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

I'm Lyndall Stout.

As we turn the page to October, we begin yet another month talking about high temperatures and extreme drought.

Today we begin by looking at how the cotton crop is faring about two months out from harvest.

Here's Dr. Seth Byrd.

- So yeah, it's been a pretty rough year for cotton in general.

We've had obviously a drought through most of the state for the majority of the cotton season.

Looking back to the spring, intentions were to plant a lot more acres maybe than we have in the past couple of years.

There was some price support for that and we've had a couple of decent years back-to-back, given the weather we've had.

But a lot of the cotton this year that was maybe planned to be planted, didn't get in the ground or a lot of it that did get in the ground, never established a stand because of the dry conditions.

But it was surprising how rapid that moisture went away.

And even in four to five to six days after some of those great events cleared we were already planting into fairly dry ground at least at the top two inches where we're placing the seed.

Yeah, so coming off a really warm and fairly dry September is gonna be beneficial for the crop that remains out there.

Maybe not as beneficial as this kind of September would've been in a better year, where we have maybe a bigger crop and maybe we have some immaturity issues because of the boll load.

We're probably not gonna see a lot of that this year.

We're not gonna have a big boll load sort of weighing the crop down and keeping it from being mature on time.

But anytime you get a warm, dry September you're gonna get a lot more natural boll maturity and boll open's gonna occur.

And you're also gonna help that crop sort of age the leaves.

So when we do get that cold snap, we'll probably get a pretty rapid natural leafs in essence.

Yeah, so as far as pest pressure goes and that's one thing about a drought year usually if the crop's having a hard time everything else is gonna have a hard time too.

So we haven't had, you know, really really bad weed pressure maybe early on when we had some most big rains.

But over the course of the season it's probably been one of the lighter years for weed.

It's probably one of the lighter years that we've heard of for a lot of for insect pressure.

And of course a warm, dry September's also gonna help us with our late season disease pressure.

So we're not gonna see a lot of bacterial blood incidents, or verticillium wilt.

We saw some harvest aids start to go out in late September.

It's gonna really ramp up now that we're getting into October.

You know, there's two things going on.

The prices kind of dropped off and obviously our yield potential is dropped off this year with the drought.

So, you don't want to go in with your, you know absolute max inputs on your harvest aids this year.

You kind of wanna make sure that you're staying within the budget just like we are every other year.

But our budget may have adjusted this year as the season's going on.

Moving forward, you know, we'd like to see it, get maybe a little cooler during the day, that just helps us with harvest aids.

It avoids any sort of antagonism we might see between weather conditions and our harvest aid products in terms of, you know damaging the leaves and having an issue getting those off.

You know, I'm looking at this solely from a cotton perspective.

So I'm gonna say we like it to stay dry.

I know folks that are trying to establish maybe a winter crop or maybe you know, planting covers back in, you know, do their cotton.

Would like to see little moisture to get those covers established.

If the moisture could hold off till that cotton's out of the field, that'd be ideal.

So I guess the good news is, if you're harvesting a crop this year, it's probably a pretty good crop.

And then looking ahead to, you know, maybe 2023 assuming we get some rain between now and next May we may have learned some things this year about, you know maybe that worst-case scenario what varieties have performed well there and maybe some things that we did that worked well in a year like this so that, you know should this ever come back around again, there'll be some things that we can maybe call back on from this year to help us out in the future.

(bright upbeat music) - Hello, Wes Lee here with your weekly Mesonet weather report.

The last 60 days have been one of the driest in Oklahoma history.

And it appears that the drier the normal weather pattern is here to stay for a while.

The forecast map for next week shows Oklahoma is not expecting much in the way of rain.

The map for the following week doesn't look any better with yellows and browns indicating lower than normal chances of rain.

Why is this dry weather pattern set it sites on the Southern planes?

It is likely due to the onset of yet another La Nina weather year, our third in a row.

La Nina, usually means drier and warmer than normal conditions for Oklahoma during the cool season months.

It is the opposite of the El Nino weather pattern that often gives us wet and cool winters.

La Nina is caused by cool surface water temperatures in the Pacific near the equator.

On this map, you see the current water temperatures are in fact, one to two degrees Celsius below normal.

