- [Voiceover] "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 and Landscaping, the Gallatin Gardeners Club, and the Rocky Mountain Certified Crop Advisor Program.

(dramatic country music) - Good evening.

You are tuned to "Montana AG Live", originating tonight from the studios at KUSM on the very vibrant campus of Montana State University.

And coming to you over the Montana Public I am Jack Riesselman, retired professor of plant pathology, and I will be your host this evening.

Glad to be here, missed a couple programs, but I am very, very happy to be back this evening.

For those of you who watched the show in the past, you know how it works.

You phone in the questions and this excellent panel will do their best to provide very knowledgeable answers to your questions.

Without those questions, folks, this program becomes pretty boring.

So don't be bashful, call in those questions as soon as you see the number on the screen.

Let me introduce tonight's panel.

Tonight, way on my left is Mary Burrows.

Mary is associate director of the AG experiment station and a plant pathologist on the side.

We have a special guest tonight.

He's been here several times in years past, John Dudley.

John is owner of a company that was called School Crisis Management.

John has trained probably 10 to 12,000 school crisis teams across the United States.

I'll get back to him in a little bit, he can tell you a little bit more about it.

And, he's been here before, Dan Biggerstaff.

Dan is a retired plant breeder and very knowledgeable about plant breeding.

We have some questions that we've saved up for Dan, and he's also a volunteer school teacher.

So we'll get some insight there.

And of course, Mac Burgess.

Mac is our small farm specialist, so if you have horticulture questions, small farm questions tonight, excellent opportunity to get those questions answered.

Answering the phone this evening as Cheryl Burnett, Bennett, I'm sorry.

And she's here in the studio and Abby Wagner will be on remote.

Before we get any farther in the program, let me tell you a little bit about John Dudley.

I have known Dr. Dudley for well over 60 years.

- [John] That's good enough right there, Jack.

(John and Jack laughing) - [Jack] Yeah, about right.

During those 60 years, I'll be honest with you, I've tried my very best to teach that guy how to hunt and fish, but folks, unsuccessful.

But if you want to know anything about school crisis situations, keeping schools safe, John is probably the most knowledgeable individual here in the United States relative to that topic.

So John, tell us a little bit about what you've done in your career, and what you're here for this evening.

- Well, I'm glad to be back in Montana.

The weather.

Recently moved to Arizona, and it's nice to be here, and I've trained a lot of school districts in this state, and I think we've done a good job across the country of making schools safer.

Tonight, I'm gonna use a couple of examples of the difference between safe and secure schools that might help us in our discussions.

There are two kinds of schools.

There are safe schools, and safe schools, my definition of that is it's a place where kids can go where they are free from accidental injury.

And where are those schools?

You people out there drive by 'em every day.

Every school in this state, I would classify as a safe school.

Then there are secure schools.

A secure school is a school where students and staff would be free from intentional harm.

My judgment, you would be hard pressed and maybe not even find a secure school in the state of Montana.

Not only Montana, basically across the United States.

So as we kind of talk our way through some of the things tonight and answer some questions, I'd like people to keep in mind that I want to talk mainly about how to make schools more secure, without spending any additional dollars to do it.

In my line of work Jack, as you know, I've dealt with over 5,000 student deaths over the years, many of those have been of a violent nature.

And as you said, we've trained thousands and thousands of schools in managing crisis.

Because even though we talk about being a secure school, there are times that even the best measures don't work out.

Example as of Friday night, when I flew up here, we had had 52 school shootings so far this school year, and we're just into the beginning of October.

So we still have issues and things to deal with.

- Okay, thanks John.

We have a question that came in from Facebook this week, knowing that you were on the program, and it came in from Polson and they would like to know, do you think that people in rural Montana are more complacent about school safety than people in urban areas around the state?

- No.

- Okay.

- I think that one of the issues that we run into a lot is, this is never gonna happen here.

You know, it happens in the big city, or it happens in the rural area because that's where you'll find more guns, so to speak.

And I've got bad news for everybody.

There are two kinds of schools out there when it comes to crisis.

Those that have had them, and those that are gonna have 'em.

And I couldn't tell you the number of times I've sat with school administrators in particular, done TV shows, et cetera, as a matter of fact, we did a national show one time and I told the moderator, "I want you to only ask one question, did you ever think this would happen in your community?"

And every one of them said, "No, it doesn't happen."

But it did.

So it happens all over and I don't think anyone's complacent, or everyone is.

- Okay, Dan, you've been in a lot of school systems around the state as a volunteer teacher.

Do you think the communities are a little complacent about it, or do you think they're pretty aware of school safety in the state?

- I would echo what John has said.

Most rural schools in Montana probably think, well, that couldn't happen here.

We're a tight knit community, it won't happen.

So yes, I would say they're probably complacent.

I'm most familiar with Bozeman school district here, and they're well aware that there is a safety issue that they have to be, you know, guard against something unusual happening, some crisis.

But I would say most schools are somewhat complacent in Montana.

- I think that's human nature.

All right, let's move over to Mary.

Mary, this question came in from the Northeast part of the state, they didn't say exactly where, but this person said they had bacterial blight in their peas.

Is there anything they can do next year with the pea crop they have?

