- [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, Cashman Nursery and Landscaping, the Northern Pulse Growers Association, and the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

(country music) - Good evening.

Welcome to another additional Montana Ag Live, originating tonight from the studios of KUSM on the very dynamic campus of Montana State University, and being brought to you over the Montana Public Television system.

I'm Jack Reisselman, retired professor of plant pathology.

Happy to be your host this evening.

We're continuing our theme this spring.

We're looking at women who are innovative and very important in the agricultural community that we're involved with today.

So this evening, before we get started, let me introduce the panel.

Way to my left is Mary Burrows.

Y'all know Mary.

Mary's a plant pathologist, also functions a little bit in the Dean's office.

Our special guest tonight, and we're happy to have her come all the way down from Belt, actually Great Falls too.

Cassidy Marn, Cassie is the executive vice president of the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee.

And you're gonna learn a lot about wheat and barley, and what it does for the state of Montana tonight.

It's really one of the best industries we have in the state.

Jason Cook, Jason is a plant breeder, relatively new here.

He's been on the program a couple times.

Happy to have you here this evening.

If you have any questions about varieties that you might be interested in, especially spring wheat lines, hey, it's an excellent time to call that question in and an old friend, Bruce Maxwell, his What are you laughing about?

You know where I'm going?

- I Know where you're going.

- Actually he's a weed scientist and believe it or not, this shows our age, Bruce used to be in one of my classes I thought many, many moons go.

If you have any questions about actually climate, weeds, he knows a little bit about everything.

Answering the phones tonight, Mike Giroux.

Mike, welcome, and Judge Bruce Loble.

And they're both remote tonight, and those questions come to me over this little computer here via technology called Slack.

So get those questions in.

We'll take all kinds of them, and if we don't get them on tonight, we'll get them on next week.

Cassidy, thanks for coming down.

Tell us what you do for the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee and a little bit about the Wheat and Barley Committee.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So I've been happy to work with the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee for over 10 years now.

We are the checkoff organization for small grains in the state.

So a portion of all wheat and barley sales sold in Montana help to fund the program.

We celebrated our 50th anniversary a few years ago, so the committee's been a very longstanding tool for Montana producers within the state.

We fund a lot of research and market development efforts.

Our core research funding, we call it our critical ongoing research efforts, include all of the breeding programs at Montana State University, along with a variety of other best practices.

Additionally, Montana exports about 80% of our wheat overseas, so market development is a huge area of focus for us as well.

- And I will say this, you guys have done a wonderful job through the years, and I'm very appreciative of that.

Before we get into tonight's program, I wanna show something that I'm very impressed with.

This is a book about the early years of the development of Wheat and Barley Committee, and it was produced by Charlie Ross.

Charlie was an a ag economist here at MSU, he's retired.

He put this together recently.

I'm fascinated.

It was really difficult to get the legislation through the, through the legislature for a wheat and barley checkoff.

It took six bills, six legislative sessions before it was enacted in, I believe, 1967.

And one of the reasons that I read that they really wanted to get the checkoff program going is because way back then, Montana's wheat was viewed as being low quality, some of the lowest quality available in the United States.

And they recognized that we needed to improve our varieties.

And we got the funded finally, and now it's taken off.

Jason, you might mention, our varieties are pretty good right now, aren't they?

- Yeah, they are, I mean, so we've been developing varieties for drought resistance, improved indigenous quality, and sawfly resistance is another big one that we've really been focusing on.

And like this last year, especially in the drought conditions that we had from our testing, Montana developed varieties did quite well relative to the other varieties available.

- Last week, we had the barley lab on with the Malt Barley Lab, and Hannah, our guest last week, came right out and said, "One of the reasons that we really have great barley "in this state is because of the producers."

And I think the same is true for wheat, and also the breeders who have brought high quality varieties to the marketplace and what we needed.

And in that respect, the first question that came in is for Cassidy.

And this person would like to know what value added traits are Montana expert markets looking for, and would they require identity preservation?

And I think they're referring primarily to wheat.

So you wanna take off on that one?

- Yeah, absolutely.

Value added has certainly been a popular topic of discussion.

We've seen a lot of additional value added efforts come into the state of Montana.

And I think a lot of those have fallen on some of the alternate crops that we have, pulse crops, certainly a lot of beef processing, meat processing.

But I do think there's certainly a big role for small grains to fall into that.

We've seen some popularity with some new high fiber type wheats that have been marketed to consumers with more of a health conscious mindset in that respect.

