth larvae, we might need to look at some applications of insecticide.

Looking at different modes of action of that insecticide, the synthetic pyrethroids, group three insecticides, we've seen some resistance in the past on dimeback moth larvae, so that can work, but we've also seen some guys that had to repeat applications, two, three applications to try to get those populations in control.

So might look at some other premium products to control those worms if they're starting to get out of hand.

Of course, we need rain, rain, rain.

Rain makes grain, so as we're making those decisions on crop protective products, insecticide, herbicides, fungicides, those are just going to protect yield.

But we need the rain, we need some fertility out there to make the grain yields to make that crop profitable this year.

So we need some rain.

For sure.

Josh, thank you very much.

We'll see you again soon.

Good morning, everyone.

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

Well, the Oklahoma Mesonet's 120 lonely sentinels out across the state taking measurements every five minutes, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in order to help keep you, your loved ones and your property safe.

Sometimes they get hit just like you folks do.

Tornadoes, snow and ice, lightning, and wildfires.

Here you can see the Woodward Mesonet site that got hit by the Woodward wildfire.

Did a lot of damage out that way and also did some damage at our Mesonet site, but we will get it repaired and it'll be back up and running and helping keep Woodward safe.

Part of the reason we had so many wildfires and acres burned was because of the drought.

And we did see some changes in the drought monitor, not a lot of good ones, but let's get right to that new map.

Okay, the same basic pattern even after the rainfall we had over the last week.

We didn't see a lot of big changes, a few interruptions in those severe and extreme drought areas across the southern part of the state mostly.

But we did add some of those abnormally dry areas up into the panhandle northwest Oklahoma.

That's the yellow colors on the drought monitor map.

Now I did ask the national drought monitor author who has the final say for some moderate D1 drought to be put up in the panhandle.

They didn't accept that, but we will try again next week.

Seems like there's a lot of evidence for that drought up in the panhandle.

They do now see about 90 days without significant moisture up in that area.

The same thing for other more localized parts of the state.

We still have up in northeast Oklahoma up to 40 plus days without significant moisture up there in parts of northwest Oklahoma and as I said the panhandle.

But at least we did reset some of these areas in the map.

So that's the good news.

The bad news, we just need a lot more.

Here we see the departure from normal rainfall map for the winter thus far.

I showed you this last week and showed you that it was the driest on record with last week's rain.

We did bump it up to the ninth driest on record.

So a little bit of improvement there.

Certainly not a lot of good news when you look at it overall, but some of those deficits did decrease a little bit.

We still see big time deficits from two to as much as five inches plus over across the eastern two-thirds of the state.

But when you look at the percent of normal rainfall map, so compared to what we would normally expect for this time of year, it really evens out across the area.

Lots of places, especially the panhandle, northwest Oklahoma, less than 50% of normal.

Also central up into northeast Oklahoma, but everywhere is pretty much in deficit.

Just a few areas that are close to normal, most below 50% at least.

Let's take a look into next week.

Now even though we did cool down to more February-like temperatures this weekend, we still see coming up increased odds of above normal temperatures across the entire state.

So no sign of any let up in that above normal regime we've been in.

You know, we'll have some dips here and there, but by and large it's going to remain above normal in temperature.

Precipitation, we still see increased odds of below normal precipitation across the western half or so.

Normal conditions across the rest of the state.

So we have to remember, February is not the wettest part of the year, so even if it's near normal, it's not going to be a drought buster by any stretch of the imagination.

I think if it's going to be warmer than normal, we can at least get some rainfall, maybe get that green up a little earlier, maybe end some of this bad wildfire danger we've been seeing a little bit earlier in the season.

That's it for this time.

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

We're here now with Todd Hubbs, our OSU Extension Crop Marketing Specialist.

And Todd, it's been a couple weeks since we talked last.

We did have a WASDE report, but what are the markets doing?

Kind of just give us a rundown.

Well we did get a WASDE.

It was sort of uneventful like February WASDE typically are.

We saw some minor changes to the world balance sheet.

I don't think any of them really surprised the market all that much.

The Brazilian soybean crop came in higher and everybody was sort of expecting that.

Corn exports were raised some more and we've really been moving corn a lot.

So in the markets we've seen some rallies, but most of our prices have stayed in these ranges we've been in for the last few months.

With the exception of soybeans, they've rallied back up to close to where we were in November after the trade announcements.

But all that uncertainty we've talked about the last few times, trade policy uncertainty, geopolitical uncertainty, biofuel policy uncertainty, that's all still sort of hanging out there and it doesn't appear to be going away.

So I think this kind of range bound action is going to continue for a while.

Yeah, so let's talk about wheat a little bit.

What's kind of going on with the wheat markets?

We are moving wheat pretty good in the export market, hard red winter in particular.

We're on track to hit USDA's target forecast.

We did see them lower the food usage a little bit, which was expected when we saw the flour milling data come out.

So we're sort of fading on that a bit.

But overall demand's good in the world.

Most of the northern hemisphere is in dormancy and we're looking at how those crops are developing.

As everybody in Oklahoma knows, it's incredibly dry and we had big hopes for that weather event over the last weekend and good chunks of Oklahoma didn't get much of anything.

So that's a problem.

There's some speculation about the Black Sea crops, but it sounds like the crops in Ukraine and Russia are doing pretty well this year and there's really no expectations of crop loss there.

So we're just waiting to see how this winter wheat crop turns out here in the Southern Plains.

Yeah, let's dive a little deeper into corn.

We have a lot of exports going out, right?

