The drought monitor for Kansas indicates that except for a small swath southeast of the Kansas City area, the state is out of drought conditions. And not part is in severe or exception drought. After the rain, a lot of rain, we had freezing temperatures and snow in many parts of Kansas last weekend. Believe it or not, this wasn’t all bad for several reasons but first what did this cold snap mean? Our long-term average first frost normally occurs around the 15th of October. The last few years haven’t really seen this until the end of October/early November. So actually, this was just a little early.  Remember there is a difference between the first frost and the end of the growing season, a killing frost. Parts of the area and state recorded a killing frost, a frost where the temperatures are cold enough and long enough to shut down or kill all but the hardiest plants. This is normally considered to occur when the temperatures fall to 28 degrees or lower for several hours. Many areas experienced this temperature condition over two nights. Putting aside human comfort, what are some of the potential problems and benefits of this weather?

Problems

• Believe it or not, there is a fair amount of cotton just south of Barton County. While cotton will call it a summer at temperatures well above freezing, this definitely stopped development and the opening of bolls. The plus side is stripping should be easier with the loss of vegetation. The negative is the loss of cotton lint from unopened bolls if a boll opener hadn’t been applied.

• The cool weather is also slowing down the drying of fields enough to return to fieldwork and also the dry down of grain to harvest moisture for some fields. Naturally wheat planting is affected and the cooler weather has cooled the soil which will slow germination and development of the seedling.

• Loss of nitrogen fertilizer applied to wheat fields which can fortunately be replaced.

Benefits

• We had saturated soils and some areas were/are under water. This cool weather helped wheat plants cope more effectively with the saturated soils as they dry out and should have limited the extent of damage.

• Soybean pod shattering would have been worse if we had immediately returned to hotter, sunnier weather.

• Insect populations were reduced and it should have helped especially with Hessian fly.

• While wheat growth will be slowed, especially on late planted fields, these cooler, more seasonal temperatures allow more soil moisture to be maintained and for the wheat to gradually acquire cold tolerance.

Dr. Victor L. Martin is the agriculture instructor/coordinator for Barton Community College. He can be reached at 620-792-9207, ext. 207.