Also, I do think a lot of, again, what we export overseas, we have very, very quality sensitive markets.

We don't tend to see our traditional buyer groups change from year to year.

We have the same countries that come back to us for a very specific reason.

They absolutely know the product that they're going to get.

We have a lot of quality that starts in Jason's lab.

I like to say that for value added for Montana wheat, we're starting with the kernel, we're adding value from the time that you pull it off of the combine.

It has superior end use qualities, whether that's longer stability that a lot of the end users like to see when they're mixing their dough.

Bigger loaf volumes, that adds value to these consumers.

And so I'd like to try and point that out that we're really, maybe not processing it and sending flour off, but we're adding value to our specific end users and really, they're helping to drive these breeding programs.

We have a producer board that helps us allocate funding.

So we have Montana farmers that are helping to direct these checkoff monies, but we're also in a very unique position that we have big companies from Japan that come and meet with our wheat breeders and tell them their specific needs.

So Jason has a tough job on the agronomic side and the end use side, but we do really have an interesting way to get a lot of voices heard.

- Okay, thank you, excellent.

I'm gonna come back to you, talk about a little contest, or a naming contest we had in a minute, but I wanna ask Mary a question here that came in from Bozeman, and this person has rhubarb and rhubarb is up and growing by the way.

I noticed that today.

They get red spots on it every year, does this harm the plant?

- There's a number of causes of the spots, either nutritional deficiency, and then a fungal or a bacterial leaf disease.

As long as it's not defoliating it year after year, it should be fine.

And if you might wanna split it if it's getting too big and get it a shot of fertilizer.

- [Jack] It's pretty hard to kill rhubarb.

- It is, I've done it.

(all laugh) - Speaking of that, we're gonna get into something about house plants here in a minute, but before we do, the naming contest for varieties that I've seen advertised on several news programs, the Montana Northern Ag Network promoted it the other day.

This might be the first chance to share the names of those new varieties with the audience.

- I know, that's exciting.

Well, this all kind of ties back into the previous question about IP or identity preserve.

We've recently made the change.

Any new variety publicly coming out of Montana State University will be prefaced with the MT, so that buyers and producers alike are very, very aware of where those varieties are coming from.

And then this time around, with some of the new variety releases, again, we wanna give our growers a voice in what we're doing.

So we did hold the public naming contest, and we actually had four varieties, four different classes and varieties up for release.

So drum roll.

The Eastern Montana Durum variety will officially be named MT Raska, named after Lola Raska, a long time executive director of the Montana Grain Growers Association.

The Golden Triangle Durum will be named MT Black Beard, and that's to signify it has these very unique black ons in the field, so hence Black Beard, and then we'll have MT War Cat will be the new winter wheat variety, as well as MT Cowgirl, which is a barley forage variety.

- Good names, I like them.

And I like the way you approached naming them.

I think that's interesting and it gets the public involved and that's a positive.

Bruce, from Stanford.

This person recognizes that spring wheat prices are up significantly.

They're considering adding more spring wheat, but they're concerned about the long term climate aspects.

What do you think?

- Well, we, yeah, well, that's understandable.

We're in a very difficult time.

I think we have something like 33 of our counties in Montana are in either severe or extreme dry conditions.

And therefore, we're very much in a drought.

So it's a real challenge to make a recommendation at this point as to, should you plant, should you not with your spring crops in particular.

We have a lot of winter wheat that's in the ground, and I know farmers that are in the center of the drought, area in the center of the state that are not seeing much germination or very low stands so far, it's just starting to germinate, it can still come on, but to counter that is this high price.

And so, I mean, people can still make money even at very low production rates.

So-- - Go with it.

- I don't think you can go wrong that way.

I mean, certainly if it gets so dry that we just don't get a crop, but I think it doesn't take much of a crop to make money.

And especially if you can back off on your inputs.

- And you can, because inputs are pricey this year.

- Well, and most of our crops aren't gonna respond much to inputs in a really dry year.

So I think that's the critical part of this is the balance between watching that price and then determining what are the conditions.

And who knows, I mean, we could get a really wet May, and we could be back in business in terms of having some moisture, but to get the soil moisture there now, it would be unprecedented amount of precipitation.

So, yeah.

- All right.

The answer is, it's a gamble, but it probably will pay off.

Jason, this is an interesting question, it comes from Bozeman.

And this person hears the term spring wheat and winter wheat, and they understand one is planted in the fall, one is plant in the spring, but they wanna know what spring wheat is used for and what winter wheat is used for.