- So bacterial blight is seed borne, and then it's also stubble borne, or soil borne.

So if you have had an epidemic of bacterial blight, you want to replace that seed lot with something from a reputable seed dealer.

'Cause you don't want to plant seed that you know has a problem.

There's no seed treatments you can do on the seed, but just good crop rotation practices, and then often bacterial blight follows a hail or a rain event, or sometimes a frost.

You don't need to spray a fungicide for bacterial disease.

You just kinda have to roll with it.

It can cause significant damage on especially dry pea and fresh peas in the garden.

They're very, very susceptible to it, but best practices just use a good seed lot and best management practices for your crop.

- All right, thank you Mary.

We had a question come in that did not get answered last week.

And I'm gonna throw this to everybody on the panel, except John, because it's not in your arena.

- [John] I can't even grow Tomatoes.

(all laughing) - Yeah, that's true, he can't.

Winter rye and Austrian winter peas, is too late to plant 'em?

Dan, you want to jump on first?

- Well, it's certainly not too late to put winter rye in, it's quite hardy, and hopefully we can plant it and get some rain and it'll be just fine.

And also depends on how much snow cover you're gonna get, as to how well it goes through the winter.

As far as peas, I'm gonna defer to the expert here.

(all giggling) - We talked about this at the beginning.

If you're gonna have good snow cover, and I think you can still plant winter peas here in Bozeman, for sure.

We always plant them after their winter squash and it's never failed for us.

You gotta be sure you're getting a winter pea though, there's some confusion on that in the market.

And there's large swaths in Montana where it's not gonna work even with ideal... - For best management practices, you wanna get like a bit of growth on it in the fall then?

- I think ideally you get 'em up and have a little growth in the fall, but I've certainly seen them survive without that happen.

And again, here in Bozeman where we do have reliable snow cover.

And I think there's large areas in Montana where that's not gonna be a successful.

- Sounds good.

Question again from Facebook, they've heard about School Resource Officers, and they would like to know do rural Montana schools have Resource Officers or similar programs?

And John, you don't know Montana all that well, Dan does, but what do you guys think?

- We've been talking about it here at the table before we went on air.

Mary's on a school board, in a rural school, would you say?

- [Mary] Mhm.

- Yes.

And the Resource Officers for those, School Resource Officers by and large are in larger communities.

But you say a Resource Officer does come to your school.

- We have a Bozeman police officer that's trained as a school resource officer and they do that as additional time.

I don't know exactly what the arrangement is, but they serve all of the rural schools in our county.

- Right.

- So they're rotating amongst a lot of 'em.

- And Dan and I were talking about it cause he's in Bozeman.

And you had some very positive comments about that.

- I can't say enough good things about the school resource officers here in Bozeman.

They're in school because they want to be in school.

And you can tell that.

And the most important thing that they do is develop a rapport between them and the students.

Here's a trusted adult, and you'd be surprised how many students will go to one of those resource officers and tell them, "Hey, you know, I think something's going on that you need to look into."

So they are well worth what the school pays for them to be there.

And they're regular police officers.

They do their weekend shifts, and do all of that.

They're in the school because they wanna be there.

And they're good with kids.

- And they also help school boards, too.

Like when we've had some issues with parents and wanted some security at the meeting, they'll show up.

They've been invaluable.

- Yeah, and you do have a person there.

There's a trained, you know, EMT.

And they're there instantly if there is a crisis.

- Dan mentioned, Jack, the rapport that the SROs may have with the students, and he made the comment, we hear it a lot now, you know, if you see something or hear something, see something, say something.

Specifically for rural schools that may not have access to that, or any school, frankly, in this state and around this country, one of the things that we really run into oftentimes is we'll do some polling and find out that upwards of 60% of the kids in a high school don't feel like they have a significant relationship with an adult in that high school.

It's important.

I'm not talking about relationships I'm talking about a relationship with a school secretary, with a custodian, with somebody in the cafeteria, with the school bus driver.

So it's important that everyone in the school try to develop relationships with these kids, so that if something's going on that the student has someone they can go to to share that information.

- I'm gonna come back to something we talked about in the duck blind earlier this morning about one of the tests that you did.

But before we do that, I'm looking at all of this stuff here.

And I know they're not apples.

(all laughing) I've learned that much through the years.

What the heck is all that stuff you got on the table here?

- We've got a huge collection of squash, and I could talk for the whole hour about 'em here.

- Well let's not do that.

- We're not gonna go that deep into it, but all these were grown here in Bozeman, and they've all got a unique flavor profile, a unique ability to store over time, an ideal time of year to eat 'em.

And if there was one I was gonna eat today, it would probably be this one, the acorn squash.

Those are an eat me now squash, you can find those in the market and they're pretty good right now.

Many of the rest of these are gonna get better with storage and you should go buy a locally produced one now because when the time comes to eat them, the ones in the store are gonna be from somewhere further south, and they're not gonna be as good.

But some of these will store for as long as nine months and get nothing but better during that time.

- Yeah, I've kept them in my garage till the next spring, and they've been great.

- Do you know the interesting thing and we'll go back, 25 years ago, you could not grow these to here in Bozeman.

Why is that?

- We've either had climate change or some genetic investment.

(all laughing) - I would vote for climate change.

