This is the final set of articles for the 2009 season of the Field Crop CAT Alert newsletter. Click here for an index of articles on topics covered this year. Educators and specialists have worked hard to inform readers about current issues and crop production throughout the last few months.

We will continue to publish timely articles to the Field Crop CAT Alert web site. Not signed up for our email notification? Send an email to catalert@msu.edu with your full name and note that you wish to subscribe to the field crop edition. You can also sign up to received RSS feeds when new articles are posted.Look for the bright orange RSS feed logo on the right side of this page.

We love to hear feedback from our readers. Do you have a comment or suggestion? Please send it to catalert@msu.edu. Indicate whether you are referring to our fruit, vegetable, field crop or landscape edition.

Thank you. - Joy Landis, editor and Andrea Buchholz, asst. editor

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Beth Bishop...Check out the overnight temperatures tool at www.enviroweather.msu.edu. This tool displays overnight temperatures recorded by area weather stations during the previous night. It also shows forecasted low temperature for the upcoming night. Late afternoon/early evening dewpoints are also provided.

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The 2009 North Central Region - Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (NCR-SARE) Farmer Rancher Grant Call for Proposals is now available online at http://sare.org/ncrsare/cfp.htm.

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If you are seeking practical training on improving soil quality, working with compost, manures and cover crops and managing pests, consider attending the 2009 Soil Building workshop on August 14 for field crops and August 15 for vegetables.

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By Ned Birkey... Many farmers hire some farm work to be done or else perform custom work for others. What is a fair amount to charge or to pay for such work? Dennis Stein, Extension Educator, District Farm Business Management for MSU Extension has surveyed farmers in the Thumb area of Michigan regarding custom machine hire. The numbers below represent his lastest survey of October 2008.

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As we approach the middle of the CAT Alert publishing season, now is a great time to poll you, the readers, about our new website. Please fill out this short, five question survey: www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=UXKfFGg4s5jaenMSpGPwCg_3d_3d Your feedback helps us make improvements as well as provides important information to share with our funders who make this publication available for free on the Internet.
– Andrea Buchholz, assistant editor.

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By Vera Bitsch... During this past April, the total number of hired workers was estimated at 903,000 individuals; that’s down by 2 percent from a year ago. In the reference week, 680,000 individuals were hired directly by farm operators. The average number of hours worked stood at 40.1, down 2 percent compared to last year’s 40.8 hours.

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By Kurt Thelen... In the mass media lately we have been hearing a lot about “carbon footprints,” “greenhouse gases,” “climate change,” and “global warming.” Unfortunately, some of the information is non-defensible, inaccurate, or misrepresented. This muddling of the facts has been especially prevalent when assessing the environmental impact of biofuels.

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By Natalie Rector... How would you like to save $40, $60 or even $100 per acre on manured fields? Plan to take pre-sidedress nitrate soil tests (PSNTs) on fields going to corn or other high nitrogen user crops.

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By Fred Springborn... Quite a few folks were lucky enough to start planting earlier this month before some of the big rains. With dry weather and summer-like temperatures over the past couple of days some of those fields are getting crusty. Crusty enough to where corn seedlings are having trouble emerging. Many are thinking of pulling the ‘ole rotary hoe out of the back corner of the shed or are angling to borrow the neighbors. Here are a few suggestions on rotary hoe operation.

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By Christy Sprague, Wesley Everman and Bernie Zandstra... We invite you to attend the annual Michigan State University Weed Tour, beginning at the MSU Agronomy Farm located at the intersection of Beaumont Road and Mt. Hope Road on Wednesday, July 1. Registration begins at 9:00 AM with the field tour kicking off at 9:30 AM. The tour will provide ample opportunity to look at research plots and participate in some short field presentations.

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Note this information is from the latest MABA Newsletter.

For those of you handling or working with stored grain, several courses on bin entry and rescue safety will be held this summer. The courses are 14 hours long over one and a half days. The courses are appropriate for farmers, millers, and others handling bulk grain, or for firemen and rescue personnel responding to emergencies. There is a fee for each.