Is there a difference in their end use?

- Well, spring wheat is generally, it's produced as a high quality wheat with strong gluten strength that's oftentimes blended in with other wheat, so say winter wheat from the Central Plains, or other types of wheat blended in in mills, and then of course in the bakeries overseas, primarily to get, essentially, the flour that they need to make the products that they want to produce.

So generally, spring wheat's kind of blended in with other types of flour to get the specs where they need to be able to make the products they want.

Winter wheat's kind of more, consider your bread wheat.

It's really widely used for making bread, and this, of course is, there's more volume of it, and so it oftentimes tends to be the majority of the blend in your flour.

- So the spring wheat is generally a and they add it for-- - Right, so it has a higher grain protein content, usually stronger gluten strength.

And so they take those properties and then add to flour from other market classes to get the type of flour they need to make their products.

- Okay.

Question here that came in from Billings.

I'm not sure we can answer it, we'll give a try.

They would like to know how big a market is there for organic wheat, and do any of the export markets place a greater value on organic wheat?

Cassie, I'll let you jump at that first.

- Geez, I see everybody looking at me on that one, yeah, that's an excellent question.

And again, I'll go back to the very first question on IP.

Montana's very lucky in our logistics system, we have the ability to send shuttles of high quality wheat overseas.

However, we also have a lot of smaller acreage crops, canola, pulses, lentils.

We do have the ability to send smaller quantities, and Montana farmers are used to segregating crops versus a lot of other states, we have the bin storage to properly clean and store those crops and keep them separate.

The elevators have a much better ability than a lot of other areas to handle that.

So with that being said, we have several growers that are doing both conventional and organic farming.

It sounds like a pretty difficult task, but when you're looking at pulling CRP acreage out, and why not try the transition to organic.

So I think there's certainly room for all of those options across the board.

And I think we're very, very well positioned in our ability to segregate to do it better than other states.

As to the demand, we're the biggest organic wheat grower in the state, and I don't see that decreasing anytime soon.

And I think, as that becomes more and more popular, we'll hear more about it from other countries.

A lot of the organic demand is consumed domestically at this time, but I think we have the ability to provide that overseas as well.

- I agree, and I have worked with some producers over the years that have kind of mastered how to produce organic wheat.

And one of the real tricks a few of them have is when you break out some new ground, that first couple, two, three years, you can be certified to be organic, and it depends because the market varies.

Some of it is pretty high, and if you find the right contract, you can buy a new pickup every other year.

- Yeah, I think it's also interesting around the world what actually qualifies as being certified organic.

There's a lot of countries that maybe claim to have organic wheat, but the standards are not the same as the US, so I think it's a little more competitive for organic wheat around the other rest of the world.

- So does the container, if we had container depots, would that make a difference in terms of how we would shift our thinking and being able to sell smaller amounts, identity preservation, et cetera.

- I certainly think it would be a huge benefit for Montana growers just to have another option.

Obviously, we love our big customers.

We love the ease and ability to sell wheat by shuttle.

But I think the more options, certainly the better, and again, I think Montana growers are much more accustomed to doing that than a lot of other states and certainly have the ability and the willingness to try anything.

- Okay.

Mary, quick answer, actually, two quick answers.

Number one, what do you do about fairy rings?

It's only time we're gonna hit it this spring.

- [Mary] You promise?

- I promise.

- Fairy rings are result of decaying organic matter in the soil, so if you can fertilize to kind of even it out and water that in, that usually makes them appear a little bit.

- [Jack] Okay, and question two, is it too late to prune fruit trees?

- It's getting kinda late.

They're starting to bud out.

So you want them when they're completely dormant.

- You might be able to get away with it in Red Lodge, but not in Billings.

- [Mary] Yeah, no.

- Okay.

Facebook question.

Has GMO been a problem in the wheat seed in Montana?

Jason.

- Has the GMO been a problem?

So there is no GMO wheat in the US.

A few years ago, there was an issue where there was some GMO wheat found at the Southern Ag Research Center, but that was cleaned up.

It was from past Roundup Ready studies that were done in the end of the '90s, but other than that, there's been no GMO wheat found in Montana.

So yeah, it hasn't been a problem.

- It has not been, I don't think it has been in any place to speak of in the US.

- Yeah.

- And is there still GMO work ongoing in wheat?

- Yeah, I mean, there's researchers using the technology for different types of experiments and but I'm not aware of anyone pursuing the release of GMO or genetically engineered wheat.