- This gives us a high probability, shown by the blue bars, of Le Nina conditions continuing through the fall and at least early winter.

Hopefully, by spring the pattern will return to neutral, shown by the gray bars.

So, at least for a while, expect the dry conditions to continue.

Now here's Gary with the newest expanding drought map.

- Thanks, Wes, and good morning everyone.

Well, Wes showed you the unfortunate rainfall outlooks for the next couple of weeks, and I'm going to show you how September didn't really help as much at all.

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

Unfortunately, when you're looking at the drought monitor, anytime you see color, it's just bad.

And if you see the the reds and the darker reds, it's even worse.

And, unfortunately, many of those colors are starting to expand and multiply even more across the state as we go through the early parts of fall.

Now, much of the southern part of the state is covered by extreme to exceptional drought, the worst two categories of the drought monitor, and that's not far off from where we are in northern Oklahoma as well.

So, unfortunately, the drought just continues to worsen, intensify, and spread across the state.

We've been tracking that top soil moisture percent short to very short from the USDA.

Unfortunately, that's starting to increase rapidly as well.

We're now at 91% of the states' top soils being short to very short of moisture.

Second, in the United States, only to Montana's 95%, but it's certainly race to the top there, unfortunately.

Okay, we can take a look at the September rainfall a little bit early here, through the 28th, because it's not gonna rain through the rest of the week.

So, we do see a little bit of decent rain across far east central Oklahoma, but, for the most part, we have the 120 Mesonet sites, less than 2" of rainfall, by and large, and many of those are less than 1", less than 1" below normal.

Now, we do have a statewide average for September of about 0.7".

That's the fifth dry September since 1895.

Now, the driest was only 0.25" back in 1956.

So, as we always say, those 1950s or 1930s, not the years you want to be hanging out with when it comes to drought.

We can take a look at the departure from normal from the last 30 days.

Again, this covers most of September, but, most of the state, 2" to 3" to 4" below normal, even as much as 5" below normal over there in east central Oklahoma.

Just a really horrible map to look at for September when we were counting on rainfall to get us out of that flash drought from the summer.

Okay, our chances for our fall secondary rainy season are dwindling.

We really do need for those rains to come in.

After that, we're into the drier parts of the winter, so let's hope we can get something in here quickly.

That's it for this time.

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

- Continuing on the topic of drought and whether it may actually slow down the growth of weeds in your wheat fields.

Here's SUNUP's Kurtis Hair and Dr. Misha Manuchehri.

- It's hard to believe it's already that time of year to start talking about weeds.

So, Misha, this year, you know, some producers did get some wheat in the ground, so what is the situation looking like for weeds this year?

- Yeah, so, we're dry and we're warm, unusually for this time of year.

You can see here, in a lot of our fields, we still have our summer annuals that are up.

So many of those are finishing their life cycle, don't need to worry about, too much about in-season competition.

You'll see some of our pigweeds, there's nutsedges out, but we're gonna start to switch gears soon, and, as those plants senesce, we'll see our winter annuals emerge.

And in-season those are gonna be the most critical.

- So it's been really, really dry, as you mentioned.

Everybody knows it's really, really hot and not a lot of moisture.

How does that impact, you know, we know how that impacts wheat, but how has that impact weeds?

Is that gonna keep weed pressure low?

- Yeah, so, you know, weeds do need those resources to germinate.

It could delay some of our flushes, but we can't get too excited and think that they're not gonna come.

They're gonna come.

We might see more than one flush or maybe the emergence patterns that we're used to, just a smaller percentage of that population coming up.

So, our weeds are still gonna be around, we might see some delays in those typical timings that we're used to.

- So if we do get a rain, how does that, you know, work with the herbicide and just the weeds in general?

- Yeah, so, when we have some moisture, we should anticipate, and as we cool down, some of those flushes to kind of start to take off.

We have one herbicide timing in Oklahoma that is really important if you battle Italian rye grass, which much of the state does, and that's a timing that we call delayed pre-emergence, where we put out, we have a few herbicide options, but it goes out about seven to 10 days after planting, right when we have wheat emergence.

So, if you have Italian rye grass and you are planting wheat, that's likely the timing that you're gonna be making an application.

And we do need a rain to incorporate that herbicide.