It's definitely warm.

- You know, we pulled some tricks on these.

These were grown on plastic mulch, which warms the soil up.

And I did irrigate on June 11th when we had that frost to protect the plants from that frost.

But other than some plastic mulch and a little bit of frost protection, these are really reliable.

- Thank you, and we'll get back to a couple more of these, 'cause I'm curious about what some of these are, and I'm gonna go back a little bit in the history of agriculture in the state, and talk about some squash that we used to grow here to ship overseas that wasn't very successful.

(all giggling) Meanwhile, I want to go back to John.

John, you told me about something you did as a test run years ago at a small rural school in Nebraska, where you laid a gun on top of a car and... - My car.

- Yeah.

And how many kids would report.

Tell us about that experience?

- Well we do that a lot, by the way.

We oftentimes invade schools intentionally, or do something to show that their security is not what it ought to be.

The one that you're referring to is a school in, I won't even mention the state or whatever, but just to show that they weren't paying attention and the kids weren't sharing proper information, I just parked my car in a no parking area for one, and stuck a 12 gauge shotgun on the hood and just stood there and engaged kids in conversation as they went by.

And none of those students that I talked with, and I probably talked with 15, 18 kids, went inside and said, "There's a guy out in the parking lot that's got a gun!"

Not one, they just went on, went to class, did their thing.

And so then I parked my car and walked in and talked with the people about some ways that we might do this a little differently and make that school more secure.

Again, I'm trying to emphasize safe.

We've got non-skid tile, we've got shatter-proof windows, we've got railings that are in schools depending on the age of the schools, et cetera, and schools by and large are safe.

They're not very secure.

Now Mary, on the other hand has done something in her district that, it's a new building and they've done the right thing in regard to making it a little more secure.

- Okay.

I like that test.

And it makes you realize that kids can be a factor in school safety.

- [John] Absolutely.

- Okay.

Good point.

Mac, let me throw this one at you.

This is from Bozeman.

They have planted peas and beans in raised beds, knowing that they fix nitrogen.

You have any idea how much to leave in the ground for soil to get the benefit in future years?

- How much of the- - Yeah, how much nitrogen they might fix.

- You know, peas and beans fix nitrogen largely for their own use.

And if you're gonna have the crop produce peas and beans, which you pick, there's not a whole lot of leftover from that.

There's some, but- - [Mary] Did they inoculate it?

- Right, and did you inoculate 'em in the first place?

And to be honest, most gardens soils that are amended with manure, compost, or time has got a fair amount of nitrogen cycling through them anyways.

And so it may be the case that the peas and the beans don't have to fix much at all.

But I would say in the big picture, and this would apply to field situations as well.

If you're harvesting a crop, you're probably removing most of the nitrogen that was fixed.

They're still a great rotation crop.

They probably add some nitrogen, but I wouldn't worry about whether you remove the crop residue or not.

I would remove it and compost it and go on doing what you're doing.

- Sounds like a reasonable answer to me.

Mary, from Glendive, this person wants to seed winter wheat.

The soil is extremely dry and what can they do to ensure that even under dry soil conditions, that the seed stays healthy until they germinate?

- Right, so the primary disease, if you can call it that, we're worried about right now is dry seed decay, which is just penicillium, it's bread mold, and it's in the soils.

And then there is a certain seed treatment, which is in the Montguide that's online, and I can't remember the name of it right now, but it's in the Montguide, and you'd want to use something with that, especially in these dry soils.

- Okay, thank you.

I'm a firm believer in seed treatments in dry years.

- [Mary] Yeah.

- Especially.

- Yeah, and the thing that people don't realize is that there are pathogens that are encouraged by dryness.

And so they're primed for when they get a little moisture, and get a little- - Ironically, one of the fungi, it was called penicillin.

And it's a green mold that really does a number in dry situations.

John, a caller from Missoula has a question.

He is wondering if COVID has been an issue for secure schools, and how did you address that?

- Yes.

How's that for an answer?

- [Jack] Well, that's a quick answer, exactly.

(all laughing) - Well, here's where we noticed the difference in COVID was last year, when so many schools were doing virtual and remote learning, the number of calls that we had for school shootings were almost zero.

You know, because now it's changed, but COVID is an issue.

And speaking of that, one of the trainings we began, we did it in Montana as well, 11 years ago, we began to train school districts about pandemics.

And in many instances, the response was the same as, "Well that's never gonna happen.

That's never gonna happen."

And we were talking with them about, you're gonna have to be prepared to do a curriculum for kids out there.

You're gonna have to pay staff not to come to work so they can pay their mortgages, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You're gonna have to understand there are gonna be kids in their homes with a dead body.

A parent, a sibling, whatever.

And no one's gonna come and retrieve that body for quite a while because they're afraid of that disease or whatever it is that's going around, in this case, COVID.

And it was amazing, the number of schools that called and said, "Wow, wow, we just didn't believe it would ever happen, and we were not prepared."

- I would agree with you there.

Dan, we're gonna delve back into your private and early life, when you were a plant breeder, and this person from Great Falls said, why do we need public plant breeders when are we gonna have private plant breeders?

Do you want to expound on that?

Your opinion?

- And you gotta remember, I've retired sometime ago and I'm out of the loop.