So, as far as I know, there's no real, nothing moving forward there.

- Okay, so this is for the panel.

We often overlook the fact that we have a lot of people watching that are not producers.

So this question from Bozeman came in.

It says, for non grain growers in the audience, please briefly explain the processing equipment used in growing grain beginning in the spring, so we'll take spring wheat, and ending in the fall.

And that includes the use of custom combines, et cetera, so forth and so on.

So who wants to answer?

(Both laugh) - I guess I can do it, so here we go.

So yeah, in the spring, I don't know how detailed you want it, but the basics are farmers have a planter, they purchase their seed and then they-- - Certified seed, right?

- Absolutely, certified seed.

And so they user a planter, plant it.

Yeah, depend where you're at, maybe around April 15th to maybe May, some of the Northeastern parts of the state can be a little bit later.

And then yeah, after you've planted, after a few weeks, the farmer may go out, do some weed control with their sprayer.

And then depending on what kind of program they have, they may do another fertilizer application at the appropriate time.

And it might be a good option this year due to the drought, people might be really careful about how much fertilizer they wanna put on.

And so they may wanna wait a little bit and then see what the moisture outlook looks like and the prices and everything, and then apply it later, fertilizer application.

And then after that, you basically watch it grow, have it mature and then take your harvest equipment out, your combines and then your trucks to haul it back to your storage facilities or the elevator.

So that's generally the process.

- And then you put them in unit grain car trains and ship it to Portland and away it goes.

- That's right, yep.

Send it off to the Pacific Rim.

- So can you explain the certified part.

Why would you plant certified seed?

- So certified seed is seed that's produced by, that's been certified by the Montana's Seed Growers Association.

So it's certified as being weed free.

It's certified as being, if it says it's this variety, it's certified to be that variety.

Sometimes mix ups as far as what your seed sources are.

And then, yeah.

And so it's just kinda this quality control measure that's really helpful for planting high quality seed out on the farm and generally does better than your bin run seed or seed that, or brown begging is another term for it where you just take the seed off your farm and then put it back in the field, so.

- Okay, Thank you.

Cassidy, from Helena, what is the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee doing to promote or breed Kamut, and how big a market could you envision Kamut might be, and does it have the same nutritional properties as spring or durum wheat.

Tough questions, but have at it?

- Yeah, absolutely.

It's certainly been a very, very popular crop, obviously.

Bob Quinn and Big Sandy started of the whole thing and he's done a tremendous job.

It definitely can fill a very important niche where people are very, very interested in the nutritional properties of some of these ancient grains.

And it also checks off that organic box.

So it's certainly something that we've seen has gotten some interest on.

We get inquiries a about it regularly, and are happy to certainly include that in our promotion.

But we do work with Bob and we've been able to have him come in and speak to a couple of teams that we've been with.

And one of our board members actually has been growing Kamut, raising it for seed.

So we've been able to take some trade teams out and look at it in the field and it's awfully beautiful to walk through.

It comes up to your shoulders.

So definitely always are willing to spread the word about that and like to promote Montana across the board, organic and ancient and new and conventional, we're happy to take it all.

- You mentioned board members, how are your, and well, first of all, I believe there are seven board members that are voting board members.

How are they selected?

- Very good question.

So our seven producer board members are all selected by the governor of the state of Montana.

They represent various regions around the state that are based on production.

So for instance, one of our directors only has two counties because one of them is Chouteau county, which is a huge producer of grain.

And then another actually has most of Southern and Western Montana, that's a very, very big district, but all seven of them are appointed by the governor.

They serve three year terms.

They can serve up to three consecutive terms, and we've been very fortunate to have a very stable board, very, very experienced.

We get a lot of board members that are coming off of Montana Grain Growers, Farmers Union, Farm Bureau.

So they're very, very adept in that leadership role and very quick to step in and take on a lot of big duties, in addition to being on the Wheat and Barley Committee and going to four board meetings a year.

We have groups like US Wheat Associates and Wheat Foods Council, and US Grains Council that they're board members representing those groups as well, so it's a very, very big time commitment to be a part of the Wheat and Barley Committee.

- And they're eager to train the next generation.

So if you're a young producer, talk to your local board member and see if you can get involved.

- Yeah, absolutely.

I've been passing them off to a lot of reporters this spring, we've been very popular, so it's definitely a part of the job.

I'm not sure we tell them when they sign up, but they're very willing to step in and the door is always open.

Email, phone, whether that be our office or our board members, we're here to represent you as growers.

