- [Narrator] "Montana Ag Live" is made possible by the Montana Department of Agriculture, the MSU Extension Service, the MSU Ag Experiment Stations of the College of Agriculture, the Montana Wheat & Barley Committee, the Montana Bankers Association, Cashman Nursery & Landscaping, the Gallatin Gardeners Club and the Rocky Mountain Certified Crop Advisor Program.

(upbeat music) - Good evening.

You are tuned to "Montana Ag Live," coming to you tonight from the studios of KUSM, here on the campus of Montana State University in Bozeman.

We're glad to have you back.

I'm Don Mathre, retired Plant Pathologist, and I'll be your moderator tonight.

And we have four excellent panelists here with us in the studio.

I'm gonna introduce those first.

On my far left is Eric Belasco from the Department of Ag, economics and the economics.

He's a specialist on Ag finance and everything related to it.

So if you've got money questions tonight, Eric's gonna be the guy to go to.

Our special guest tonight is an old friend.

It's really glad to see him back here.

Ken Kephart is the Superintendent at the Southern Ag Research Center down at Huntley Montana.

Made a special trip up to Bozeman to be with us tonight.

And we're gonna talk about the research centers and what they do a little bit later.

So we'll be coming back to Ken.

An old friend, Laurie Kerzicnk is here, gonna tell us about all the bug problems that we've seen this fall, if any.

So we're always glad to have Laurie back.

And Tim Seipel is here on my left, a weed specialist, a range ecologist, something like that.

So anything related to weeds tonight, we're gonna turn to Tim.

Our phone operator tonight is Nancy Blake.

Nancy's all by herself tonight so be patient with her.

If your phone line is busy, call back and she'll be able to help you out that way.

So let's go first to Ken, and tell us about what are the research centers and how do they relate to Montana State University?

- Well, the research centers, there's seven facilities that are scattered around the state.

We refer to these as agricultural research centers.

They conduct research on crop and livestock programs.

And I would say programs that are usually unique or adapted to the specific environment where the facility is located, but they're also involved in statewide and in also to a certain degree in regional and into some extent in national research programs as well.

So these seven facilities are part of what we call the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station.

And there is only one Montana agricultural experiment station in the state, and and that is the unit that represents the research arm of the College of Agriculture.

And so for instance, I have an appointment in the Montana Ag Experiment Station.

I spend most of my time on research.

I'm also a superintendent, so I spend part of my time as the administrator of the facility at Huntley.

And I think we have a connection to the website that we can show I believe, or no, I guess we're going to go to Laurie I hear, I guess in a moment, but we do have a website.

We'll talk about it, I think a little bit later that shows where those locations are at and the kind of programs that they're involved in.

- Okay.

Well, we're gonna come back to you with a lot of questions about the research centers.

So Eric, let's go to you.

Food prices seem to be rising pretty quickly at the grocery store, especially beef.

Can you explain what's happening?

- Yeah.

So over the last year, and you said beef in particular, meat prices have gone up by about 15%.

A lot of food prices have gone up by about 5%.

So seen a lot of inflation.

And if you look at the reasons why, I think most economists are looking at the supply side for that.

So the main reasons are, you know, if you look at wage rates around Bozeman, at least we see everyone's making, you know, the higher wages right now, and that impacts the price of food 'cause, you know, we need to hire people for logistics and different areas to get food to the tables.

And so there are also some supply bottlenecks that are happening still, not necessarily COVID related, but they are due to more of just shipping.

Like if you've tried to buy something from Amazon, it's taken a little bit to get to you.

And so those things have all led to some more food price inflation.

Supposed to slow down a little bit next year, but you know, they're saying, economists are saying in the range of one and a half to 2% next year.

So hopefully slowing down a bit.

- Let's hope so.

- Yeah.

(laughter) - Laurie, this question came from Michelle from Hyalite, "We have these huge white and gold spiders in our yard this year, what are they?

- Ooh, this year we've had, I would think this might be the banded or garden pea spider, which is a garden spider.

They're probably about an inch long.

They're kind of white and gold striped, and I've had several questions on that this year.

So I think that's probably what it is.

They are Argiope trifasciata.

And they feed on a bunch of different insects, but they really like grasshoppers too, since we've had epic grasshopper year, they're doing their job in the yard.

- [Don] Okay.

Nothing to worry about.

- Nothing to worry about.

They don't really come indoors at all.

They're just a beautiful thing to see in the yard.

- Okay, good.

Tim, is now a good time to control Canada thistle?

- Now is an excellent time to control Canada thistle.

Canada Thistle is a plant that has most of its roots below ground.

And when we treat it with herbicides, we want that herbicide to go down into the roots below ground.

And that happens when the plant is taken its sugars on the surface, down into the roots to store them for winter.

So this is really actually the best time to get after your Canada thistle with something like glyphosate or 2,4-D. - What about pulling Canada thistle?

I've heard a lot of controversy of whether if you pull it, you don't get the whole root, that you're spreading it.

- No, you will not get the whole root.

I dug up a chunk of Canada thistle out of my backyard the other day, and it had continued to make new sprouts three times where I defoliated it six inches below the surface so I dug that root up.

