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Forestry Landowner Meetings Mark your calendar for our Johnston County Fall Forestry Landowner meeting on November 1st. We have approximately 245,000 acres of forest land in Johnston county. This represents almost 50% of the total acres in the county. Topics to be discussed are How to write a forestry Management Plan, Landowner Liability and income opportunities from hunting, Voluntary Ag district, and comments for soil and water. A sponsored meal will begin at 6:30. Those interested in attending need to call the Extension Office at 919-989-5380 by Friday, October 29th so we can have a close head count. Corn Yield Contest Anyone in Johnston County wishing to submit an entry into the 2010 North Carolina Corn Yield Contest should contact, Tim Britton with the Johnston County Extension Service. Entries must be post marked by November 29th, 2010. We have the applications at the office. Contestants must harvest a minimum of one contiguous acre. The four sides should be as straight as possible. I will make the measurements with help from someone in the office. The combine and trailer must be reasonably empty. Corn from the plot will be taken to a certified scale at a local buying station. Only entries with moisture samples analyzed the same day will be permitted in the contest. Cotton Defoliation Since defoliation is considered an "art and a science," selecting harvest aids can be among the toughest, but most critical decisions a cotton producer will make all year. There is no one encompassing prescription. Two methods used to determine timing of defoliation are the open boll method and nodes above crack boll method Percent open boll is one of the methods, and the traditional recommendation for harvest aid application has been 60 percent open boll in most areas. This method, focusing on the opened portion of the crop, has a couple of disadvantages. One is that this method does not account for fruiting gaps, and the second is the time it takes to perform this measurement. Percent open bolls can be measured by marking a section of row (e.g., 10 feet) and counting the number of total bolls within that row distance. Then, the open bolls are counted. The number of open bolls divided by the total bolls times 100 is the percent open boll for that area. Nodes above cracked boll is a method of timing defoliation whereby only plants containing a first position cracked boll are utilized. Beginning with the node (branch) above the fruiting) branch containing the highest first position cracked bolls, nodes are counted upward to the node containing the highest harvestable. One advantage of this method is that it takes less time than percent open boll. In well cutout cotton, Extension recommended treatments are expected to work well. See the North Carolina Ag chemical manual and the 2010 cotton production guide for recommendations. Defoliation 2010 Most of the crop suffered some level of drought stress this growing season that has contributed to early cut-out and in some cases tremendous re-growth pressure. When we defoliate cotton what we are trying to do is alter the hormone levels in leaves to cause them to abscise.

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