Introductory level
Star-of-the-West Milling Co, Gera MI
June 19-20 or June 29-30

Intermediate Level
The Andersons, Toledo, OH
August 18-19

For more info, see this handout: http://www.ipm.msu.edu/cat09field/BE_TR_Flyer_2009.pdf, or contact Jenny Boeckman, 1-800-888-9596 ext 213 or jenny.boeckman@rci-safety.com.

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By Christina DiFonzo... Over the last several years, a slew of extension specialists from Midwest universities have retired or left academia. May 15 marks another loss for extension entomology. Many of you who read regional newsletters or attend meetings in other states know Dr. Kevin Steffey as the extension specialist in agricultural entomology at the University of Illinois. Kevin is particularly well known for his work on corn rootworm.

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By Fred Warner... In a recent Field Crops CAT Alert newsletter, Dr. Warncke submitted an article entitled, “Effects of cutting back on potassium.” After reading that article, I got motivated to write this one. Since virtually all plant-parasitic nematodes spend some time in the soil and it is the medium in which plants grow, I thought I would address the influence various edaphic factors have on nematodes and their impacts on plants.

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As you know, we have changed the CAT Alert web format this season. With the changes come many new features. We have established an informal article rating systems with stars, which allow you, the reader, to rate each article’s usefulness. By selecting a five-star rating, the highest rating possible, you are essentially saying the article provided beneficial information or it was exceptionally good. When using our search engine, these stars can help readers select articles.

Another feature available is found below the article in the “Actions” menu. Here you can email an article to a friend; use the Permalink option for saving the link; “Kick” the article (the more you click this option, the better chance the article will stay on the homepage, it is another way to rate the article); Dzone an article (another Web 2.0 social media sharing option), or bookmark the article with del.icio.us (an online version of your bookmarks that use keywords).

We will continue to update you with changes to our web. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email us at catalert@msu.edu. – Andrea Buchholz, asst. editor

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By Kurt Thelen -- The recent extended period of rainy weather has growers anxious to get on the tractor and resume planting and in some cases, begin planting corn. The extreme wet weather in late April that affected most of the state has delayed corn planting relative to past years.

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Ned Birkey...Many farmers hire some farm machine work to be done or else perform custom work for others. What is a fair amount to charge or to pay for such work? Michigan State University has Extension Bulletin E-2131, Revised October 2002 available free of charge, which outlines labor, tractor, and machine rental rates based upon a survey from around the state of Michigan.

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Darryl Warncke...With harvest operations comes trafficking over the fields by combines, tractors, wagons, grain carts, trucks etc. With trafficking comes soil compaction. The degree of compaction that occurs depends on soil moisture. Excessively wet soils will compact more than dry soils. The larger the tire, the deeper the compaction occurs. Compaction is most evident during harvest, but compaction may also have occurred during seedbed preparation.

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Anyone in Michigan who grows, sells, processes or eats food now has a new resource to help them. Market Maker© locates producers, businesses and markets of food products, providing an important link between Michigan producers and their buyers including end-consumers.

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Richard Leep...Summer annual grasses are used for summer pasture, green chop, hay, and silage. Annual grasses are normally used as emergency forage. The most common annual grasses used in Michigan are sudangrass, hybrid sudangrass, sorghum-sudangrass hybrids, and forage sorghum. A relatively new annual grass called teff, has been grown to a limited extent in Michigan with varying results, however, some growers have had good experience growing it.

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Bruce MacKellar, Dennis Stein and Roger Betz...2008 has already shown significant volatility in the commodity markets. A fallout of this market has been the hesitance or inability of grain merchandisers to continue to forward contract grains. Rapidly advancing markets in January and February have forced many grain purchasers to continually shell out large sums of dollars to meet margin demands on their brokerage accounts servicing forward contracted grains at the CBOT. This means that many producers who want to lock in grain prices will have to work with brokerage firms directly. This may be out of the comfort zone for many producers.

