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

With summer in full swing, you'll hear how crops like corn, sorghum, and soybeans are shaping up in Oklahoma.

Then we see how much the recent rains around the state are helping the crops and improving the drought monitor.

And we have some mid-summer pest management tips for livestock producers.

Grab that hot cup of coffee, because an all-new SUNUP starts right now.

Welcome to SUNUP, everyone.

We're diving right in today, talking about the weather.

While the rain is certainly welcome, we could do without the severe weather and extreme winds.

Gary McManus, our state climatologist, will have a full update in the Mesonet Weather Report.

But first, we're talking about summer crops.

Here's SUNUP's Elizabeth Hokit with Dr.

Josh Loftin.

We're talking summer crops now with Josh Lofton, our OSU Extension Cropping Systems Specialist.

And Josh, it's been a while since we caught up about summer crops, but we have some stuff to talk about here.

So, let's just jump right in, start talking about corn.

What's been going on with corn?

Well, I mean, we're sitting here kind of the first quarter of July, and we've progressed a lot on our corn.

Our corn is one that probably, you know, most growers planted first.

And so, it's the furthest along.

We're hoping that it's the furthest along.

And I just kind of grabbed some samples of some corn that we have here on the station, planted it around the first part, first couple weeks in April.

And we have anywhere from, you know, it at the blister stage, so right after it pollinated, to kind of milk, maybe early soft dough.

So, for those folks that aren't familiar, we've moved on to reproductive.

We have pollinated these.

So now, these are just filling with resources, and we're heading towards the end of the season.

So, I would hope by the end of July, this crop had kind of finished filling, and then we would use a couple of weeks into August to finish out that crop, dry that crop down, and potentially see some combines rolling through the field here in about probably 30, 45, maybe 50 days, depending on where you are.

Probably a little bit earlier in the southwest, and then working here towards the state line.

Good looking pollination time.

We've had some good moisture.

The one thing that does concern me, and we'll talk about it probably a little bit more with all of these crops, is that as we've gotten hotter, we've kind of gotten into these real critical stages, as we've gotten the heat.

And that timing doesn't play well, typically, with getting good fill, good pollination, and maybe some good yield at the end of the season.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, let's jump into sorghum.

What's happening with that?

Is that about the same?

Yeah.

So, we are kind of hitting, really, just depending on where you plant.

We have some good looking sorghum here with a little bit of variety.

We planted our sorghum kind of the middle of April, so right around where you would like to see sorghum going out.

We're anywhere from boot, maybe flag leaf, on to early pollination.

We've been traveling around the state.

We have more advanced pollination down in Southwest, where we are going into grain fillings.

So we're moving very, very quickly on some of our early planted grain sorghum.

Our double crop, we have some of that, just kind of have gotten a lot of that in the ground after we finally got wheat out of the ground.

So that's coming up into some really nice heat, some good looking soil moisture.

So sorghum is doing pretty well.

Again, we really don't like these temperatures during pollination.

As long as we kind of stay south of that 95, 100 degree weather for all day, I think we're going to be better than most for both corn and sorghum.

But the more we can get into those low 90s, maybe even some of the high 80s, maybe in the next couple of days, the better, or the next couple of weeks, I don't think we're going to get it in the next couple of days, but the better off we're going to be as a whole in the crop.

Now, what about soybeans?

How are they doing?

Yeah, so last kind of crop that we work on in summer crops are soybeans.

We are seeing a lot of soybeans kind of in that intermediate stage.

So we have some like these, again, we planted a little early.

We had some good conditions, some good moisture that we didn't know how much we were going to get in April.

So we went ahead and planted kind of that, again, that middle part of April.

And so we have moved on these to pod development.

You can see we're developing pods kind of in the lower part of the canopy.

We're still flowering in the top part of the canopy.

So in between kind of that early pod development and that flowering, again, that's a time we really don't like these 90.

Soybean is a lot more sensitive to that heat stress.

So the more we get even into the 90s, the more we are going to lose some weight, maybe lose some successful pollination.

The good thing is because soybeans produce so many flowers, we can lose some of those early flowers, lose some of those early pods and still have a good flush of those kind of come in on the back end.

Just briefly touch on insect pressure.

Have you been having any insects?