Out the Fort Ellis, East of Bozeman, we have some Canada thistle experiments, and we've dug down to try to find the horizontal rhizomes or the roots that spread underground.

And it was a foot before we reached those horizontal rhizomes below ground.

So I really think digging it's not a fit.

You may wear it down over time and you'd have to do it 20, 30 times, who knows, but you're gonna have to keep at it if digging is where you're at.

- Okay.

- Yup.

- Okay.

Ken, back to you, you mentioned we have more than one Ag research center around, in fact, I think you mentioned there are seven.

- There are seven of them, yes.

- So where are these seven centers located?

Do they specialize in anything particular?

- Most of the centers are involved in, what I would say is commercial crop production research.

All of them have a program that's involved in small grains production, wheat, barley, particularly in terms of interacting with the breeders here on campus and in variety development.

We have a station at Creston which is near Kalispell, which is by the way where I happened to start my career as an agronomist.

I consider that working summers for Vern Stewart there, and they do more work probably in pasture management and hay than they do at most of the other research centers as well.

We have a facility down at Corvallis near Hamilton, and that facility had more involvement in horticulture, particularly in tree fruit production.

And now they're doing some more berry work and things of that nature.

The station up at Havre is the one station that still has a...

In fact, they have a very large beef cattle program there.

They have a herd of about 400 cows.

And so they have at least two research projects there that are connected with that, but again, we also have an agronomy program there that's, again, working with the breeders.

One of our smaller stations is at Conrad, which is the Western triangle station.

And they have, again, most of their efforts is focused on small grain production, also doing some work on peas and lentils and pulse crops.

One of our, in fact, I believe it is our oldest station is the one that's at Moccasin, Central Ag Research Center.

And again, small grains, a lot of work in alternative crops, a lot of work in peas and lentils, garbanzo beans or chickpeas.

They're also doing more cropping systems type research, looking at alternative crops in rotation.

Also the Eastern Ag Research Center at Sydney.

That's more like Midwestern agriculture, them and Southern, have a more diversified agriculture that they serve.

And so they have sugar beets, corn, a lot more warm season crops.

And that also describes the situation that we have at Southern Ag Research Center.

- Okay, we'll come back to Southern for more details here in a second.

- Okay.

- You mentioned that Moccasin is the oldest station.

Do you remember or know when it was established?

- Oh, I think it was 1905, I believe it was the year that it was established.

- [Don] Okay.

- [Tim] In 1908, maybe.

I've gotten on the path two or quite a few times.

(laughter) - Well, I've got a banner.

I've got Dave Wichmann, celebrated the hundredth there and I've got a banner hanging on my wall and I looked down and I thought, it said 1905, but you could be right, it could be 1908, but I think that would make them only two years older than Southern.

And I think they're more like five or six years older than Southern, but that's minor (indistinct).

- And my understanding, Western was established fairly early too, is that right?

- The older stations are Southern, which was established in 1910.

Eastern, not Eastern, excuse me.

Havre at Northern that's one of the older stations, and Corvallis is one of the older stations.

That's right.

- Okay.

Eric, this just came in from Bozeman.

This person has written that all sectors of Gallatin County are growing except for agriculture.

What is a reasonable projection for the farm economy and the future for the Gallatin County?

- Yeah, so Montana is definitely going through a big change in the labor force.

We've seen it in Bozeman at least, a lot of new industries coming in, especially with people working online, people, you know, working from their home offices instead of in a physical office.

And so the big difference is you see a lot of that expansion kind of move the city out.

And we've certainly seen that in Bozeman, you know, areas that used to be growing hay or have cattle on them or dairies are kind of pushed out further and further.

And that's not just true for Bozeman, it's true for other areas of Montana as well.

That being said, some of the best agricultural land is also in some of these rural parts away from the cities.

And that's where you see more and more of Montana agriculture settle in.

And so, yeah, the dynamics are definitely changing in the big cities.

They're getting younger, new industries, but agriculture and the rest of the state, I think, you know, holds its own and keeps up its traditional, you know, wheat, cattle, bringing in some of those new varieties that are coming from the research centers to kind of keep the future of Ag vibrant.

- What's happened to land prices out in the agricultural areas of Montana?

Have they gone up as much as housing prices have?

- Not as much as housing prices, but they've been steadily growing for a long time, especially in Montana, there's a lot of interest in, you know, second homes and that will drive up the price of some of those ranches, especially, but you haven't seen the sharp, you know, and at least in Bozeman, seen a real sharp increase in home values in the last year, and in other parts of the state as well.

Yeah, you've seen kind of a steady or rise of property values or land values outside of some of the city centers.

- Okay, Laurie, from White Hall, their chokecherry has white scaly spots on it.

Is that an insect or a disease?

- White scaly spots, maybe if they're white or brown scaly spots.

Some of the things that we've seen with chokecherry this year, we've seen a lot of pair slug damage and it kind of looks like a disease or could it look kind of scaly, but pear slugs are not true slugs, they're closely related to wasps as adults.

And it doesn't really do too...

It's more kind of cosmetic damage, but we usually have a couple of generations of pear slugs, but I would start looking out.

It's a little bit too late this year to do anything about it.

So I would maybe scout in July next year and see how bad the damage is, and they can be controlled with a lot of contact insecticides.