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MSU ag economist Jim Hilker posts his Market Outlook and Probabilistic Price Forecasts for Grain and Livestock on the Internet at: http://www.msu.edu/~hilker/index.html These are updated regularly, so please visit his web site if you'd like the latest information.

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Lyndon Kelly...New wells and surface water withdrawals in Michigan installed February, 2006 that are capable of pumping 100,000 gallon per day (70 gpm) are now required to register with Michigan Department of Agriculture prior to beginning to pump. All water withdrawals that reported prior to 2006 are considered properly registered.

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Lyndon Kelley...How to achieve the most agronomical and economical start from irrigation during planting season is important. Achieving the maximum uniform germination and emergence can be assured through proper early season water management. Irrigating fields prior to or just after planting, can keep the planter moving and still meet the “plant into moisture” requirement.

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Zachary Huang with Christina DiFonzo...If you have been listening to the radio or reading papers the last few weeks, chances are that you have already heard about the alarming honey bee die-offs around the country. The phenomenon is officially named “colony collapse disorder” (CCD). This disorder has the media all excited because it is large in scale (25 states are affected), came in quick (colonies that were fine in August-September collapsed around October-November), and hit people hard (many beekeepers with hundreds to thousands of colonies are losing 50-90 percent of their hives).

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Kurt Thelen...Advances in handheld global positioning system (GPS) receivers provide growers with a low cost tool for crop scouting. A satellite based augmentation system has been developed by the government for the aviation industry to improve the accuracy and integrity of information signals broadcast by GPS satellites. This technology is driving down the price and increasing the accuracy of handheld GPS receivers.

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Kurt Thelen...The recent extended period of rainy weather has growers anxious to get back on the tractor and planting corn again. Relatively wet and cool weather in late April has delayed corn planting relative to the past few years. Fortunately, modern planting equipment allows for rapid planting once fields finally dry out. I heard a grower remark once that with current modern farm machinery, “the entire state of Michigan can be planted in about one week’s time.”

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Christina DiFonzo...The crane repellent Avitec is available again this summer for corn in Michigan (as well as Wisconsin and Minnesota) through the Section 18 process. The Section 18 is specifically to reduce crane damage in newly planted corn seed.

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Agricultural irrigators are required by law to report their 2006 water withdrawals to the Michigan Department of Agriculture by April 1, 2007. Producers that have the capacity to withdrawal more than 70 gallons per minute of water need to report their water usage. Water withdrawals can be reported as either gallons per acre or acre inches applied each month.

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Sieg Snapp and Russell Freed...There has been new interest recently in an old oilseed crop, canola. Canola was developed by Canadian plant breeders that made selections from rapeseed that had low erucic acid and glucosinolate levels – less than 2% erucic acid and less than 30 micro-moles of glucosinolate in the meal. As a member of the Brassica family, canola could be an important crop to help diversify our region’s agriculture, complement our cropping systems, and maintain a vibrant rural sector.

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Kurt Thelen...When scouting corn and soybeans this year it quickly becomes obvious that the cold wet period experienced in mid-May dramatically exposed the spatial variability within fields. Stands that appeared uniform at emergence now are highly variable in plant size and vigor. The stress of excess water and associated limited root growth magnifies field spatial variability and can reveal problem areas within the field.

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Christina DiFonzo...In past years, I’ve visited fields with tattered and ripped leaves attributed to insect feeding, only to find hail damage. With the recent thunderstorm activity, I am reprinting this list of tips that point towards hail rather than insects.

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Ned Birkey...Although Asian soybean rust did not affect Michigan soybeans in 2005, many farmers were spraying for weeds, soybean aphids and perhaps tank mixing manganese. March is an excellent time to “tune up” field crop ground sprayers for 2006. Does your farm sprayer have the capacity to handle multiple, or twin nozzles, higher spray pressure and can you raise and keep the spray boom level? Can you adapt your farm sprayer with taller and narrower tires to spray taller soybeans in narrow rows?

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