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Corn and soybean schoolBy Richard C. Snell Barton County Extension Agent, agriculture Kansas It will get you every time. I'll have to admit it's probably my fault we had that blizzard this week. Last week in my column I mentioned how it was getting to look a lot like Christmas even though we didn't have snow on the ground. Well, we certainly do now. I hope that will put you into the meeting mood. On Dec. 22, we will be having a corn and soybean school at the 4-H Building on Highway 281 between Great Bend and Hoisington. It will begin at 9:30 a.m., with the actual program starting at 10 a.m. We will finish up around 3 p.m. We do need farmers to pre-register for a meal count, so sign up at our office by e-mailing me at rsnell@ksu.edu or call us at 620-793-1910. You can also stop by our office and pay a personal visit at 1800 12th Street in Great Bend. The program is free with the lunch being sponsored. We will be discussing the K-State crop performance tests and some of the new seed trait genetics offered and whether they are cost effective. We will be covering both dryland irrigated situations. Other topics will include soil compaction, efficient water use, soil fertility, and pest management technology. Some of the herbicide companies will talk on what new products they have to offer. We hope you can attend. However, we do want your name as well as your information. Please notify us by noon, Dec. 18 of your intentions. Winter and more Christmas ideas at your Extension office Hopefully, the weather is putting you in the Christmas spirit as opposed to what a pain it is to get around in or how it affects the animals and us. Having said that, most of you know I hate winter or at least the cold. Christmas and basketball are about the only things I like about it. Last week, I wrote about items for sale at our office for the farmer at Christmas time. We also have quite a few free items as well that you can pick up for yourself, your neighbor or loved one. I have talked about the famous red pocket beef booklets for $5, but we also have a free beef calving record book that is not as detailed and has less information but still allows you to keep calf records. The next one may not be worthy as a gift but it could be. It is the Kansas Farm Account Book. If you still do your books with a pencil (there's nothing wrong with that), these are a necessity for the farmer. These sell for $3 each. The Kansas Farm Account Book is a loose leaf system with pages for receipts, expenses, inventories, crop, and livestock records for a full calendar or fiscal year. The categories are set up to follow the Federal Income Tax Farm Schedule. Extra pages can be added or removed easily. There is a binder available as well. This is the last "cost" item I will mention in this article. All the others are free. While on the subject of account books, we also offer family account books for keeping your records and budgets. We have two versions of this. We have a few copies of the old version legal-sized loose leaf for $3. The only difference between the new, which is $5, and the old, is the old ones still say 19__ instead of 20__ for the year, which won't affect your accounting. Other items include copies of production handbooks from K-State on corn, wheat, grain sorghum, soybeans, alfalfa, and sunflowers. We have two different sizes of pesticide record keeping books that will help farmers comply with the pesticide record law. These items are all free. Then we get into the 3-ring loose leaf notebooks that can be purchased and periodically updated. The first one is the Kansas Farm Management and Marketing Handbook. It contains crop and livestock budgets plus many financial management tools such as income statements, cash flow sheets, balance sheets, marketing pamphlets and other information sheets. Its cost is $75 for the notebook and 3 years worth of updates. Sample and test hay before winter feeding I wish I had written this last week because a lot of you had to start feeding hay already due to the snow storm. Do you know how much protein and energy your cows will get when you start feeding your hay? Find out by following the following instructions for sampling and testing. Correct sampling techniques, followed by lab tests of forage quality, are necessary for cattle producers who want to get the most value from their hay and profit from their animals. If this group includes you, let's make sure you are doing the best you can. Maybe the most important, and sometimes most difficult, step in sampling hay is deciding which bales and stacks should be included in each sample. Ideally, each sample should include only bales that were produced under nearly identical conditions. A few years ago, a producer had some of his hay quick tested for nitrates and it came back as alright. However, in the middle of the winter, he lost several cows to nitrate poisoning and found that just one or two bales were hot out of 100 or more. So if you have bales from a drought spot or stressed area, you may want to sample those separately.
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