Chickasha Biofules Field Day
Good morning and welcome to "SUNUP." I'm Clinton Griffiths. On October 21st, the Chickasha research station will be holding its second annual biofuels field day. Over the years, there's been a lot of talk about growing corn for ethanol which may leave some Oklahoma producers feeling left out. Researchers will be discussing alternative biofuel crops including sweet sorghum.

Corn production in Oklahoma is basically limited to a large extent in northeast Oklahoma, a little bit in north central and then the large majority of it is irrigated out in the panhandle.

Growing grain sorghum as a feed for cattle is already common in Oklahoma. But sweet sorghum also has a history in other states.

Traditionally, this crop was grown many places around the state. People may have even operated their own on-farm presses to press the juice and boil that juice down until they have sorghum syrup and molasses. We still have a few people in the state that do that. The Wewoka sorghum fest is based around that concept.

Sorghum has low pest pressures and grows well in Oklahoma's climate and compared to switch grass another biofuels crop that requires a bit of processing collecting the sugars.

Well, the nice thing about sweet sorghum is these stalks. You're going to press these stalks. And what is going to come out is the water solutions. That's different from switch grass. You have to break down the cellulosic series to arrive simple sugars. And even grain that you have complex starches that you have to break down. When you squeeze this, you have a sugar-water solution to ferment directly.

Together, OSU researchers are developing a machine that can harvest and press the juice at the same time, such as this early prototype built by lee mcclune. By pressing at the time of harvest, producers can start the fermentation process on site before going to the plant.

If we can start the fermentation process on the farm, we could actually come by with kind of like other old ampi milk system trucks that would come by and pick up a load of milk. In this case, it would be fermentation material, get that process started. So ma means that the plant is not handling all of that material or doesn't need the storage capacity up-front and the producer can store it.

Not only will on-site processing increase profitability of the ethanol, the remaining materials can be used for cattle or other production systems.

What you end up with are these stalks that are going to be ground up, pressed, that can be silage for cattle feed. The leftover juice that's not alcohol, that can be simply put in a holding tank or holding pond and sprayed back on to the fields.

Sweet sorghum works as a rotational crop for wheat.

We struggle to find alternative crops in Oklahoma for wheat systems. It's fitted for those dryland systems in western Oklahoma. Of all the biofuels, crops that we hear talked about, I think sweet sorghum in western Oklahoma holds a lot of potential.

The Chickasha field day will be an opportunity to see the research being done in sweet sorghum and switch grass.

Our research system has numerous biofuel programs ongoing right now. We're working on the sweet sorghums as well as the forage sorghum. We will have a lot to offer our producers and anyone interested in the biofuel industry.

If you have never been to a field day, I would encourage you to attend on the 21st. Not only do you get to ask questions of OSU researchers in the field, you get to meet other producers considering biofuel crops, not to mention a free lunch to boot. Hopefully, we'll see you there.

Oklahoma Quality Beef Network
It's that time of year when a lot of producers are waning cattle and looking for places to send that to make a little profit. Doug, you're working with the Oklahoma Quality Beef Network. Tell us about that.

Oklahoma Quality Beef Network is the value enhancement program for beef cattle producers. It provides an opportunity for producers to obtain additional income through four pillars. One is health management verification or otherwise known as preconditioning. Agent source verification, production verification which is your organic and genetic verification which is any breed association in the branded program.

What's the benefit of having these verification programs in these four pillars?

Basically in terms of precondition, that third party verification has had a premium of up to $6 per 100 weight on these cattle. There's a lot of value to in terms of to the producer.

That's what we're talking about is value to the producer. What kind of returns can they see from joining this network?

The VAC 45 program is something we have a lot of interest in right now, the precontinuing. And we have several scheduled this fall, four of them. There's a lot of hidden value, but there's value that our producer can receive a premium, $3 to $6 per 100 weight it's been proven in the value added sales year after year. The opportunity is there. The guarantee is never there, but the opportunity is there. There's a lot of benefits through these sales from a producer's standpoint as well as a buyer. For more on the cattle, you're going to reduce the cattle stress and shrink. And shrink alone looking at the shrink from a calf right off the cow to the sale, there's shrink right there. You're going to wean these in 45 days. You'll sell a heavier calf 45 days down the road. Another benefit is going to have an improved or increased immune system. These calves will be healthier as they hit the next phase of the industry, the stocker phase or going right into the feed lot. And also this time of year, typically in the month of October, cattle prices are falling as everybody is weaning the spring-born calves. We're holding them 45 days. Typically mid to late November and into December, the prices increase. We take advantage of a price increase through the seasonal changes.