But with regard to that question, I consider private plant breeding and to be cooperative events.

- [Jack] Exactly.

- There's no question about that.

Public plant breeding does some things that private companies can't do.

They do peer research.

They also train plant breeders.

That's where we get our new plant breeders, which is a critically important thing.

And some cases, a private plant breeding company can move faster to address a certain problem, what have you.

So yes, we need public plant breeding and they should cooperate with private and vice versa.

- You worked for a company called West Bread, eventually Western Plant Breeders.

And you work closely with breeders here at Montana State University.

And did you release joint varieties together?

- There were some instances when we actually would license a variety from the university and release it that way.

So we did some cooperative work like that.

And private plant breeding companies also provide a place for graduate students to work in the summers or do that sort of thing.

And we used to often have graduate students that would go to national meetings and we'd help fund them to do that.

So as far as I'm concerned, that's the right way to go.

And that is to cooperate.

- [Jack] It worked well for a lot of years.

- It did.

- No doubt about it.

Okay, I'm going back to a little bit of history on the Japanese squash that we're talking, kabocha squash.

And pointing that out, and I can go back into probably the late eighties or early nineties when we grew several hundred acres of that squash here in the state.

I think Dan, you remember that.

And the caveat was we were gonna ship 'em all to Japan because the Japanese loved kabocha squash.

That didn't happen.

And it's not the first time that a crop didn't make it because of a market.

But tell us about the kabocha, the Japanese squash.

What's really good about it?

- I'll back up a little bit, there are three different species present here.

We have cucurbita pepo, which are the acorn, the delicata, the spaghetti, and the pumpkin.

This is a pumpkin.

So the same species as a pumpkin.

And then we have the cucurbita muskata, which is the butternut squashes, and then there's maxima.

So maxima would include the hubbards, I would call this a kabocha, and then this one, which is called tetsukabuto, it's a hybrid and the seed comes from Japan.

And this is one that's very popular in Japan.

It's a very dark orange, kind of dry and flaky flesh, and it's got far and away the highest sugar content of these and it stores extraordinarily well.

I wouldn't even want to think about eating this until December and it's gonna store well into next year, into March, April easily, just in your garage.

And if you give it ideal storage conditions, nine months.

Yeah, this is a reliably high producing, and an excellent eating and good storage squash to grow and eat here in Montana.

And I don't know anything about trying to sell 'em to Japan.

(all laughing) That seems like a long way to ship something that's mostly water, but they do keep quite well.

- That's true, we've had some other crops like- - You know and I've had some visitors from Japan come out to our farm and see these growing and, and right away they, oh yeah, tetsukabuto.

- [Jack] Ironically.

- It's a hybrid between this, two species actually, it's a hybrid of- - Okay.

If somebody grew a lot of these here in Montana, is there a market, do you think?

- There is one, and I think there's a fairly strong, it's typical of your local commerce markets, farm stands, farmer's markets, fall festivals, that kind of thing.

I think, you know, the vegetable producing valleys of Montana each have several growers growing considerable acreage of these, and selling them locally.

I noticed the co-op here in Bozeman had a special on 'em last week and they sold out of the locally produced ones in a matter of days.

And then we start seeing them come in from Idaho and Washington.

And then later in the season, when I want to be eating these ones that have developed all their sugar, they're coming up from as far away as Mexico in the spring.

- All right, I didn't realize we could grow that many here, but that's impressive.

Back to John, this question came from Whitefish, and it's a school security question.

How do you feel about armed teachers?

That's always a touchy question.

- Very.

Well, let me just, we train law enforcement officers, and we train educators and school staff.

In our training of law enforcement officers, and I don't want to focus, the only problem in schools is not just guns at times.

It is non-custodial parents trying to steal their kids, et cetera, et cetera.

I said we'd had 52 school shootings, in that same period of time we've probably had 25,000 attempts by non-custodial parents to take kids away from schools.

Mary and I were talking about how they and their district admit visitors to the school.

And I made some suggestions to her off camera about some changes for that that would make it more secure.

Our training with law enforcement, you need to understand that when something happens, if you're gonna have first responders show up, the building's gonna be locked.

Let's say to all those people out there, a way to be more secure and not spend dollars is to just lock your doors.

But if you have a problem, you're gonna have to have people enter those buildings.

So we do it a number of different ways.

We call them knox boxes.

They're keys to the building that law enforcement have a general key that they can open and enter, or they have all kinds of breaching equipment in the trunks of their cars nowadays to get into schools or whatever.

But law enforcement officers are trained in rapid response, one or two officers entering a building.

And when we train them, our instruction to them is if you see someone with a gun, shoot them.

I had a superintendent recently in a state that I won't mention, who said, "I have a shotgun in my closet."

And I said, "Well, I just trained 400 SROs yesterday, and this is what we told 'em."

And he said, "I think I'll take that shotgun home."

Because they don't know who the perpetrator or perpetrators are.

And I'd also say this, a common question that we ask law enforcement, and they're fabulous, is in a high stress event, I'm talking about you fear for your life, et cetera.

How much of your training do you lose?

And the common response is 70%.

Now here's someone in a school that hasn't even been trained that has a weapon that's supposed to be stopping something that's going on.