We are moving corn like crazy.

We have a lot of corn, over 18 .5 billion bushels of supply this marketing year.

And we're just seeing buyers come out all over the world.

But prices are cheap.

When prices are this low, people will buy, particularly the good quality corn we have in the U.S.

So we're moving corn really well.

We're grinding it for ethanol.

So the demand's good.

We just have a lot.

Do we see that potentially changing any time soon?

Well, we'll see the prospective plantings report come out at the end of March to give us an idea of maybe how many acres of corn we'll see.

But Brazil's pulling in their soybean harvest now and they've got this two crop system that pretty much dominates their agriculture.

They're putting in a safrinha or second corn crop.

That'll really start hitting the market in July.

So between what we do with our corn crop and how Brazil's safrinha crop and how Argentina's corn crop turns out, they've been a little dry down there and it sounds like it's deteriorating slightly but it's still really early.

So there's some weather issues and some acreage issues we're looking at.

So what advice do you have for producers right now?

What should they be keeping in mind?

Well, I mean, margins are tight.

And when margins are tight like this, you gotta know your budgets, know what you can do and know what prices are profitable for you.

So if we do get a rally somewhere, you can think about, do I want to price some of this?

Even if you haven't planted or harvested it yet, depending on how confident you are in the crop.

But the idea of marketing even old crop stuff you got in the bins or new crop on a really strong rally, something people should be thinking about if the price makes sense for you.

Yeah.

Alright.

Well, thanks for the updates, Todd.

You're welcome.

We'll talk to you in a couple weeks.

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

This week we talk about freeze branding of beef cattle.

And as we've talked about in past segments over time, if we want to have good production records in a herd of cows, it's very important that we've got some sort of permanent identification on those cows.

Now we can use ear tags and a variety of things that may get lost, but the age old identification system of branding is proven throughout the industry.

And particularly at this point in time, a lot of cattle producers prefer freeze branding over fire branding.

We're going to do less damage to the hide.

It's a fairly simple process once you get comfortable with what you actually need to do.

And Grant Hubbard, our Purebred Beef Cattle Center Headquarters Manager, is joining us today.

I appreciate Grant taking time off from preparing for the Cowboy Classic sale in April.

One of the things we point out when it comes to freeze branding is we want to do it at times of the year when we've actually got hair growing on these cattle.

The process by which freeze branding works is we actually freeze and kill off the pigment and so that the hair grows back white after we've completed the freeze branding procedure by a few weeks after we've done it.

So it works really well on black cattle, really well on red cattle, not so good on white cattle just because of that.

But the process we use here at Purebred Beef Cattle Center has proven to be pretty effective.

Customers have been very complimentary of it.

And we'll walk you through some of the things that we do here.

And behind us you can see some of the equipment that we've got set up.

So Grant, as we get started, I know here in a minute we're actually going to freeze brand one, but how long ago today did you start preparation to get the irons activated and stuff like that?

We let the irons sit in an alcohol or methanol solution with dry ice in it for about an hour and a half.

When the frost starts building up on the irons, that means they're cold enough and ready to go.

Just walk me through the procedure.

We're going to do some heifers today, some of our replacement heifers here at the school.

From the time we've caught that heifer and have her secured in the chute, and we know that a chute's very important for the safety of everybody and animal involved in this.

What's going to happen at that point to complete the procedure?

When we go to freeze brand these yearling heifers, we'll get them caught in the chute, squeeze them down.

We'll shear off a section of their hide with a surgical blade to make sure that's nice and tight to the hide when the brand is applied.

We'll shear it off, soak it, then spray it down with alcohol, and let the brand sit on there for a minute to a minute and 15 seconds, and do that repeatedly for all their tattoo digits.

Grant, what about, I know we're going to use a rice root or a curry comb here to clean up that area.

Are we doing that before we peel that hair off or after?

We will do that after to make sure all that debris is out of there after we've sheared off the hair.

The irons will stay on the hide for about a minute, a minute and 15 seconds, and make sure right there about the 45 second mark, we take them irons and really roll in the edges of there so it's nice and crisp and it comes out number full and formed.

And the irons we use here at the school, they're about three to three and a half inch irons?

Yes sir.

And we like the size of those because as we do it on approximately yearlings, they continue to get a little bigger with age, they don't get obnoxiously big, and yet they're big enough that if we're out checking heat in the pasture and we got that hip exposed to us, we're going to see that and know what animal we're actually looking at.

What else to tell us about it, Grant?

We got the iron, we need the methanol and the dry ice.

We're getting methanol from a gas station nearby.

We're getting our dry ice from grocery stores.

Yes sir.

Producers may need to investigate, do some homework on where you can secure those things.

We're mixing it to activate it with the irons in it.

We know we need a spray bottle of alcohol, the clippers, a rice root or a curry comb, something like that to get that hide cleaned up.

And some means of timing.

Yes, we use a stopwatch here or set an alarm on your phone for a minute so then you don't have to have it in your hand, you can use both hands to freeze-frame.

And I guess if we're doing this out in the middle of a pasture, we got to have a source of electricity for our clippers, so possibly a generator if we don't have an electrical outlet in the barn.

And two insulated coolers also to keep that dry ice from melting off at a quicker rate and keep the irons cold.

Thank you, Grant.

And thank you all for joining us on Cow-Calf Corner.

That'll do it for our show this week.

A reminder you can see SUNUP anytime on our website, follow us on social media and stream our show anytime at youtube.com/ SUNUP TV.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

Have a great week everyone and we'll see you next time at SUNUP.