If somebody wants to get signed up and be part of this program, what do they need to do?

To sign up for OQBN and VAC 45 sale, they need to contact me and one of the barn owners or one of the local county Extension agents. Once they make contact, if they have an interest in participating and enrolling their cattle, we have basically a three page enrollment form where we ask for basic information. We want to know who you are, where you are located, what number of cattle you have, what breed and your management in your herd. Once we get that complete, we have an ear tag we ask you put in that calf's ear that will give identification of that calf belonging to that producer in that sale. Once we get that done, we're going through a third-party verification. We're going to come out and verify the cattle, that they are weaned and they have been weaned when you say they are. They have been vaccinated. We have a health protocol they must follow that the bull calves have been castrated and the cattle dehorned and there's no health defects in the herd. Once we get to that point, they will be enrolled into the sale.

That will be good. Any time we can add extra money into someone's pocket that will be great. Check with your local county educator or give Doug a call here at Oklahoma State University.

Canola Update
Looks like Oklahoma is going to see a lot more canola this season. For some of you who are new to the crop, there are some things you need to think about right now. Here to talk to us is canola Extension specialist, Mark Boyles.

Glad to have you out.

Glad to be here. I hear we're going to have more canola this season. How many acres are we expecting?

Well, that's still a little bit in doubt, but it looks to me like we're going to have over 100,000 acres. We have a lot more people asking for insurance this year, which is tremendous. We've got a lot of people asking for help to calibrate their drills. Heath Sanders, he's been running around all over the country and myself calibrating drills and helping growers setting up and getting ready, finding their seed for them, getting everything, the ground ready. It's been unbelievable. The phone has just rung off the hook.

So, if I am new to canola and this is my first season planting what do you think I need to be looking for?

The first thing, insurance is up now as far as coverage of planting. But now is about the time you want to stop planting canola. It has good winter tolerance but has to get a few leaves on it in the rosette or dormant stage. If you haven't got it in the ground, you need to get it in the ground as soon as you can.

Those that have some early planting done, is that what it looks like now?

Most of the canola that's up, this is the coteledon stage of canola. Basically looks like a radish you'd see in the garden. Once you know that, it's recognizable. Once it gets bigger, these are muddy because it's a little wet out here this morning. You have the coteledon, those reddish coteledons turn into these radish-like and you start counting main leaves. This is like one, two, three main leaves on this canola. And for this canola to survive the winter well, it needs to get enough growth in the fall to get three to five main leaves on it before we get into that 26 degrees for 10 hours and we essentially wheat and canola both go dormant.

Is that a good standard? For those used to growing wheat, how do you know?

Looking at a stand of canola for first-time growers, wheat growers can look at a wheat stand and say that's a good stand, that's not a good stand. I'm going to have to go plant it again and fill in these areas and that area. Canola is a little bit different. Canola is a lot more ragged looking for a stand. They can have a lot more plants. I have had many growers take out stands that I would have left because they didn't think they were good enough. If we take a quick look at this stand of canola here, right here in front of me, very excellent stand. If you have a stand like this, you've got it. This is perfect. In fact, it's probably too many plants. You are planting five pounds per acre. That's over 500,000 seeds in an acre. If all those come up, you basically have too many plants. Every grower says how many square foot do I know in average? In spring canola it's seven or eight. In winter we're at two or three plants per square foot. It's great and will be a fine plant but you only need about two or three plants per square foot.

What they need to be concerned about is wheat and early competition?

Early competition in wheat is important. We have an area we can go talk about competition.

Ok.

But the first six weeks is critical. You need to be taking out your wheat. Let's go over here and talk about it a little.

Sure.

Early competition in canola is extremely important. More so than wheat. And that's what we're trying to look at and show the growers. We have been telling them over the years early competition is important, but show them how important it is. Particularly at this stage of growth in this particular competition study. What we're trying to do here, we've got canola and one of our major weeds in canola since we're planting in continuous wheat, a lot of growers had wheat is volunteer wheat. We have a lot of other grasses we're taking out but we're using volunteer wheat as the competitive. And canola, it's not very competitive at this stage. So if you have a lot of weeds in your field and the growers are going out early and he looks at the weeds in his field in wheat, he needs to pull the trigger and control those grasses in canola quicker than in wheat. Canola, when it's small, is not very competitive. When it gets four to five leaves, it's very competitive. If you wait longer than six weeks, you're losing profit on the bottom line.