- For those grain-only producers who haven't planted yet, is it still a good idea to just go ahead and plant or, like, is, or does that rye grass have another cycle that it goes through?

- Yeah, so, if you are in that boat where you only have the delayed pre-timing - You don't see rain in your forecast, you're wondering if you should make the investment.

I think much of our data shows that it is worth it.

We know that Italian ryegrass will flush again in the spring.

And the great thing about those herbicides is they're very long-lived in the soil.

So we have an opportunity to get them incorporated for that second flush.

- And as, I guess, on the kinda flip side of that coin, if we do get a lot of rain, - Yeah.

- Hopefully, how does that impact the situation?

- Ooh, yeah, that's a good question.

Those specific herbicides are relatively stable in our soil profile.

And so, we wanna get them incorporated, but compared to other chemistries, we don't have to worry too much about getting them to depths where they're not gonna be effective.

- And, you know, as always, producers, if they have questions, they can go to their local Extension office - Yes.

- To get some more information.

- Yes.

We have fact sheets specifically on controlling Italian ryegrass, so there's some additional resources there that we can share.

- All right, thanks, Misha.

Misha Manuchehri, OSU Extension weed specialist here at Oklahoma State University.

And if you'd like a link to the fact sheet she talked about, go to our website, sunup.okstate.edu.

(upbeat music continues) - Dr. Derrell Peel, our livestock marketing specialist, joins us now.

Derrell, let's dive right in and talk about what's happening with feeder cattle markets this fall.

- You know, on the lightweight end of things, the calves or the stocker cattle, this time of the year, early fall is always a little bit of a race between the supply and demand conditions in Oklahoma.

So, we're trying to figure out whether the supply's coming to town ahead of the demand or vice versa.

- As we sort this out, let's start with the supply side of things.

- You know, on the supply side, of course, we expect a bigger fall run of calves.

That's typical in Oklahoma and most of the country, frankly.

And so, you know, this year, we do know that we have moved a lotta feeder cattle earlier because of the drought conditions.

Auction volumes in Oklahoma since the 1st of July are up about 20%.

And a smaller percentage of those than normal are cattle over 600 pounds.

So we've moved a lotta lightweight cattle already.

And so, we would expect then that that means that we will see a somewhat smaller fall run of calves on the supply side.

- With that in mind, what are you seeing in terms of demand for stocker cattle?

- Well, the demand picture, of course, in the southern plains is typically one of wheat pasture and demand for those lightweight calves to graze through the winter.

Obviously, with the conditions we have right now, there's relatively little prospects for wheat pasture.

There's a few folks buying some stocker calves, but it's pretty limited.

So it's, you know, again, we've got less supply, less demand.

We have to kinda see how those things balance out to figure out what that implies for prices as we go in, you know, deeper into the fall.

- What's happening with big feeder cattle?

- You know, the big feeder cattle, this time of the year, are very much in demand by feedlots.

Feedlots are looking ahead when they place these cattle to where they're gonna sell 'em in the spring.

So they're looking at that April live cattle board versus the June live cattle board, typically, this time of the year.

April is usually higher than June, so they're right now, they're really in favor of those big feeder cattle that will finish before April.

There's less of a discount between April and June right now.

It's only about four bucks.

It's normally about six or $8.

So maybe that's a little less pronounced this year, and frankly, the supply of those big feeder cattle of any size are pretty limited.

So, all in all, the demand is quite good for those.

- The year's flying by.

What are you seeing as we start heading and looking toward the fourth quarter?

- You know, on the stocker cattle, again, we've kinda got this race between supply and demand.

We're seeing a little bit of a seasonal softness in this market, but I really don't think it's gonna be very dramatic as we go forward here for the next couple of three weeks.

In general, I think supplies are tightening up, and we're gonna see that more clearly in the fourth quarter.

So, I think there's a decent chance, before the fourth quarter's over, we may see the highest prices of the year across the board for all of these feeder cattle.

- All right, Derrell, thanks a lot.

We'll see you again soon.

(upbeat music continues) - Good morning, Oklahoma, and welcome to Cow-Calf Corner.

This week, we talk about body condition scores on beef cows and kinda managing your feeding to optimize those by the time those cows calve.