Yeah, we have found, I know that there's a couple of big ones that a lot of growers see.

We have had some aphid issues and some aphid scares in sorghum.

A lot of growers are seeing more corn leaf aphids, which are not as big of a concern.

Soybeans we've been kind of quiet, some vegetative feeders.

I think most people are interested in the corn and the corn leaf hopper.

We have found them in the states.

That's something that growers need to be reaching out to their county educator, our state extension entomologist and pathologist, really helping out with some management goals, depending on if you're full season and we're getting close towards the end of the year, or if we're just now planting our double crop and really starting out the year, mayb e there's some different considerations we have to take.

Yeah, well, we'll hope for the best going into August and September and we'll see how the crops turn out.

Yep.

Thanks, Josh.

Yep.

We just want to take a quick break in the show to tell you about a great opportunity for producers.

OSU Extension will be hosting a summer demo day at the Chickasha Research Station on July 27th from 830 to noon.

This event will be a hands-on learning opportunity focused on better understanding Oklahoma's summer crops.

Topics will include soil horizons and soil health, testing for nitrates and forage, in-season nitrogen applications and much, much more.

For more information on this event, just scan this QR code at the bottom of your screen.

Good morning, everyone.

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

Well, if there's one thing that June and July have taught us, it's that you don't need tornadoes to have damaging winds.

We've set some records on those winds.

Let's take a look at those.

Did you know that since June 1st, the Oklahoma Mesonet has recorded 34 wind gusts of at least 70 miles per hour?

And from January 1st to May 31st of this year, we only recorded three.

So we certainly ramped up over the last month or so.

And if we look at 60 mile per hour gusts, so anything 60 mile per hour or greater, we've had 93 of those gusts on the Mesonet and only 33 from January 1st through May 31st.

So we have been very windy indeed, especially around those thunderstorms.

Also, did you know that five of those wind gusts that we've had during June are the five of the top 25 in the Mesonet history, dating back to 1994?

And three of those were above 100 miles per hour.

The other two were 95, 96 miles per hour.

So we have had some extreme winds here in Oklahoma since the climatological summer started on June 1st.

Now let's go to our other damaging hazard, the drought.

Now we have seen a remarkable amount of drought relief across the eastern half and also down in south central and north central Oklahoma.

But that core drought still remains across western Oklahoma and up into the Panhandle with the large area of severe to extreme to even a little bit of exceptional drought still left in the state after all the rains that we've had.

Now we have to worry about, since we're into July, into the heat of the summer, another dry spell starting.

And that's what we're seeing across parts of the state.

Now we are up to just about a week of consecutive days without at least a quarter inch of rainfall in a single day.

A little bit better across the southwest up through north central, northeastern Oklahoma, through central Oklahoma.

But we are seeing those numbers start to multiply on this map, including down as far as southeast Oklahoma where they're also suffering about a two-week dry spell.

As we take a look at those rains that have fallen since June 1st, to go along with all those severe winds, same basic pattern, lots of rain across eastern Oklahoma, north central down into south central Oklahoma.

A little bit here and there across other parts of the state, but way too many of those green and yellow colors across western Oklahoma, central Oklahoma, and up into the Panhandle.

And that also shows up on the departure from normal rainfall map since June 1st.

We see those deficits in those areas of those lesser rains, about an inch or two in those areas.

Now we do have some massive surpluses across parts of the state from 7 to nearly 10 inches.

Parts of north central, northeastern Oklahoma, a little bit of southeastern Oklahoma.

But we still have those areas of deficits that are very concerning across western Oklahoma.

So we will definitely take some rain, but Mother Nature, please leave the 90 to 100 mile per hour winds at home.

Thank you.

That's it for this time.

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

We're talking now with Dr.

Todd Hubbs, our OSU Extension Crop Marketing Specialist.

And Todd, since we last saw you, a lot has been happening in terms of prices and the weather and kind of give us an overview and get us up to speed.

Yeah, we had the June acreage report and the June stocks report, which closed out the market year for wheat.

Both of them were somewhat bullish for wheat and that the acreage came in a little lower, harvested acreage, and the stocks were a little lower than USDA was projecting, which is good.

We had supportive stocks for corn.

