I was driving across Kansas last week and took note of what I at first thought was the changing color of wheat of in Stafford  and Barton County. A closer look, however, revealed that the wheat isn’t really ripening in that area. It is freeze-damaged. The first clue was that the color is not so much gold as white. And there’s an awful lot of green heads in those fields. In south central Kansas, around Wichita and points south, there is a distinct, uniform gold…

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There have been 48 long hours now to try to grasp the magnitude of what happened to Moore, Okla. Just 24 hours before a massive tornado struck the town about 200 miles to our south, my family and I were hunkered down in the basement of my northeast Wichita home while we listened to updates of a “massive, destructive wedge tornado on the ground approaching Mid-Continent Airport.” The home that I own in West Wichita sits on the northwestern final approach path to…

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Driving around south-central Kansas to get a look at the progress of the winter wheat crop confirms one piece of good news: freeze damage in this part of the state appears to be minimal in spite of a couple of very cold nights. Probably a solid half of the wheat is either headed out or beginning to head and most of the fields I saw had only a few, if any, telltale white heads that indicate the growing point was damaged by unseasonably late freezes on April 24 and again on May…

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I was in Colby a couple of days ago as the U.S. Custom Harvesters kicked off the 2013 wheat harvest season with their annual safety seminar. This time last year, several of the crews were already headed into Texas to cut an unseasonably early wheat crop that continued to run ahead of schedule right through a Kansas harvest that was complete before Father’s Day. This year, the crop is as late as last year was early, with yet another freeze in the forecast tonight. But the…

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The percentage of the Kansas wheat crop adversely impacted by freeze damage is expected to go up substantially in the days ahead. It will take several days after the weather warms up to get a handle on just how much damage was done when the temperature hit a record 25 degrees in Wichita  in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, but there is no doubt that the wheat crop is far enough along in south central Kansas that damage is inevitable. Just about all of Kansas was hit with…

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As “this month in history” goes, April is an amazing month. I am always a little in awe at how many major events in American history have taken place in the month of April. Other months have their memorable dates: January is the month of inaugurations, February is famous for president’s birthdays, the lunch counter sit-in that launched the Civil Rights movement, the launch of the first U.S. astronaut and the explosion of the space shuttle, Columbia. In March the…

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I’m about to do something I don’t do very often: take vacation days. As most of you know, I really, really love my job. I love it so much, in fact, that I find myself forgetting it is actually a job and not something I do just because I want to do it. I guess that is why I often forget that I am entitled to take vacation from it now and again. This week and next I am taking a few days either side of the annual North American Agricultural Journalists spring meeting (which…

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It’s starting to look green in southern Kansas, in spite of the fact that the final remnants of the recent five-inch snow are still hanging around. They will be gone in today’s 60-degree sunshine. That recent snow and the 20-plus inch blanketing we got a few weeks ago, along with a couple of showers in between is enough to bring out the smiles on the faces of farmers in this region, where wheat fields are looking great as the crop breaks dormancy and heads toward the spring…

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There’s an amazing report out that shows Kansas poised to be one of the top states in the country to benefit economically from the emerging Unmanned Aerial Vehicles industry. The study was done by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International and looked specifically at the economic impact expected when U.S. UAVs are integrated into U.S. airspace beginning in 2015. I wasn’t surprised to see Kansas among the leaders in research into the technology of this industry…

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I’ve about had it with infirmary. Seriously, all I have is a 3-week-old hairline crack of the kneecap and I even talked my doctor into a minimally restrictive immobilizer. Still, there are SO many things I can’t do, or at least can’t do as easily and painlessly as I am accustomed to doing them. Wouldn’t you know that this would also be the time that one son-in-law is nursing a tear of wrist cartilage – great daddy that he is, he saved the 20-month-old…

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