And officers also say, I say to them, "If you were to shoot, how many times would you hit what you're shooting at?"

And they say, "In a high stress event, maybe one out of 10."

And now we're gonna allow somebody to have something and not be trained.

We don't think that's a very good idea, frankly.

- Okay.

Dan, you've been a volunteer teacher for quite a few years after you retired.

Do you get training as a volunteer teacher on how to handle some of these high stress situations in a school system?

- Yes.

As soon as you apply to become a substitute teacher, I'm familiar mostly with a Bozeman duty, you go through a certain amount of training.

Of course, they do a background check to see if you're, you know, a danger yourself and it's minimal training.

I will tell you that, but in your folder, when you substitute, it will outline the procedures for, you know, shelter in place, and what to do if there's an armed intruder, but it's not extensive, it's just, you know, some common sense things that you're supposed to be able to do, but it's outlined right in your folder.

And every time you go to school, you should open the folder and read it.

- Can I jump on that Jack for a second?

- Sure.

- I'm looking at your notes over there, and I'm gonna ask Dan, what's the font size in that folder that you're reading?

(Jack laughing) Is it this big?

Of the directions to you on what to do if there's an armed intruder, et cetera, how big is the print in the folder that tells you what to do if that happens.

- Some of the lines are quite large.

- Okay.

- I can read 'em quite well.

(all laughing) - Okay, but what if you just got eye surgery?

What I'm saying- - But your point is, is it emphasized?

- Well, my point is that when we interview people all the time after high stress events in schools.

And staff often say, "I was so afraid, I could not read the directions that have hung on my wall for a long time, that I knew what we were supposed to do, but I was so afraid for my life and the lives of my responsible people, IE the kids, that I couldn't even refresh my memory because I couldn't read it."

So we say to school people, only have four or five things on there and put it in font size that goes, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and that's it.

- You must have trained someone in Bozeman.

- I did.

- Because those sheets are exactly what you say.

There's not very many lines, and they're pretty prominent.

- I'm glad they followed through.

- Dan, I recently had some first aid training that involved a makeup artist, making some very realistic looking injuries, and then some role-playing around a serious injury.

And the idea was to create a stressful situation so that we could work through it.

And I think I agree with you, when you get in a real stress situation, whether it's a violence crisis or a first aid situation, you don't function very well.

Do you do something like that, of simulated high emotion training with teachers to- - No, we don't.

We do not.

And the reason we don't do it is because of the fallout.

- [Mac] Gotcha.

- Schools oftentimes have these junior, senior proms, and then they'll fake an accident.

And they'll call all the kids in the auditorium and they'll say, "Oh, we had this accident on the way to school, and Billy and Sarah and so-and-so have been killed."

Because they're trying to emphasize the kids, you need to be responsible in driving.

All the time, and especially on prom night, et cetera.

And we always say, you better have a crisis team on call because you're dealing with people, adults and students, who have had loss issues in their lives.

And all of a sudden they're gonna re-grieve.

And so we do not do it because of that.

- Okay, let's switch back to Mary.

I had a question from Bozeman here, and I agree.

Their raspberries are declining.

Do you know why?

(Mary laughing) And mine have declined seriously, so.

- Well, I've had- - Yours pulled through okay this year after, we've had two hard falls.

- We had two hard frosts in the spring.

And they had just, the canes just died.

But if it's a long-term patch, there's a number of things that could, they accumulate virus diseases.

Especially if you have like small, hard berries and stuff.

They have a bunch of cane borers, so if you can get rid of that, the old canes, you know, and get them out of the area, throw them in the garbage and get 'em off the property.

And then if you decide to replace them, well, and thin the patch.

Because a lot of times people just keep 'em real, real thick.

And you just want, what is it, like, there's a Montguide on that.

- [Mac] It's a surprisingly thin density that's advised.

- It is.

- [Mac] And I followed it and was surprised how well it works.

- But it bears really, really well.

Yeah, so you get much bigger sweeter berries if you actually follow the directions.

(all laughing) But if you're gonna replace that patch, you know, you want to rest that soil, maybe a year, plant something, a non host, and then- - You don't just dig up some plants from the neighbor?

(all laughing) - Right.

And then certified virus free plants and start fresh.

Don't get it from the neighbor.

'Cause they have as many viruses that probably came from your patch.

(all laughing) - I see, okay.

- We've all been guilty of it, right?

- All right, and you're right.

- But that's the best practice.

- And I am a culprit at stealing somebody else's raspberries and growing 'em.

And you're absolutely right.

If you start fresh, sometimes you're better off.

Mac, this is interesting.

If you're growing squash in the garden and cross-pollinate, are you coming up with a different variety?

- These varieties are what they are, and they look like what they look like.

But if you were to get the seeds out of any one of these, it's a jumbled mess.

So you need to buy new seed every year from a squash breeder who controls pollination or only grows one variety.

- I have a patch in my garden with gourds, and I just leave it there for like just the surprises every year.

(Mary laughing) - Oh yeah, some of those compost pile gourds can be pretty cool.

But no, if you took a seed out of any of these and grew 'em next year, it would be a big mess.

I wanna tell you about a couple other, the maximas, the tetsukabuto is a hybrid.

And it's a good one, but a couple of these, really the ugliest ones on the table are the best eating.