- So the only thing left to do with chokecherries is harvest the chokecherries, right?

- That's right (laughs).

- Okay, Tim, from Facebook, "How can I control the neighbors cottonwood's tree roots from totally taking over my yard?

Will these roots also damaged my home's foundation?"

So the cottonwood is in this case.

- Yeah, the cottonwood is the weed in this case, and cottonwood trees can be really weedy, right?

They continually make roots and suckers that come up.

I think most sort of weed and feed lawn products or products that 2,4-D in them for your lawn will generally take care of the suckers as they come up if you retreat them fairly often.

We have that issue right in my yard, and I notice with aspens and instead of cottonwoods, and the 2,4-D and weed and feed lawn garden products, do a pretty good job of taking care of those suckers, but you'll have to continually follow them and they'll always be coming back, yep.

- And I've gotten into my sprinkler system.

I mean, some of the routes that are...

I've got suckers all over my yard and it's pretty extensive how thick some of those routes are and it's very frustrating.

- Yeah, septic drain fields too, they'll definitely clog up your septic drain field too.

- [Don] Just get rid of the trees then?

- I'm working on that.

(laughter) - Let's see here.

Ken, for you.

This person is wanting to know what is the status of soybean production in Montana?

Do we have any acres?

- Well, as it turns out, one of the things I initiated when I opened up Southern, opened it back up, back in 1998, I had a strong interest in looking at soybeans.

I had spent nine years in the Midwest as a State Extension Specialist for the University of Missouri.

And so I'd been exposed to soybean production, and I couldn't figure out why they would not be adapted to the Yellowstone River Valley of South Central Montana.

And so we started a project and started looking at adaptation, looking at maturity groups, and it took us about seven or eight years to figure out a production system.

And it turns out they're very well adapted if you pick the right maturity group of soybean varieties.

And we figured out of the production system in terms of what worked best as an inoculation, particularly in the early years of production, because they are a legume and very well adapted.

We usually get 60, 65 bushels to the acre in most years.

Yes, we do have some off years, like in 2020, we only produced about 48 bushels of soybeans to the acre.

That's still pretty respectable though by Midwestern standards, but protein levels have been 40% plus.

And then oil content has been averaging 17 and a half to 18 and a half percent oil content.

Very marketable product.

Our big impediment, and maybe our Ag economists can help us with that is marketing because we don't have good market channels for soybeans in the State of Montana.

We do have some producers that are growing them locally, probably have anywhere from two to three.

I think we had one year, we estimated we had 5,000 acres, excuse me.

There is people dabbling with them.

I have a couple of producers that have been growing them for 10 plus years and very happy with them.

And more recently, the last two years, I've heard a lot of farmers that have tried them, are now haying them because we had a couple of years worth of research that showed that you could grow of off a quality forge with them, high protein content for beef cattle.

I'll make that as kind of a caveat 'cause beef cattle are not susceptible to the trypsin inhibitor that can cause problems in say, monogastric animals, but they are haying them and they like them.

In fact, I've heard there might be even more acreage coming up in the spring of 2022 planted just for hay production, so.

- So Montana's not just a wheat and barley state?

- No, well, we've been working on it, but again, it is the marketing issue that stymies them on the grain side.

Yeah.

- Well, just to add to that, I think that kind of demonstrates the in kind of establishing that you can actually grow this stuff in Montana.

And then, you know, it takes a few years, like the marketing channels establishing those.

It takes a good quantity, it takes a good group to go out and find out where we're gonna send that product.

There's probably not a whole lot in Montana yet, but I think it's great you guys are working to diversify that.

- The other impediment that we have, in terms of marketing, is that our growers historically have been sugar, beet and barley producers and malt barley producers, I'll add that on.

And they are used to forward contracting their crop.

They know exactly what they're gonna get or potentially can get for the crop on the day that they plant.

And this is a commodity green.

And I have discovered that many of the growers in the barley, 'cause this is an irrigated crop, so it's going to be fitting into irrigated rotations, are just not accustomed to dealing with what it takes to market a commodity crop like soybeans.

And so that's been a little bit of an impediment, but we've had them in our rotation, 30, 40 acres for the last 15 years and it's worked out really well.

- So there've been a big increase in pea production in Montana.

- Yes.

- In fact, I think we're one of the top.

- We are the top state producing dread peas in the country, yes.

- [Don] Will soy beans grow in the same areas under the same conditions as peas?

- Peas are probably better adapted to our dry land areas.

I mean, Perry Miller has done lots of work on that, showing that they fit into rotate dry land rotations, if you will, even in a re crop scenario where they're using moisture only in the top foot or two or two feet of the soil profile, which lends itself to follow up with small grain, which has a much deeper root system development.

Soybeans don't fit into that scheme very well at all.

No, we've tried growing them under dry land and bushels per acre turns into pounds per acre.

At least in the Huntley area.

Now, in the very north east corner of the state, where they tend to have more of a rainfall pattern similar to the Midwest, they may fit in in a dry land system.

- So back to you, Eric, with hay prices so high in Montana, how are cattle producers supposed to make any money in the cattle business and why our hay prices so high?

- Yeah, that's a good question.

So hay prices that they'll follow the weather.

