I took a soil temperature reading
(6 inch) at 8:30 am this morning 1 mile south of Plainview.
66°F
/ conventional till / cotton on cotton / pre-irrigated.
While
this reading is a touch lower than ideal for cotton planting, when evaluating
the weather for the upcoming week, we note a warming trend that looks to stay. Cotton should be ok, soil temperature wise,
to plant. I have a much larger concern
about the lack of moisture, dry conditions sucking out all of the costly
applied pre-irrigation, and our ability to irrigate up a crop. There truly are few of these problems a
gentle three inch rain would not alleviate.
As
I make preliminary rounds through the county, I am finding an alarming number
of weeds already emerged in several of the area’s potential cotton fields. These weeds have been flushing with each and
every pre-irrigation. In some cases, a
select few weeds have come through pre-plant residual. In others without any applied residual, the
number of emerged weeds looks to be 5 or six fold. In seasons past, these weeds, regardless of
number, were a minor concern as we could count on Roundup to clean them up with
the first pass. I no longer feel this is
the case. In fact I could make the case that
these already emerged weeds have been at least 90% of our problematic weeds in
recent seasons.
I
urge producers to get a quick scout across their fields to confirm or disavow
the presence of these seedling weeds before the planter heads to the field. We still have some pre-plant knockdown with
residual options that has a good chance of taking these weeds down before the
planter leaves seeds among the weed patches.
Please call or come by with any
questions,
Blayne
Reed
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