The winter sweet, that's an old open pollinated, I'd call that a kabocha squash, and then a hubbard squash is the same species.

- [Jack] Hubbard makes good soup.

- That's the ugliest one here.

And that's an old, old, old heirloom.

And it's very productive as well and a real good eating squash, but it's hard to sell them because they're so ugly.

(Mac laughing) - My comment on those, you need an ax to get inside of 'em.

- You need a serious knife, yeah.

(all laughing) - An ax works better because that's actually a small hubbard compared to some that I've seen.

John, this interesting question from Facebook, are there model programs or curriculums that address the roots behind school violence?

- After the Jonesboro shootings, we began to work with the United States secret service.

And the secret service does assessments of threats.

And so we went around, and we went to prisons, and we interviewed actual school shooters.

And then we took the information we got from them.

You made the comment, if you see something, hear something, say something.

One of the comments that those shooters often made was, "I told them a bunch of people I was gonna do this, but those kids never told anybody."

Or, "I picked out the people I was gonna shoot, but they also told me to shoot so-and-so and so-and-so."

And so, because these kids pre-select their victims frequently.

So we took all of that, and took the secret service information, and put it together.

And that was sent out to every school district in the United States.

So all schools have the information on how to do threat assessments from that study.

- Okay, that's interesting.

And also from Facebook, we'll follow up with another one, should the role of a school resource officers be reexamined?

And I'm not sure what they mean by that.

- Well, I support everything Dan has said, one of the misnomers is, if I have a resource officer in the school, and we have an active shooting, they're gonna stop it.

Active shootings take usually less than a minute.

Resource officers, Jack, you are a Nebraska native, I dealt with a shooting in Omaha where the resource officer was 10 feet away and still the assistant principal was killed.

And the principal was shot five times, and the SRO, it just didn't work out, you know, for them to be involved at all.

So I don't think they should be reexamined.

I think they should be reexamined in schools where they consider the role different than Dan described.

Because there are some SROs, no offense to them out there.

So don't give me a ticket going somewhere on the way home or whatever it might be.

But there are some who really aren't wild about being assigned that role, or see it as a role where they are gonna police in the school, as opposed to be someone who builds rapport.

And that's not their fault, it's just a kind of a mis-assignment.

- Okay, good answer, thank you.

Dan, this is from Denton.

You know where Denton's at?

- [Dan] I know where Denton's at.

I get a response in Denton.

- [Mac] I think I graduated there once.

- Did you really?

(all laughing) - This person would like to know how you become a volunteer or a substitute teacher.

- I'm glad somebody finally asked.

'Cause I was gonna put a commercial out here a while ago, especially for gray hairs.

If you're retired and you're trying to decide to do something, consider being a substitute teacher or a mentor in the classroom, what have you.

And it's easy to do.

You do not have to be a certified teacher.

If you're gonna do a long-term sub, they would like you to be a certified teacher, but you can just volunteer.

And right now Bozeman is critically short Teachers are working their, you can't say it on TV, they're working their keister off.

And I'm sure it's true in rural schools.

- [John] Absolutely.

- They're short.

- And it's almost every state.

- Yeah, if you want to do something useful, go ahead and volunteer.

I've had a lot of people say, "Well, but I don't understand this new math."

This sixth grade math or eighth grade math, that doesn't matter.

You don't have to be a math teacher to teach math.

I even took some German classes, I mean subbed in German class.

I certainly don't speak the language.

So they'll, once you volunteer, they will go ahead and do a background check, which is obvious.

They have to do that to be sure you're safe to be in the schools.

And you can pick and choose the assignments you wanna take.

I mean, if you want to be called at six o'clock in the morning, you can tell them, "Yeah, call me anytime you want."

But if you want to just look at the vacancies that are posted the day before, and select one that is of interest to you.

And after you do it for a while, you'll get to know some of the teachers and some of the classes.

I have my favorites and it's just fun.

Now, here's the other thing.

Here so many people say, "These kids nowadays, you know, they think they're-" I think my parents said the same thing.

And of course we said, they are 99.9% polite, nice students.

I have a hard time deciding which I like better.

The sixth graders, the seventh graders, the eighth graders, or the high school students, because they're all nice young people.

Once in a while, you'll find a jerk.

But, and I can remember back to high school.

(Jack laughing) Guilty.

- [Jack] Yeah.

- But it is very, you don't get paid a lot of money.

You're not gonna make a living necessarily, but you get a hug occasionally, even with COVID protocols.

- Absolutely.

- And especially when you work with the special needs students, they are some of the nicest young people to work with.

So it is rewarding.

It's fun.

And anybody can do it.

You do not have to be a, you know, calculus wizard to take over a class in high school.

You just have to be willing to be a trusted adult.

- I'm curious, do the kids relate maybe better to a volunteer or a substitute teacher at times, than they may with their regular teacher?

Your opinion, there.

- They do.

Usually you get a free pass, and the grayer your hair, (all laughing) the more days that you get that free pass.

No, they like to see somebody different from time to time.

But I just can't say enough good things about being a volunteer teacher.

- So say I want to go into Bozeman and become a volunteer teacher tomorrow.

How would I start?

What would I do, first of all?

