Agriculture

Cold temperatures lose there bite when wind speeds are low. Even temperatures down near freezing can feel balmy when the wind is still.

The real chill comes when the wind drives the cold through your clothes. With a biting wind, cold temperatures can chill you clear down to the bone. Consider Sunday, February 22, 2015 across the state of Oklahoma. The coldest wind chills that day were single digit numbers. On the Oklahoma Mesonet, wind chill and heat index are reported on the Apparent Temperture map. This provides a single map that can show either or both heat and cold stress.

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In the Great Plains, wheat and cattle go together like beef and potatoes, pancakes and syrup, bread and butter. Wheat is a great winter forage. Cattle love it and its excellent for weight gain.

Farmers and ranchers have a choice to graze wheat and skip grain production or pull cattle in late winter and allow the wheat plant enough time to produce grain. To grow wheat as a dual-purpose crop, make the most of grazing, and still produce a good grain crop, wheat growers pay attention to first hollow stem.

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You need the weather to hold for two more hours to finish your latest job. Will it? Will it get too windy to spray? Is the temperature going to change rapidly impacting livestock? Is rain headed your way?

The National Weather Service (NWS) has a new EXPERIMENTAL forecast webpage/widget designed for mobile devices that offers an excellent assortment of easy to access forecast and weather information.

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Farmers and ranchers understand what relative humidity means. Humidity and hay moisture are critical for proper baling. The right humidity is needed for cranking up the combines for wheat harvest in summer or the cotton stripper in fall. High humidities and mild temperatures make it ideal for fungi to attack plants. Low humidity increases fire danger.

So farmers and ranchers have a good feel for humidity. What about dewpoint temperature? Dewpoint temperature is that other “temp” that TV meteorologists have on their graphics. Dewpoint is common to meteorologists. It’s not commonly talked about in ag circles.

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How does wind impact fire danger? Sunday, January 18, 2015 and Monday, January 19, 2015 provided us a great example of how wind contributes to fire danger. The National Weather Service offices in Norman and Tulsa designated Sunday as a Red Flag Warning fire day. Monday didn’t rate that designation.

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Hot, cold, hot, cold. November of 2014 went up and down the temperature scale like a yo-yo. While the days and weeks of November brought up and down weather, a similar trend played out between the months of October and November.

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What value does a graph line represent? How can a graph of weather data be a risk management tool? Will comparing rainfall to good and bad years help you make better crop decisions?

The difference in Mesonet rainfall graph lines between 2012 and 2014 represented more than a 100 million bushel wheat crop loss for Oklahoma’s farmers. With the wheat price close to $6 a bushel as this article was being written, that’s $600 million dollars in lost grain production by Oklahoma wheat farmers between a good year and a bad year.

The graph of cumulative rainfall for Freedom for 2012, green line, and 2014, red line, shows the dramatic difference in spring rainfall between these years. The blue fill area is the 15-year average rainfall. The Oklahoma hard red winter wheat crop in 2012 came in at 155 million bushels. In 2014, it was a disasterous 51 million bushels of wheat.

[Full site: mesonet.org / Weather / Past Data & Files / LongTerm Averages - Graphs / Freedom / Rainfall]

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