In fact, we have a very dry year this year across most of the state, there's a few spots that are, you know, exceptionally dry and they tend to be also where there are a lot of cattle, you know, Southwest Montana and in Northeast Montana, but really the whole state is under some kind of drought.

And so yeah, hay prices, you know, I'm seeing like $200 a ton.

At the same time, cattle prices are going up.

And so I think a lot of people are trying to figure out is that cattle price sufficient to keep that herd or should we be selling them?

And so, yeah, it's a real economic trade off, but it just depends on what kind of capacity you have to bring in hay, what's your breakeven price.

Yeah, but there's definitely a lot of volatility in the hay market because it's directly related to that weather.

- Where can a hay producer or a cattle producer buy hay now?

Is there hay being produced any place that's close by?

- Well, I mean, you know, that's the thing is, you know, when you start growing hay you never know what the conditions are gonna be in the summer, right.

So yeah, you kind of have what you have.

I think that usually hay tends to be a pretty regional market, but it opens up, as that supply gets limited, you see it open up to more and more areas.

- Okay, Laurie, I'm gonna bump this over to you.

Here's a new book.

Maybe you'd like to talk about this book.

I think you're one of the authors, and it's something our viewers might be interested in getting a hold of.

- Yeah, so this is, "Pest Problems and Identification of Ornamental Shrubs and Trees in Montana."

So this is something that a few of us in the Schutter Diagnostic Lab worked on, and it has a section on plant identification then has a section on insect identification and diseases.

And I think that's what, yeah, and it also has a biotic issues.

So things that aren't related to any insects or diseases, and this is free through the extension store right now, you can get a PDF version.

You could also get a hard copy version.

And this is something that was funded through our integrated pest management grant.

So it's has a lot of great pictures in here, a good index in the back where you could go and look for a spruce tree, passive spruce, and just has a lot of great information in here.

So please try to check this out, we put a lot of time into this, and we're pretty proud of it.

- Oh, I think you should be.

And my goodness for free?

- For free.

- That's quite a deal.

So I think the viewers ought to get ahold of that if they can.

- Yeah, I agree.

- Okay Tim, from Bozeman, "Can you recommend a chemical treatment for bellflower besides Roundup?"

Tell us about bellflower, first of all.

- So bellflower, if you walk around Bozeman, especially in the older neighborhoods and you look, you'll see this rise ominous mat of little leaves growing on the surface, especially in the shade, especially in some garden, in the edges of old flower beds and gardens.

It's a bellflower species and it has these purple bellflowers And it's somewhat pretty, but it is a really a tough weed in a lot of places to deal with.

And so it can be tough to deal with.

You can use glyphosate and it will control it.

Mostly you'll likely have to reapply at a couple times, if you don't wanna use glyphosate, which is Roundup, you can use sort of a lawn, 2,4-D sort of herbicide that kills only the broadleaf weeds.

And that will work pretty well on controlling the bellflower, but you're gonna have to follow it up a little bit.

If it's mixed into your flower bed and you have some desirables, you can't go spray the whole thing.

So what I do is I take a Q-tip or a little rag, and I wipe it on the individual leaves to keep the desired plants that I want and hopefully kill the bellflower.

- Just takes a little time and effort.

- It takes the whole time and precision.

That's precision management.

(laughter) - Okay.

Ken, from Helena, "Are the research centers doing research on organic farming or perennial crops?

- [Woman] Yes, yes.

- Well, I mentioned any of the stations that are doing work on forages are gonna be involved in perennial crops, you know, that nature.

At the present time, we do not have a research center that's focusing on organic production systems, per se.

We do have some research going on with what's called cover crops in rotations.

And it turns out that that is related to, could have an application in terms of organic systems, simply because there's nothing registered for selective control of either weeds or other pests in those species.

And so there is some of that, including at Huntley, we have a gentleman that does do some cover crop research, but no, we do not have a research center that's dedicated per se to organic production systems.

- I'm part of a organic research project with Dr. Pat Carr, Dr. Zach Miller at Western Ag and at Central Ag, and we've been looking at managing field bindweed and Canada thistle in organic systems, and are two of the toughest weeds to manage in organic systems.

And we've been doing that in Corvallis and also up in Moccasin.

- Had any success yet with bindweed?

- Yes, a little bit of success.

I could say we've had with the two and, you know, managing weeds and organic cropping systems is really the most difficult part of organic cropping systems.

And we've switched, so we've had some different rotations, some that Ken was talking about.

And alfalfa, over a fairly long period of three to four years, you can wear down the bindweed and you can wear down the thistle at least to keep it from expanding more.

When you have those annual crops in there and those annual crop rotations, the thistle and the bindweed just get away from you in organic systems, yeah.

- [Eric] Yeah.

Very difficult.

- I'm a member of the Gallatin Gardener's Club, and a weed control this year was one of our huge issues.

And I kept telling our members, this is the year where we find out how many weeds can we tolerate?

(laughter) They're never going to get rid of all of them.

Eric, what is the economic value of the research done here at MSU and on the research centers, if somebody ever looked into putting a dollar figure on that?

- Yeah.

Economists do that all the time.

That's what they like to do.

The cost benefit analysis.