Acreage didn't move around too much, but I think right now everybody's just speculating on the spring crops and what they're going to look like with all the weather that's going on.

So some of that translated to prices already.

It did.

We saw a run up in prices since June 30th was when the reports came out.

We've seen consecutive days of prices moving higher across the ag complex.

And then on Monday of this week, which was July 6th, we just saw prices explode coming out of the holiday weekend.

And it's a really good pricing opportunity in my opinion, depending on what you're marketing and where you're marketing.

But you know, when we see these kinds of big rallies, particularly in soybeans, it's a good opportunity.

Talk about the weather a little bit.

We're used to it in Oklahoma, but parts of the United States that don't normally see this high of temperatures and Europe, that's factoring in as well.

It is.

Like really hot.

Let's go to Europe.

For really hot temperatures in Europe, they're just not used to this kind of heat dome pressure.

And it's impacting their wheat crop, which they're starting to harvest in Western Europe, particularly France.

And there's some concern about in Eastern Europe, like Germany and Poland and Latvia and Estonia, those areas, because it's just been so hot as the crop was finishing.

It's the winter wheat crop.

How that turns out over the next month is probably going to determine a lot about wheat price dynamics over the next three months.

Talk more specifically about what you're seeing with soybean prices recently.

Well, just a huge rally coming out of the holiday weekend.

Over 30 cent move sort of came out of nowhere.

And I think it's a buildup.

It's a speculation on the crop here.

And our usage in general, we've seen a really strong crush this year related to biofuels.

And we've seen soybean oil prices drop back into the high 60 cents a pound range.

We had them up in the high 70s a month ago.

I think it's probably going to go back there and the crush margins are pretty good.

So I think for soybeans, we just saw this move into it come out of the holiday weekend.

Some of it's to do with Chinese buying.

We had these deals with China that maybe they're going to buy 25 million metric tons.

I have no reason to doubt them, but the timing's there.

So they're really big bargain shoppers, and I think they saw a bargain.

And so we saw this sort of a technical rally coming out of the weekend, sort of underlying fundamentals, but it sort of lifted the other markets with it.

So it's pretty positive.

This is certainly some positive news to talk about, but we still have to be realistic and kind of what's the main takeaway for producers with what's going on currently?

The recent rally sort of brought us back into areas where we were in March, but nothing like we saw after the May report.

And so we're still not back to the highs we saw, and it's probably a low probability, barring a weather issue, a serious weather issue in the U.S.

or that European crop having major problems, that we get back to those levels.

So when we get a rally like this, it may be prudent to reward that rally with some sales, depending on if it's at a level you think you can handle and is profitable.

All right.

Todd, great information as always.

We will see you again next time.

Thank you.

I'm Mark Turner, wildlife extension specialist at OSU, and today we're going to be talking about things that you can be doing to manage your food plots during the summertime.

You know, a lot of folks are in the summertime or thinking about fishing or thinking about other things within the outdoors, but it really is a great time of year to evaluate and hopefully set yourself up for success within your food plots on your property.

There's a lot of good habitat management that can be done during the summertime, and that also extends to areas that you might be planning for deer or turkeys for food plots, whether that's cool season food plots or warm season food plots.

The first thing I like to consider doing during the growing season, especially right now during the summertime, is going out and evaluating your food plots for potential weed problems.

Certainly, if you've planted something like soybeans or sunflowers, oftentimes warm season annual grasses can be a problem, and so spraying to control them can help boost either forage production or seed production if you're managing sunflowers for doves.

This is a great time of year to do that.

This is also the time of year that you should be thinking about your perennial clover plots if you're managing something like white clover or red clover and trying to maintain that as a perennial planting.

You know, this is a great time of year to evaluate weeds within that plot, and in particular spray to control those grass weeds that can outcompete the forage production that you're desiring.

The second thing I like thinking about during the growing season is go ahead and get your soil testing done.

Certainly, soil amendments are really important for food plot success, and we're talking about both lime as well as fertilizer, and lime in particular takes a fair amount of time to work, and so instead of waiting for the fall or right before you're fixing to plant the plot, go ahead and take your soil test now when there might not be quite as much going on on your property and you might not be as busy with planting.