We continue to deal with stress pasture conditions and lack of rainfall in Oklahoma.

And so, just thinking about the normal ebb and flow of body condition on cows as they go through their productive lifetime, typically, we would think that a dry cow without the nutritional stress of lactation should put on some weight, some flesh, some body condition, and be at about her high point at the time she calves.

Once she goes through the stress of calving and begins to lactate, it makes sense she's gonna lose some body condition, up to the point of weaning, as that calf gets bigger and bigger and puts more stress on her, consuming milk that she's producing.

And so, we address body condition scores this week from a standpoint that now is the time, if we're weaning off those spring-born calves or in weeks to come when we're doing that, it's the time to assess the body condition score on our cows and kind of target where we wanna get 'em to by the point they calve.

Now how do we go about doing that?

- Typically, if, let's say we look at a cow that weighs about 1,200 pounds right now and she's a Body Condition Score five, we feel like we wanna put about a half Body Condition Score on her.

Maybe she's a 4 1/2, we need to put a full Body Condition Score on her 'cause we generally like to keep our cows at about a 5 1/2 target at the point they calve.

Knowing that's gonna increase the likelihood they get re-bred in that 80- to 85-day window postpartum.

That keeps them on schedule to raise and wean a calf every 12 months.

So, say we got that 1200-pound cow, she's a Body Condition Score 5.

About how much weight should she gain to get to a Body Condition Score 6?

About 7 percent of her body weight.

So if we do the math, if we're at a 5 right now, we want to get her to a 6.

We're going to put about 84 pounds, or take her to about 1284.

By that same token, a 1200-pound cow and a Body Condition Score 5, she's going to drop to about a 4, by losing 7 percent of her body weight, so taking away that 84 pounds makes her about 1116.

When she drops to a Body Condition Score 4.

The Body Condition Scores are covered in chapter 20 of the latest edition of the OSU Beef Manual.

The scores range from 1 to 9.

1 is an extremely thin, emaciated kinda cow.

9 is an obese kinda cow.

And they are provided as a management tool to producers, to try to do what we're discussing this week, assess that body condition, manage and feed accordingly, to optimize reproductive efficiency in our cow herd.

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

(guitar music) - Time to mark your calendars for the Rural Economic Outlook Conference coming up on October 12th.

Here's Dr. Rodney Jones, with a preview.

- It'll be on Wednesday, October the 12th at the OSU Alumni center.

We're going to start off at about 8 o'clock in the morning with a breakfast.

All the registrants get a breakfast and a lunch.

So we'll start off with breakfast and a little bit of an introduction.

And then we're going to go right in to one of our featured speakers from outside of OSU.

We've got Dr. Jim Mintert coming down from Purdue University many of you may know that name.

Dr. Mintert was at Kansas State University, our neighbor to the north, for a good many years.

He's going to be talking about issues affecting agricultural producers.

Dr. Mintert runs the Ag Economy Barometer Survey out of the Center for Commercial Ag at Purdue.

We'll have a little bit of an update of what's going on with our undergraduate students, what's going on with our graduate students, everyone will get a great lunch.

Then we'll settle in for the afternoon.

We've got an outside speaker coming in whose gonna talk about supply chain issues in the Ag sector.

An important topic that is on a lot of people's minds.

So that will be our featured Keynote speaker in the afternoon.

Then we'll have our rapid-fire outlook panel go to the sunup website.

Information there, and a link to link you right to registration, so you can check that out, as well.

(guitar music) - And just a quick reminder about the upcoming Third-annual Rural Renewal Symposium.

The event will be held on October 5th at the ConocoPhillips OSU Alumni Center, in Stillwater.

The symposium is one of OSU's four Tier-1 research initiatives.

These efforts represent timely, impactful, engaged research.

For more information about the upcoming event, and other tier-1 programs, go to sunup.okstate.edu (fiddle music) (music continues) - Dr. Kim Anderson, our Crop Marketing Specialist, joins us now.

Kim, dive right in and describe what's happening this week.

- Well not much on the surface if you look at the crops.

Wheat, it's all Russia-Ukraine.

Wheat this week, we've been going down in the end of last week, and into this week.

Middle of the week we got a big rally going on.

If you look at what Putin is doing, he just unpredictable.