- Go to the administrative office in Wilson, just fill out an application, and they will, of course line you up for a background check.

- [Jack] Right.

- And then you have to do a little bit of training.

I mean, it's mostly just common sense.

Things that you read through, and some of the training that John has talked about, and then you're on tap and you choose when you're gonna work.

I mean, if you need to be gone for a week, that's the beauty of this thing, you just don't take any jobs for that week.

- Interesting, sounds good.

Mary, I have a question, and this has come in almost every week.

We had an ornamental disease insight guide.

Where do people get that?

Can you mention that again?

- Yeah, you can call 994-5150, or the extension office, which I don't know their, I mean extension publications, and they can get you some.

Although we may have to consider another printing.

(all laughing) There might be out shortly.

- I finally picked one up and I give you guys credit.

They are really very nice.

- It's really impressive.

- Yeah, very impressive.

- Is the content available online as well?

- Yes, the PDF is freely available online.

- John, a question from Deer Lodge, and Deer Lodge is just between Butte and Missoula, for those people that are geographically- - [John] Been there.

- Okay.

This person would like to know if students are outside for recess or for any other reason, when a lockdown occurs, what are those students supposed to do?

- Okay.

When we interview people after events, they say there are two things that got us through it.

One, radios.

Every time students are outside, the instructor, whomever is responsible for those students, needs to have a radio.

Not a cell phone, a radio.

And that radio then is the way that they get communicated with.

So if you were to have a lock out or lock down, lock down would be the classroom doors, which is another thing that we look at is do classroom doors, does the teacher have to step in the hallway to lock the door, can they lock it from the inside?

Those are all changes that schools are beginning to make, but you would not want them to come into the building.

So schools should have, and almost all of them do, ultimate sites.

If you evacuate the whole building, students would go to the alternate site, but parents would not.

And we would have law enforcement One of the biggest problems after these, you see it on television a lot, the news people love to cover it, are the streaming of parents to schools, you know, and wanting to, I've always said, "If you want to see violence, ladies and gentlemen, just tell a parent you don't know where their kid is, and you'll see violence."

And so those kids would be moved to an alternate site.

And then if it were to continue, and they'd be released to their family members, there'd be a relocation site that they'd go to.

And those alternate sites are difficult in smaller communities because they need to be a safe distance from the school, just in case we're talking about explosives or anything like that.

- You know, there's a lot of rural areas, especially in the eastern part of Montana, and north central part of the state.

And some of these schools may be half an hour or an hour away from the nearest law enforcement officer.

What do those schools need to do to prepare for the unknown?

- Well there are several things, and I won't talk about 'em here.

Because we don't want people who would pick those schools and try to do things that shouldn't be done to know what it is we've done to train them to be able to wait and tell and be reasonably secure until an officer arrives.

And need to understand that some of those officers that arrive have kids at those schools.

So it's not only a high stress event, but they're also worried about their own children or whatever that might be.

You could have a veteran officer arrive, you could have whatever, plus you have weather.

So when you say half hour, you know, I've been in officer's cars where we've gone 150 miles an hour, but you don't go 150 miles an hour when it's icy.

- Good point.

Okay throw this out to Mac and Mary, and Daniel you can jump in too if you want.

This person wants to know from Bozeman, what they should be pruning now with all this warm weather?

- I think it's a little early to prune, isn't it?

- Yeah, I wouldn't quite yet.

- Now you've got, any pruning should be dormant pruning.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- You prune now, you're going to stimulate new growth.

And when we get that first frost, that's 15 degrees.

- Which is gonna be maybe next week.

- Oh, really?

Maybe, though, we'll get some vegetables.

- Well I had a question related, is what should I be watering right now?

- [Mary] Right.

- And that's a good point.

- You know, I usually turn the water off in some point in September to encourage things to go dormant.

But now it's been so hot, and so dry for so long, I'm wondering if trees oughta have a little water.

- Abby last week answered that question.

She said, yeah, she'd keep watering, but also to do it out where the water drips to the ground, not next to the trunk of the tree.

And we see that so commonly, but yeah, overnight very slow drip.

- I was having a close look at my apple trees today.

And they've still got lots of green leaves on 'em.

And so it's too soon to prune.

You do not want to stimulate new growth with pruning or with water right now.

So I think we should have a little bit of water, but- - You could prune back your raspberry canes, if you have 'em.

- Yeah.

Anything that's dead, you know, anything that's dormant, and then some things are, sure you can clean them up.

- We really haven't had what I would call a really hard killing frost in most areas of state, maybe Butte and some of the higher.

- I'm tryna process my vegetables, I don't have time to prune yet.

(all laughing) - But it looks like early next week, we're gonna get some low twenties and some snow, here in Bozeman anyhow, so.

- It's time.

- It is that time.

- I agree.

- And I hope it's not 20 below.

Like it's not like the last couple of years we've had these sudden onset of real winter.

- Oh, that's been brutal.

- That's what's been hard on a lot of the raspberries, among other things.

- We had a question also come in from Facebook.

And I want to delve on this because I know John well enough, there's another story I'd like him to really relate to.

But this person notices that there's numbers on all doors at school.

- Yup.

- Why is that?