Take your soil test now that'll give time for the results to come out, for you to figure out and line up your purchase of lime or fertilizer that you need, and go ahead and get those amendments applied such that you're going to have more successful food plots in the fall because you went ahead and amended the soil appropriately ahead of time.

And then the last thing that I like to think about doing during the summertime with food plot management is actually pretty simple.

Don't go out and bush hog them.

Now, that's not to say that there's not times that I might think about mowing a food plot during the summer, but if I've got a fallow food plot that, especially one where maybe I have sprayed it to control some problematic weed species that are there, especially those grass weeds, but I might also have some good broadleaf weeds coming up that most would call weeds, species like common ragweed, for instance, but those actually are providing excellent forage resources for wildlife.

They're also providing good structure for turkey broods or quail broods.

And so simply parking the bush hog, staying off the mower, and just let your food plots that are fallow be fallow until you're ready to plant in the fall is a great way to provide additional resources for wildlife.

And again, it's actually saving you money because you're not spending expensive diesel fuel to cut that plot.

For more information on food plot management for wildlife, check out some of the resources on the SUNUP website.

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

Our topic this week is to address where we currently stand with the USDA yield grading system.

We have talked about this in past articles and past weeks.

We know it's kind of antiquated and out of date, and we really dig into that a little bit more this week and talk about what's going on presently in industry to improve upon our red meat yield equation.

So, first of all, what do we have with regard to the USDA grading system for beef carcasses?

We have historically had a quality grade and a yield grade.

The quality grade still serves us well.

That is the one based on intramuscular fat and the maturity of that carcass, where carcasses with more marbling or intramuscular fat out of younger age groups are going to be up in those really high-end quality grades like prime and choice, where we see a lot of our premium-branded product come from.

No issue with quality grades at this time.

Yield grades, on the other hand, we got issues.

And so, what does a yield grade tell us?

It is basically a grade from one through five that indicates the percent red meat yield that we should get from a beef carcass.

How does this happen, and then why do we stand where we stand on it right now?

Well, the data was collected on about 162 head of steers back in the early 1960s.

And from that population of cattle that were bred to be pretty small and pretty early maturing and finished to weights of around 1,000, maybe 1,100 pounds, what we learned is that external fat thickness measured at about the 12th, 13th rib, the amount of kidney, heart, and pelvic fat percentage in the carcass, the carcass weight itself, and then the rib eye size relative to that carcass weight were the four things that predicted a yield grade from one to five.

That yield grade currently, in the existing population of cattle we have today, explains less than 40% of the variation in red meat yield we see in carcasses.

Why is that?

Well, over the past 60 years since that yield grading system went online in 1965, we have bred cattle to be bigger, growthier, later maturing.

We have came up with better technologies in feeding that have changed the composition of cattle, and we frankly have processed cattle a little bit differently than perhaps the way we did over a half century ago.

That old yield grading system doesn't fit the current population of cattle.

The good news story is we have a lot of modern technologies that can be used to accurately predict red meat yield.

Things like CT scans, 3D imaging, radar, and just modern computational power, we can pretty easily predict and explain 70 to 90% of the variation.

Something like a CT scan is near flawless in its accuracy of predicting red meat yield from a beef carcass.

We currently have research underway that is validating those technologies.

We've got to get them to the point that they can operate at the speed of commerce in a packing plant.

When a new yield grading system comes online remains to be seen, but the technology's there.

This is an industry priority.

We are validating these technologies, and it is only a matter of time before we've got a new way to accurately predict the red meat yield of a beef carcass.

When that happens, this is going to be applicable to live animal production.

We are going to see this informed decisions that we make with regard to breeding, mating, and management decisions so that genetic improvement can be made long term with respect to red meat yield.

Thanks for joining us on Cow-Calf Corner.

Finally, today we're in the heart of summer, which means that pest pressure is at its highest.

So today, SUNUP's Kurtis Hair is visiting with Dr.

Jonathan Kamak, our OSU Extension Livestock Entomologist, for some management tips.

We're here with our OSU Extension Livestock Entomologist, Dr.

Jonathan Kamak.

And Jonathan, New World Screwworm obviously has been kind of the talk of the town when it comes to insects.

But, you know, we are entering the early July months.

It's hot outside.

Insects are out.

So what are you hearing right now for livestock producers?

Right.