He says that he's going to use nukes, then he's not going to use.

He says he'll settle if he can keep the land that he's conquered already.

So there's a lot of uncertainty there.

The one big topic this week was 'what's it going to cost for insurance for those ships that are trying to get product out of that area?'

If you look at corn, it's been trending down just a little bit.

Our harvest 18-20% complete.

The news this week is Genetically Modified corn Russia-- Not Russia, but Mexico has a rule in there, that in the future they won't accept that as we get out into '24 and '25.

And so there's problems there that's kinda brewing underneath the surface.

And then you've got Ukraine that moving product out, and they're a big corn exporter, and you-- right now, they're not having and impact on prices.

But you shut that off, it could have an impact.

The soy beans, they've been trending down the last couple weeks.

The news coming out of Brazil, Argentina, on their harvest.

Argentina's been selling a lot of beans, and that's unusual.

They been selling them to China, and China's in that market, big time.

And ignoring the United States, and I think that's why we're falling off a little bit there.

And you've got the value of that dollar that keeps going up - Cotton, over the last month and a half or so, has moved from $1.20 down to 88 cents per pound of cotton.

Again, I think it's that dollar value going from 98 up to 113 or so, and then you got world cotton production that's relatively high and US cotton production that's low.

And so you got those two things going on there.

But right now the world production is rolling and we're getting lower cotton prices.

- It's important as we're driving along to keep an eye on down the road.

What do you see happening that could possibly impact prices further?

- I think if you're looking at wheats, you've got the Argentina, Australia harvest, the relatively large harvest in Australia.

An average harvest in Argentina.

Those harvests will start in the next six weeks or so.

So something could happen there that would impact prices.

You also got that dollar that's up to 113 now.

If that backed off, I think that could help us on prices moving up.

But if it keeps going up, then we're gonna have problems exporting our wheat.

You look beans, we got the, and corn, you got the US harvest going on right now.

No surprises there.

And then you got Brazil and Argentina that's planting and harvesting and you've got Argentina, like I talked about, selling to China.

So China's not coming into our market and, therefore, that's I think why we're seeing prices.

If China came in, we could see a rally in prices.

China stay out, they'll continue to go down.

- With all this in mind, what kind of guidance do you have for producers who are balancing the high cost to production with all this market uncertainty?

- Well, it's all uncertain.

I tell producers that you're a farmer, you're a producer, you've gotta produce.

If you don't have a product to sell, you can't make any money.

So the risk is there.

Put a sharp pencil to everything.

Don't try to shorten, take a shortcut anywhere.

When I take a shortcut, it bites me.

So if you're gonna do it, do it right and produce a high-quality product and the odds are, the market's gonna give you a profit.

- Okay, Kim, thanks a lot.

We'll see you next week.

(blue grass music beginning) - This time of year as we get into fall, we do occasionally see cattle and sometimes horses taking advantage of those Osage orange.

They may be called horse apples or hedge apples or bodark.

They can give us some problems as in particular as cattle eat those with obstructions.

Now obstructions in horses and cattle are common signs that we'll see will be feed, hay discharge from both nostrils.

They may be also coughing, increased salivation.

Also regular signs of this may be a choke.

And so we need to make sure that we get those attended to.

It can become an emergency because obviously, those cows, as well as horses, will go ahead and eat and drink and with that can cause some secondary problems if that obstruction is not relieved quickly.

In some cases, it can be very severe in that we have to do surgery with those.

Additionally, if those are ongoing, we worry about strictures, scar tissue developing within that esophagus and giving us problems long term that it can happen over and over again.

We also worry about things like aspiration pneumonia.

We wanna really take a look at our pastures, take a look at the feed if we're feeding, and find out, try to put some prevention in there for us of getting rid of those opportunities.

Cattle'll eat just about anything.

Good example that can cause us problems is just simply plastic or other debris that can show up in pastures.

Horses, we worry about pelleted feeds at certain times and the size of that.

And so we want to make sure that the teeth are good on those horses and that we're feeding an appropriate feed related to their needs and ability to consume it.

- Thanks so much for joining us for "SUNUP" this week.

Remember, you can find us anytime at SUNUP.okstate.edu.

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.

(blue grass music)