- Well, when an officer, if you have to have, or first responder of any sort arrives, usually the incident, it could be an illness, it could be whatever, is in a certain area of the building.

And commonly, they would come to the front of the building to get in.

We want them to come to the area of the school where the incident is, and therefore doesn't cost any money to number outside and inside.

And they oftentimes forget to do the inside.

So if a teacher, if it's a high stress event and someone's calling 911 and saying, come to door 11, we don't want 'em to have to step outside to see if that's door 11, because the school's in a lockdown.

We'd like him to just say, come to door 11 and then an officer, or officers, or fire, or EMT, or whomever, whatever the incident is, comes to that door.

And the response is a lot swifter and more efficient.

- I wanna expand on that, because one time you were up here hunting many years ago, you had an incident that occurred in Lincoln, Nebraska, where a high school kid, I think a 14 year old student, hijacked- - Stole a school bus.

- [Jack] Stole the school bus.

(John laughing) Explain what happened there and what transpired.

- Well, I can tell you what they are now.

- Yeah.

- There's numbers on top of those school buses on the roof, because they didn't number them, and so from the helicopters, used to fly helicopters, right?

From the helicopters, law enforcement didn't know- - Which bus it was.

- Which bus it was that he took.

And so we do a ton of things with school bus drivers.

We even trained school bus drivers how to recognize child abuse by the way kids get on and get off school buses.

'Cause they're the first to see 'em in the morning and the last to see 'em at night.

But we now have 'em put numbers on the top.

So that if bus 15 is the one that got swiped, we know where it is.

- Well there was, if I remember right, there's about 240 school buses.

- Oh yeah.

- In Lincoln.

- And they were out.

- And they were all out that morning.

- Oh yeah.

- But one of them had a renegade child on it driving his way to Omaha on the I-80.

- To put it simply, it was a cluster.

(all laughing) - Yeah, I believe that.

Okay.

Mac, from Belt, what is the best time of the year to plant raspberries and what are some of the preferred varieties?

And Mary, if you want to jump in on that too.

- Plant in the spring, get 'em going.

And there's an old variety and I'm, the name is boyne?

- Boyne.

- Is that the one everybody has?

- I asked on May the three and Toby Day, that's what I did.

(Mary laughing) - B-O-Y-N-E, boyne.

That's the one everybody grows that does pretty well here.

- Okay.

- And that's one that's gonna fruit alternate years, or alternate year canes, year old canes.

So one way to do it is mow 'em all the way down, mow half your raspberries every other year.

And you'll always have fresh canes, or you want to prune the ones that bore fruit this year out.

- Okay.

John, a teacher called in from Missoula asking what parents, teachers, grandparents, et cetera, can do to make sure the question of it can happen here, never does happen.

Any suggestions there?

- They can support bond issues, or whatever.

And design schools like Mary is talking about, where it's a double entrance into the school where you can't go directly into the building, makes a big difference in the design.

They can support trainings for secretaries who, there's another name for secretaries, chief security officer.

In almost every school in this country, and particularly in rural areas, and they're the screeners of people coming into the building, et cetera.

So we train them on what we call visual screening.

And we train law enforcement on it as well.

You can tell if someone's carrying a weapon, oftentimes by just how they look and visually figure out.

And I won't give the specifics of what we're looking for on this show, but for law enforcement, and school staff, we tell them specifically, here's how you can notice or identify some characteristics that the student or the adult may have something that they shouldn't have in your school.

And hopefully most of these schools have signage that says certain things aren't allowed on school property, like drugs, like weapons, like whatever.

But that's another security issue.

- Okay.

Thanks, John.

Dan, I find this one interesting.

This person is visiting in Bozeman.

He is from Nebraska and watches the program down there.

He says, it's very summer, but he says this one's better.

Thank you.

He watches "Backyard Farmer" back there, but he says corn yields have increased in the Midwest by at least a 100 to 150 percent.

Why have small grain yields not increased that much?

And we got not a lot of time, so go ahead and give us an answer.

- There has been a tremendous amount of money spent in corn and soybeans.

So there's been more research, and growers tend to pay for the research more than they do for small grains.

But as far as genetically why, or agrinomically why, I really don't have a good answer.

- I've got a little input.

You know, if you look at where we grow those crops, it has moved.

There's places where we used to grow a whole lot of wheat that were high yield environments.

And now we grow corn there.

And that pushes wheat further north and further west into dryer and colder places.

And the fact that it yields as well as it does is a testament to the work of the plant breeders.

But corn has moved.

- Corn nowadays in the Midwest, if you're not growing 250 bushel corn, you're not doing well.

And when I grew up in the Midwest, 100 bushel of corn, 150, what was considered good.

Folks, that's about it for this evening.

Before we go, I want to thank John for being here again.

I know I've said duck hunting trip for him, but he's been kind enough to come up and visit with us.

Dan, thank you for coming in.

Mary, Mac.

Next week, we're gonna have Dan Giuliano with the tech transfer program here at Montana State University.

We're gonna talk a little bit about plant breeding and how the university benefits from that.

So please join us again next week.

Thank you everybody for watching.

Have a good week.

Stay warm, good night.

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(moody country music) "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 and Landscaping, the Gallatin Gardeners Club, and the Rocky Mountain Certified Crop Advisor Program.

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