So you invest a dollar into public research and, you know, there are estimates, it obviously depends on where you are and what commodity you're talking about, but, you know, the most recent estimates have been around, you know, for every dollar you put in public R&D, so to the research centers, you see about $10 back to society.

So that could be, you know, you're developing new varieties that farmers, you know, and different breeders could use immediately.

And maybe like after five years, they start to see the benefit of that.

Over the last 30 years, we've seen crop prices fall.

And, you know, especially for major grains, a lot of that is just because of the research that we've been able to put into some of those products, using different inputs, different, you know, chemicals, different management strategies, you know, that are going on at the research centers.

And so, you know, all that stuff kind of pays dividends too.

I would say the future generations, we see a lot of that benefit, you know, five to 30 years out.

So the research center, the stuff they're working on now, hopefully the stuff that, you know, our kids when they're in agriculture will really benefit from.

- Okay, from Livingston, Ken, probably your best answer this one, "New crops are being researched at the university?"

- What new crops are being are being researched?

- New crops.

Yeah.

- Well, as I mentioned earlier, the work that we've done been doing at Huntley, obviously with soybeans is any introduction of a crop from another production area.

The idea being that there's a market...

If you get outside of the state, there's a very strong marketing infrastructure for that.

And in my years of working in alternative crops or new crops, big frustration is there is no marketing infrastructure for any of this.

Yes, you can figure out how to grow tons of this stuff, but what do you do with it?

And I think that's also where the impetus came on on a lot of the work on peas and lentils and those sorts of things.

We used to have a breeding program in safflower.

Used to have a very strong safflower industry, particularly up in the Northeast corner of the state.

That's diminished, somewhat that program no longer exists.

And I think they depend mostly on materials developed by private industry now, but one of the impediments to that is we used to have a processing facility at Culbertson and that no longer exists.

And so that kind of, again, that dealt a blow to our marketing options in terms of where that crop was going towards.

We have lots of interest in it trying to do inter-cropping particularly on a dry land basis.

Dr. Kent McVay, and I think we were going to talk about this at Southern.

He is a cropping systems person, and he's looking at inter-cropping chickpeas or garbanzo beans with flax.

One oil seed crop and grain crop, vastly different seed sizes harvested together, you could clean out separate one from the other.

That's not a novel concept, but it's very much interesting if 'cause that would bring inter-cropping to the State of Montana that we haven't had before.

And so there are some new things, interesting things.

We have one scientist I know that's revisiting fava beans, looking at fava bean production again.

And then we're also looking at... and then we have a scientist that's right now looking at mung beans.

Again, these are all things that are grown in other regions of the United States that we're trying to revisit.

Really, haven't looked at anything, I would say that would be new, say exotic that I'm aware of.

- We're still restricted by our climate, aren't we?

- Restricted, it's our climate.

And I know one of the frustrations is they say, "Well, gee, all we do is grow wheat, barley, wheat, barley."

We spent a hundred years developing a production system for wheat and barley that's probably one of the world's finest.

And, you know, that's a tough act to follow, to do the same thing for something else.

It's not as well adapted to the state.

Yes, climate, rainfall patterns, the whole thing, it makes a big difference.

- For sure.

- Laurie, from Missoula, she has a terrible problem with flea beetles in tomatoes and potatoes.

She's used Sevin, but it's not working well.

Are there better insecticides or other treatments?

- Yeah.

Well, first I wanted to just mention, I think I forgot to say where we could get this guide.

And so you could go to msuextension.org, and I think it's either under publications or the store and then just Google, "A Guide to Pest Problems and Identification of Ornamental Shrubs in Montana."

So make sure you go to the msuextension.org store, but for your flea beetle question, Sevin can work.

But I mean, they're so mobile that it's hard to get a contact insecticide on a flea beetle.

So I think, next year if you could start off with maybe some more established, you know, as long as your plants are maybe seven to eight inches long, you should start with some larger starters that might help.

And you also have, maybe can do some trap crops like radish, but they're very difficult to control the contact insecticide just because they're so mobile.

But I think there are a lot of other contact sprays you could use, but a lot of them will just have the same.

It's just a matter of contacting them, and I think it's the issue.

- I heard from another colleague that's involved with the farmer's market that they use 10% molasses to control flea beetles.

And I'm pretty skeptical.

Have you ever heard of that treatment?

Of course, it would be approved for organic production if somebody were an organic producer, anything to that?

- I don't know.

I'd have to look that up.

Yeah.

This is a very good question.

- Let me know what you find out, if you would.

- Okay.

(laughter) - Okay.

Tim, do we have waterhemp in Montana?

And what is waterhemp, and why should we be asking the question?

- Yeah, that's a really good question.

So waterhemp is not related to hemp cannabis sativa, as we would think about it.

Waterhemp is actually of pigweed species.

So it's an amaranth species.

And it's very common in the Midwest, especially the Northern part of the Midwest, where it's a really problematic weed in soybean production, sometimes in corn production.

It's been making its way north and west over the last few years towards Montana.

It's now much more common than it was in North Dakota than it used to be.

And we've actually found waterhemp now one time in 2020 in Roosevelt County in the sugar beet field.

And then this year, we just identified another sample.

So we have two recorded incidents of it in another sugar beet field in Prairie County.