Thanks so much for your time today.

Glad to have you out. Appreciate it.

No problem.

Cow-Calf Corner
Fall calving cows have a distinct advantage in terms of being in good body condition during the calving season because they are coming out of summer, usually coming off of good grass and, therefore, they have adequate amount of body stores. In order to get a good start into the breeding season. A really, really important point, however, is that we must maintain most of that body condition into and through the breeding season. You see, there was some research that was done here at Oklahoma State University with, I understand, spring calving cows. But it illustrates a very important point about fall calvers. And that is what happens if we allow body condition to fall rather dramatically after calving going into the breeding season. You see, what they looked at what cows in the body condition score of about a mid point 5, and they held that body condition with one set of cows and got a very nice rebreeding rate up in the 93% category. When they looked at cows that were allowed to lose one full body condition score between calving and the breeding season, then the rebreeding percentage fell off rather dramatically down to about 74%, a rather dramatic drop-off in terms of rebreeding performance. With these fall calving cows, we understand the forage quality will be going down as we go into the fall and winter months, especially after frost. That means we probably want to put out some supplement in order to keep those cows maintaining that body condition into and through the breeding season. And that will result in an excellent pregnancy percent annual next year. Hey, we'll visit with you again next week on "SUNUP"'s Cow-Calf Corner.

Market Monitor
As we heard, we may see double the number of canola acres this year. What are the canola contracts looking at?

The 2010 canola contracts are about $7.70 a bushel, about 15.4 cents a pound. I think that's an attractive contract because there's an act of god clause in there. If you lose the crop due to weather or some other reason, you don't have to deliver the canola against that contract.

What about cleaning up the field? That's another reason producers are switching.

That's an excellent reason for planting canola. Last year producers had rye problems in the wheat fields. They delivered the wheat to the elevators and had over 10 percent rye in it. It's no longer wheat. It's mixed grain. If you have mixed grain, that's a pretty large discount on price discount on that. Also we have cheat and other problems in the field. Canola just helps break that either disease and/or weed cycle in our wheat fields. I think that's a good reason to use canola.

There's an opportunity there. Let's talk about wheat. We saw a 50-cent rally this week. What's behind that.

We said if the Kansas City Board of Trade December contract closed above $5, we'd hit $5.40. We hit $5.43 this week. I think the biggest reaso is probably the index funds have been buying corn, beans and wheat. We had good export demand in sales and shipments on wheat the last couple of weeks. And then corn prices have came up. So the big reason index funds, but there are some fundamental reasons, too.

Ok. Any impacts from the low dollar?

The dollar has had an impact. It's slightly lower, but the biggest impact is the funds coming in for that.

Do you see wheat prices continuing to increase?

We're watching the Kansas City Board of Trade December contracts. We broke $5 this week. We said the target price was $5.40. We hit $5.43. Now, we're trading between $5 and $5.40. To continue the uptrend, we have to break $5.40 or to go back you've got to break $5 on the bottom side. We're just going to move sideways until we see what's going on with the CFTC. The index funds have to change some positions this next week. It's hard to call whether we'll go up or down from here.

What about producers that have wheat to sell?

I think they need to be staggering in this market. I wouldn't sell all my wheat, but everytime I got a good $.20, $.30 rally, I'd be selling some wheat.

Kim Anderson, our grain marketing specialist.

Shop Stop
Hi, welcome to Shop Stop. Today we're going to be talking about casters. If you are limited in space in your shop, putting things on casters could be the way to go. 8 they are handy for your benches. You can push stuff against the wall. Think about what you're using that bench for or table saw to determine what kind of caster you want to put it on. The casters have a load rating. Those load ratings should be listed where you purchase the caster from. But you need to make sure that it will carry the load that you're going to put them on. So you need to have a good guesstimate of what kind of weight the equipment is before you just put some casters on.

Yeah. Anything about the surface that you're going to roll it on as well. If you have a really smooth concrete surface, you can probably get by with at smaller caster. If you are going over more rough ground, you probably want to be thinking about a larger type wheel for that.

They also have different compounds for the wheels. This is a hard-type compound. This is a softer rubber and will actually work on a non-marred surfaces where they will both pick up debris, but that one will actually move stuff out of the way a little bit and not mark your surface.

Think about what you're going to put it on. Think about the load. You're going to wheel out a table that's going to have a vice on it and you're going to be pounding on it, maybe you need a heavier caster. Think about whether you need to lock that table or work bench in 9 place. You'll want a locking typecaster for that.