It's kind of the same old thing for our summer pests.

There's certainly a lot of things in the news right now and kind of, you know, flying around about, pun intended, right, about other topics.

But ticks are certainly a big deal right now.

We're getting a lot of information, reports from a lot of the country right now, and claims that the ticks are a lot more numerous than normal.

And that's a little bit of a difficult one for us to actually answer in terms of whether or not it's a bad year for ticks.

Really, because when we think about tick life cycles, we're thinking, you know, two or three years worth of kind of exposure in the environment.

So we can't say, you know, oh, it's going to be a bad year for ticks because we really got to think about what those earlier life stages of the ticks were being exposed to as they were developing last year or even the year prior.

So it's really hard for us to make that prediction.

Now what we do know is that tick numbers started to increase a little earlier than we would typically anticipate.

So likely due to the kind of mild winter that we had.

Even though we had a nice, you know, cold snap, it maybe wasn't quite long enough.

So we're certainly still seeing some issues with ticks.

And when it comes to management of ticks, you know, a lot of these things, you know, we have years where tick numbers seem to be higher, where they seem to be lower.

Same thing with hornflies.

But really, you know, it's summer here in Oklahoma.

So what type of treatment options are there, are you recommending for producers this time of the year?

Right.

So it's, you know, we really have to think about tick management and kind of that IPM framework or what can we do kind of all-encompassing to really have the best chance at managing them.

Now things we can do for our livestock is kind of keep them away from tall vegetation, tall brush, you know, tall grass, things they're not eating.

So if you've got a pasture that's, you know, bordered by a heavily wooded area, maybe, you know, set up a temporary hot wire or something to keep those cows a little bit further away from those trees that they don't need to be in, but still give them some shade, you know, maybe out, you know, from your big shade trees out in the middle of your pasture or something.

But we want to try to keep them out of those wooded environments or environments where we've gotten high populations of Eastern Red Cedar.

And I mentioned we're a screw worm, but there are other flies in the environment, obviously that can cause quite a lot of issues, particularly hornflies and livestock.

So talk a little bit about that and what, you know, kind of what you're seeing this time of year and some management options.

So kind of statewide right now, we're right in the throes of high hornfly numbers.

So our producers need to make sure that they've got some sort of a management plan in place.

And we typically want to think about dealing with hornflies from both aspects.

The adults, those are the ones that are present in blood feeding on the animals.

And then the, the immatures or the larvae, those are feeding in the manure pats.

So if we could take the approach of some sort of on animal treatment, whether that's a spray or a back rubber or an ear tag, that's great for the adults, but it's not going to do anything for those immature.

So if you can feed a mineral, that's got an insect growth regulator, a feed through product in it, that'll pass through the digestive tract of the cow, end up in the manure and will help provide some control for those developing hornfly larvae.

So when it comes to these treatment options and with screwworm that we've been talking about, is there any crossover at all with treatment options if, you know, you know, if slash when screwworm were to arrive in Oklahoma?

Yeah, they all kind of go hand in hand.

So the pests that we've talked about so far, hornflies, ticks, and stable fly is, and even even horseflies, right?

They're all blood feeding.

So they're causing some sort of a very small wound on an animal, whether that's a cow or a dog or a goat or a sheep when they're blood feeding on them.

And those small wounds can actually serve as the kind of infestation site where a screwworm can actually initiate an infestation if that wound gets infected.

So, you know, we want to make sure that we've got a good management plan in place for the flies and the ticks that we're already dealing with to help us have some preventative care in place for dealing with screwworms.

And kind of a fun fact, the ear tags that we use now for hornfly management were actually originally developed for managing Gulf Coast ticks in the ears of cattle because those massive wounds that the ticks were causing on the ears of cattle were serving as infestation sites for screwworms.

All right.

Thanks, Jonathan.

Dr.

Jonathan Kamek, OSU Extension livestock entomologist here at Oklahoma State University.

That'll do it for our show this week.

Remember, you can find SUNUP anytime on our website, follow us on social media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/SUNUP TV.

We leave you today with some great behind-the-scenes photos captured by our chief photographer Mitchell Alcala of the Soil, Water, and Forage Analytical Lab on the OSU campus, which is part of OSU Extension and Ag Research.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

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