So all you guys out there in your irrigated sugar beets especially, walk those fields and scout those fields, looking for waterhemp now.

It's a dioecious species, meaning there's a male plant and a female plant, which are actually like hemp.

And so you you'll see it.

It's a big bushy kind of pigweed.

If you don't recognize it as our normal red root pigweed, then send it into the Schutter Diagnostic Lab.

The reason we're so concerned about it is, is because it's evolved a lot of resistance to herbicides in the Midwest.

So glyphosate, all our ALS inhibitor herbicides, it's mostly resistant.

So it could have a really large economic impact on our cropping systems, especially in those sugar beet, soy kind of areas along the Yellowstone.

So that's why we're really pushing prevention and scouting and getting out there and looking for that waterhemp.

And if they have any questions, they can contact me and I can help them identify it, or if they suspect they have it, submit a sample to the Schutter Diagnostic Lab.

- Something to be watching for.

- Always.

- Always, huh?

Okay.

Eric, the drought in Montana seemed really bad this year.

Other places too, probably.

How is it currently impacting agriculture in Montana?

- Yeah, so the drought has certainly impacted all of the west.

So Montana's been affected.

It started in California very early on and it's kind of spread, but yeah, if you look at a map, the range of the drought is basically the whole west, and we've seen kind of the fire season follow that as well, on that drought drought region.

And so in Montana, you know, ranchers, obviously they're their biggest problem right now is trying to find hay and trying to find feed, trying to make that decision of, you know, can we find that hay, should we keep the herd or should we sell the herd?

For crop producers, they're a little more, you know, used to that kind of a fluctuation from year to year.

And so there are some programs there, hopefully a lot of the wheat producers will have crop insurance, for example.

So there'll be adapted to that.

And the other thing with weed is given that the drought isn't just in the west, we've also seen drought in other countries.

So some of the supply shortages in Russia and Canada has a supply shortage.

There's just a global wheat shortage this year, which has helped to boost at least, the spring wheat prices up.

So if you're selling spring wheat, your yields are gonna be low, but the prices are going to compensate for some of that.

- Okay.

So I'm a winter wheat producer, let's say, you need moisture in the soil to get that crop germinated this time of the year.

Should you go ahead and plant and just hope it's gonna rain or what do you do?

What's your process of thinking about this?

- Yeah.

That's a good question.

Well, the winter wheat prices aren't quite as favorable as the spring wheat and so, you know, there's a little less incentive, I guess, to put that in the ground, but you're absolutely right.

You're kind of banking on some of that moisture at least and far be it from an economist to tell you, a farmer what to do.

(laughter) But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you just gotta make sure that you have the right risk management strategy in place.

Most of the crop insurance programs that are available to farmers do insure against that yield.

So if you're thinking about a winter wheat crop, putting it in there and just making sure that you have the right risk management strategy in place, just in case it is another dry winter or dry spring next year.

- Ken, back to you, tell us a little bit more about some of the specific projects you have there at the Southern Research Center.

- Well, (clears throat) currently we have three research programs, my own, I spend a great deal of my time in cultivar development and germ plasm evaluations for breeding programs that are here on the main campus, winter wheat, spring wheat, the malt barley program, and in Durham.

And then occasionally I help out with some other projects that might be involved in some aspect of breeding, early evaluation of that material.

I also do the on-farm or the on station variety testing.

So we have a corn program, we have a soybean program, dry land corn and so, and then I have also been the primary contact.

You'll probably be shocked by this Don, but I actually I am a part-time pathologist.

(laughter) (indistinct) is better way to put it, but for many years I worked with Barry Jacobson and Jessica Ralph on the Rhizoctonia root rot problem and managing that in sugar beets.

And so we worked on that.

Our second program is Dr. Kent McVay.

I mentioned earlier he's our Cropping Systems Specialist.

He also has a partial extension appointment.

So he has some statewide responsibilities on the educational side of that.

And he's the gentleman that's been working with crop rotations and like I said, the cover crop aspects.

So inter-cropping, relay cropping, those sorts of things he's been working on those aspects of crop production.

And then we have a resident weed science program for many years that that was manned by Dr. Prashant Joel, who has since moved on to another university, and his replacement, Dr. Lovreet Shergil is now on staff, been on staff for about a year, and he's continuing the work that Dr. Joel started, particularly in the areas of herbicide resistant weeds.

One of the things that the station was involved in early on was figuring out the mechanism for how kochia was developing resistance to glyphosate.

And it was very, very interesting, his involvement in that work, looking at the genetic aspects of it.

And so the station has been very much involved in a whole host of things.

- Good.

Laurie, from Laurel, "My apple trees leaves are all curled up and dried out with some webbing and black spots.

What is it?"

- Sometimes with apple, a lot of times we have the area fired mites that will cause some brown spotting, but they usually don't cause curling in the leaves.

So we have had a lot of problems this year with a pest called the apple-and-thorn skeletonizer which will definitely have some webbing and some insect excrement called frass in there.

So that's what I would think it would be.

It's a little bit too late now to control it, but just it's often kind of patchy, maybe just something to keep an eye on for next year, but it doesn't usually cause too much damage to the apple tree, but.