Now, they make swivel caster and they make lock caster. These are non-swivel. The swivel type you have on one end. The non-swivel you want on the other or put swivels all the way around where you can maneuver any which way you want to. Like he said, there are locks available for these that you can lock them down. For example, if you had a table saw and casters, you can lock it down and saw your wood without pushing your table saw across the floor.

That's it this week for shop stop. A little handy caster tip. We'll see you next time.

AGWEATHER
Hi, I'm Al Sutherland with your Mesonet AGWEATHER report. October has started off to be a months of lots of rain and cloudy weather. Our first map shows rainfall from October 7th through the 13th. And during this week, every Mesonet site received rainfall. In the east side of the state over near Westville, seven inches. Then as we come across the state, we can see those rainfall amounts drop off. 5-inch areas and 4 and 3 and 2. We get out to the southwest part of the state, below an inch and the panhandle below an inch. We have had a lot of cloudy days in October. This is a chart for Watonga from October 1st through the 13th. We can see the first two days they had about 100 percent of their possible sunlight. But four out of the 13 days had only 50 percent of their possible sunlight and seven of the 13 days, 25 percent or less of their possible sunlight. Well, while the days have been cloudy and the sunlight levels low, for new crops coming up out of the ground, it's been ideal. Here's a field near Chickasha of alfalfa and you can see how well it's emerged. Now all we need is sunlight to kick it off. Here's Gary McManus with the look at the week ahead and the winter ahead.

Thanks, Al. Well, I'm so sick of the cool and wet weather, I'm going to spend all my time looking forward instead of back. Let's take a look at next week's weather. Outlooks for next week show increased chance of below normal temperatures across most of the state, especially in eastern portions and an increased chance of above normal rainfall in the far southeastern corner. As we look forward to the winter months of December, January and February, we see a classic El Nino pattern with increased chance of above normal temperatures in the northern U.S. and increased chance of below normal temperatures in the southern U.S. especially in the southeast. And for precipitation, we see an increased chance of above normal precip in the southern U.S. and increased chance of below normal precipitation in the Pacific northwest. Those outlooks are based on moderate El Nino. It takes a really strong El Nino to give us significant impacts in Oklahoma. That's all we have this week. We'll see you next week on AGWEATHER.

Ralph's Packing Co.
Heading to the local butcher shop used to be a fairly common chore. Over the years, local processors gave way to national packing companies, supermarkets and big box retailers. Yet, there are still a few local packing companies and meat processors who continue to build a business based on decades of delivering quality meat. On a two-lane road in the outskirts of Perkins, Oklahoma, you'll find Ralph's Packing Company loading another truck with the day's orders. The same thing it's been doing for the last 50 years.

That's a big milestone to me, you know. I never thought I'd see it. But we have seen it and now I have my daughter, son-in-law. They are working in the business. And hopefully they will carry on in the third generation.

Gary Crane is the son of Ralph and runs the company that now processes 10,000 pounds of product every day.

Thanksgiving is a long ways off.

You are already thinking about it.

Already thinking about it.

This year alone, they will smoke nearly 5,000 birds during the holiday season.

We do a small amount of slaughtering of beef and pork animals. We do a lot of further processing in the fact that we cure a lot of meat, a lot of pork products, a lot of poultry products. We cure and smoke. That's bacon we smoked yesterday. We call that Arkansas style. We make a lot of beef jerky.

In fact, beef jerky is one of their biggest sellers. It's not uncommon to see the familiar Ralph's jerky packaging being sold in stores across the state. Comparatively speaking, Ralph's is a small facility with about 35 employees. Yet when it comes to meeting government regulations, Ralph's and others like them are being hung with some big expectations.

I'm all for food safety. I'm 100 percent believer in it. Some of the processes that the government is mandating now is a one size fits all type regulation. And some of these rules are made for extremely large plants. And sometimes in small plants, it's just almost an impossibility to do it.

And so understanding, interpreting and executing the process to comply with those regulations has been challenging. It's been a learning process. And that's one area where Ralph's has been to the center.

Oklahoma State's Food and Agricultural Products Center has helped Ralph's define and meet those expectations.

We may not always agree or understand what's behind the regulations, but we can deliver something where we can comply with the regulations.

Will you bring us some more meat, please?

Allowing Ralph's to keep cooking, keep cutting and continuing to grow, hopefully for another 50 years down the road.