- Would spider mites be a problem in apples?

- Spider mites could be a problem in apples too, but I don't see that as often as I see someone that- - In the Yellowstone we've had spider mites and everything this year.

It's just been really bad.

- It's been a really bad spider mite year.

Yeah, just July and August, once it starts to dry down and we don't have any moisture, it could be spider mites too, yeah.

But with the webbing kind of makes me think that it's a caterpillar.

- How about codling moth this year?

I think I lost every apple in my tree to something I'm assuming it was codling moth.

- Yeah, I did get too many coddling moth questions.

So I don't know how widespread it was across the state, but I mean, we do have it every year and pretty much every county.

It's just one pass that just won't go away for some reason.

- [Don] For sure.

- Yeah.

- Tim from red light, Joe, "Why is yellow sweet clover not considered noxious and can you control it?

Is it a weed?

- You know, we'd as someone's definition and you know, A weed can simply be defined as a plant out of place.

Yellow sweet clover, it's scientific name's melilotus officinalis.

It is a biennial weed.

So the first year it germinates and it grows... We actually use it as a cover crop, believe it or not.

And it grows to be about an inch or two tall.

And then the next year it grows to be two or three feet tall and makes a whole bunch of yellow flowers and then flowers make seeds and then it dies.

So we have years in Montana where we have a lot of yellow sweet clover and then the next year you won't see very much 'cause it's all the real small stuff in between years.

And it is definitely a weedy plant.

It can take over your fields, your pastures, your things like that.

It provides pretty good forage.

It also provides a good source of nectar for honeybees.

So I know a lot of people who put out hives out in Garfield county, out in some other counties in Montana and where there's a lot of yellow sweet clover, and those bees really like that nectar source.

It is a very invasive weedy species, but it doesn't have the economic impact, the negative economic impact to be viewed as a noxious weed.

Noxious weed is actually a legal term in state law statues that has a definition, and you are by law supposed to control it.

But this one doesn't have as large enough and economic impact and actually as a few benefits.

So it's not considered a noxious weeds.

- Okay, Kim, from Great Falls, "When will the research centers solve the soft fly problem or have they?"

(laughter) - I don't know.

I can't answer that question.

No, they have not solved the soft light problem.

Our breeding programs have continued to produce soft light resistant varieties.

We do have some researchers that are working on novel sources of resistance, trying to develop novel sources of resistant, and also looking at continuing to look at the ecology of the insect and the problems it presents.

You know, one of the things is that for many years we've talked about is that oats are basically immune to soft light.

And if we could figure out why oats are immune to it, you know, you should be able through genetic manipulation, move that resistance over into other crops, particularly wheat and barley, they are fairly closely related, but that hasn't happened yet.

No, soft light is still a significant problem, and I guess the severity of it like most insect problems, waxes and wanes, I think it was so dry I don't think the crop even got developed far enough for soft lights to saw it down this year, but so we didn't hear a lot about it, but it's still out there.

Our breeding program has continued to produce solid stem or semi-solid stem varieties that have better yield almost with every generation that's released.

And some of those now are approaching the yields of conventional varieties that they obtain in the absence of the pest.

So that's coming along.

So we're still addressing the problem, but we haven't come close to solving it.

- Well, but there's a lot of effort on it.

- There's a lot of effort on it.

A lot of effort on, in fact, one of our faculty members at the Conrad station recently hired, he's gonna to continue some work on that that was started by a previous scientist there, so.

- Good.

So Eric, tell us a little bit about your own particular research program that relates to Montana agriculture.

- Oh, sure.

So I'm in the agricultural economics department away from the... but I'm still associated with the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station.

I focus mostly in agricultural policy.

So I actually teach a class.

We're going over the history of Ag policy next week and we'll talk about the Hatch Act, which, you know, sort of delegated those funds to land grants so that they could be used for research and to keep the U.S. Ag system competitive, you know, going forward.

And so I spent a lot of time on that focusing on crop insurance and how farmers can use that effectively to manage risks, especially with yield and drought becoming evermore frequent.

And then also just, you know, trying to keep track of prices and see where they're going.

And, you know, people often have questions about, "Well, why are, you know, hay price is so high?"

Like we had earlier today.

So just try and keep a handle on those things is kind of my role as an economist.

- One of the things I hear about is, "Farm Bill," but I haven't heard much about it lately.

Is this something that comes up like every five years or something like that?

And if so, where are we in that, "Farm Bill" process?

- Yeah, that's a good question.

It's so it's every four years, the last one, let's see if I'm gonna get my years right here.

I believe it was 2020... 2018.

2018, we had last one, December, 2018.

And so with it being every four years, there is talk about what's gonna be in the next Farm Bill, but it's very preliminary and the way that the Ag committees kind of move forward as they have what are called, listening sessions.

And obviously, those have not happened, you know, because of COVID.

But I know there are a lot of plans for, you know, both of those committees to start having listening sessions.

And really that's just an opportunity for both in the Senate and the House to get some insight from farmers and farm groups on sort of, well, what's missing, you know, in the current Ag policy environment.

And so hopefully, you know, they'll move towards a Farm Bill, which would be, you know, 2022, probably better 2023, just given the delays in some of those listening sessions.

- Do you personally get involved with the Farm Bill?

- No.

you know, I'm pretty good at economics.

I'm not so good in the political economy side of things, but you know, certainly, you know, as an economist and I have a lot of colleagues as well, when a new program is introduced, you know, we'll certainly look at it and kind of see what the cost and the benefits are of some of those different programs.

I mean, one of them, there is a section in there on research and development that will be, you know, in there.

And Congress is always trying to decide how much money to delegate to agriculture through that mechanism.

So there's certainly seems to be a little more momentum to invest in some R&D, especially with regard to creating more drought resistant agricultural systems.

- Is there any discussion of policy that would change insurance, crop insurance programs to include other crops or to bring whole soil health into context and any crop insurance programs or anything?

- Yeah, that's a good question.

So the first part is yes, there's always kind of an expanding suite of crop insurance programs, and they're usually what will happen is you'll have, let's say we start growing more soybeans in Montana, we wanna covered under kind of the general program.

Then that private company would then propose it to the federal government and they would evaluate it and make sure that it made sense.

There's been an expansion of products over time.

That's I guess the other issue in the Farm Bill, and I'm glad you brought it up is trying to pair risk management with more soil conservation to try to find maybe a little more compatibility between the risk management and just, you know, soil health indicators.

That's not really something that is lined up well in the past.

And there does seem to be a little more momentum to try to align those programs up a little bit better in the future.

- Okay.

Laurie, from Big Fork, "I have several grays beetles about an inch long with long and tanny on my sighting, and have a bunch of pine trees on my property.

Are these beetles hurting my pine trees?"

- Well, those kind of sound like pine sawyer beetles, and this is the time of year we'd probably see a lot of pine sawyer beetles and they attack stressed pine trees and mostly dying pine trees.

So it depends on how many trees you have on your property, but it would be an indication that somewhere along the way, are we neighbors have some sort of stress pine.

So I would just keep an eye on your trees and make sure that they're healthy, but this is one that we see quite a bit.

There's some stress trees surrounding, I'm just not sure if it's hurting your trees or not.

Yeah.

- Okay.

Tim, can I graze my kochia?

- You can graze kochia.

Some people really like it.

Right now, we really have to be careful about nitrate levels in forages and the problems that they can cause for your livestock.

So if you're grazing kochia that's mixed with a whole lot of grass and it's not that much kochia and there's some grass in there, then I think you can probably get away with it.

I would be very cognizant and make sure you test those nitrate levels.

And your local county extension agent can help you test nitrate levels in forages.

So you know if you have a problem, a potential problem in poisoning cattle or livestock.

- Ken, we're getting down to the end of the program.

And I was just curious, are there any things about the research centers that we haven't discussed that you'd like to bring out?

- Oh, gee, (laughter) there's more to discuss than I could probably think of sitting here on the spot with that question, but one of the things we haven't talked about is how does the research centers, you most of us are not tied to the MSU Extension Service, but we do have a desire to share our information with area farmers.

And so that's been one of the struggles we've had.

You know, we are encouraged to publish in scientific journals, but that audience could care less about that avenue of publication.

So for instance, at Southern we've heavily invested in a website where we have loaded up a lot of the annual progress reports that are related to particularly that commodity projects that are involved.

Again, we have a lot of research that's funded by Montana Wheat and Barley, and we maintain a website page just for those projects on the research centers that are performed every year, and that's easy to get to and view.

And so we've spent a lot of time on that.

I think what they're showing right now is the website for the research centers in general.

If you are on this site, you were able to find all the websites for the individual stations, including the Southern Ag Research Center.

So we're not the only ones that are doing this as well, because we have Kent McVay, our Extension Specialist, he also has a number of web-based tools.

You can select varieties on our site.

You can ask for information on water use, irrigation scheduling, herbicide selection.

He's done a nice job of putting those things together.

Yeah, again, that's the department of research centers there.

And again, you can see the various locations are at all across the state, but this is one mechanism that we focused on in getting this information out to help our farmers in a more timely fashion.

- Okay.

Well, we're getting down to the last minute and I certainly wanna to thank Ken, you for taking the time out to come over from Huntley today, and wish you a safe journey.

- No, I had to come from Billings, I didn't have to come all the way.

(laughter) - We wish you a safe journey back and thanks very much for coming.

We also thank all of the sponsors that are putting the money into PBS here to allow us to have this program each week.

And we appreciate that very much.

We also thank all you folks that called in this week, only one phone operator, but I know she was kept pretty busy, but did a great job.

So we appreciate that.

Next week "Ag Live" will be back on Sunday, September 26th.

And the focus of this program is, Healthy and Happy Ponies with Amanda Bradbury.

She's an Equine Nutritionist and Physiologist here at MSU.

So if you've got some interest in horses, she's gonna be able to talk about that.

And so we hope to see you next week.

- [Narrator] For more information and resources visit montanapbs.org/aglive.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] "Montana Ag Live" is made possible by the Montana Department of Agriculture, the MSU Extension Service, the MSU Ag Experiment Stations of the College of Agriculture, the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee, the Montana Bankers Association, Cashman Nursery & Landscaping, the Gallatin Gardeners Club and the Rocky Mountain Certified Crop Advisor Program.

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