- I've known a lot of them through the years, and I really enjoy them, but one individual sticks out and I'm gonna have to mention his name.

His name was Larry Barber.

Larry Barber was from Denton, Montana Larry was a little cantankerous.

And if you made any kind of suggestion, his standard response was prove it.

And this went on and on, but he really was good on the Wheat and Barley Committee.

And we have a lot of great members that have been on for years.

Bruce, from Fort Benton, this is interesting.

One of this person's friends talked about variable-rate fertilizing application at coffee, and this person did not want to appear to be stupid but he would like to know what variable-rate is.

- Okay, yeah.

Well, I'm doing a lot of work in precision ag, so this is an area where basically you determine that there are certain portions of your field might not be performing like you would hope, so you might, especially in response to your fertilizer.

So you try to put on variable-rate.

And so variable-rate application is typically a rate controller on your fertilizer spreader or sprayer, and it delivers different rates, simply.

So nitrogen might be a good example of where you would use that.

So we're finding that that technology is a way to really increase profits, by incorporating that technology, but finding out how your field performs is a very important step in making sure that you maximize those profits.

So that's part of the equation there is to really determine first.

And so part of that means that you could use that rate controller to actually put out treatments.

So you basically do your own test in your own field, putting out different rates, see what the response is across those rates and the way we actually deliver a mechanism, a software that allows you to, it uses your previous yield map and then lays out treatments, so different rates of the nitrogen fertilizer, but it does it in places where you got a high yield, places where you got a low yield, and then it determines how well, where are you getting a response and where aren't you.

And then from that, what the economic optimum would be, or what the profit maximizing rate would be in any given portion of the field, given the width of your sprayer and all those things taken into account.

- [Jack] Is that called precision ag?

- That's called precision ag.

- Okay, and on that note, a question came in, what is MSU doing to train students for careers in precision ag?

And we're gonna hold off on that one, because the dean who is an expert in precision ag is gonna be with us next week.

So she can answer that question.

So you have to watch next week.

Cassidy, interesting question.

Good question from Great Falls.

This person wants to know where most of Montana's wheat is exported to.

- Yeah, that's a great question.

So I grew up on a farm in the Golden Triangle, and as Jason explained, you planted and you harvested and you put it in a bin and then hopefully, you get it to the elevator and you never really think about it again.

So it was really fascinating even when I started this job to learn how much further that supply chain truly goes and what an impact Montana farmers truly have on the world wheat supply.

So typically, our wheat will go on a train to the West Coast and it heads out of Portland to the Pacific Rim as Jason alluded to.

So Japan is certainly, year over year, one of our biggest customers on both spring wheat and winter wheat.

Additionally, Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines are some of our top markets.

They're all very, very quality conscious and stick with us through thick and thin, good years and bad, high prices and low, they keep coming back.

So the US as a whole, will often see a bit more of a fluctuation in their top customers, but Montana's really, really quite consistent with those Pacific Rim markets.

Some of the new markets that we're always looking into are Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, these growing middle class populations that certainly have needs for wheat, but there's a lot of technical training that goes into it and actually showing them that there is value in buying, perhaps higher priced, but higher quality wheat.

So those are always things that we're working on.

- You've been very successful at that, and I wanna congratulate the Wheat and Barley Marketing Committee.

I mean, you've really done a nice job with that.

Out of curiosity, did COVID affect the overseas markets very much?

- Yeah, that was, I think it affected our office maybe more, so just really forced us to make a lot of changes and do a lot of new things that we've been talking about for many years, but COVID definitely forced that pivot.

So silver lining in all of it was our reach was tremendous.

We've really been able to take advantage of a lot of the virtual platforms and we're able to blast out more regular realtime information.

This year, we're starting to see some more on-the-ground teams, which is exciting.

However, now the expectation is that we have on-the-ground teams and we have to do consistent five minute updates every week.

So it's certainly keeping us busy, but it's been great to be able to do so much outreach.

I think that is certainly the biggest change that we saw.

And I do think, I guess, silver lining on that, it really highlighted the importance of food security and the value that we need to place on agriculture.

Most of our trading partners, obviously aren't able to grow a lot of their own food, so it's absolutely vital.

We often don't think about that having so much access to calories in our own backyard, but it definitely highlighted the importance of agriculture, the importance of food security and it really highlighted our ability to shift in our logistics, the fact that we really didn't see any major slowdowns in the supply chain.

- You mentioned 80% goes overseas.

I understand that, but is Montana small more of our own commodities in developing products that are Montana made?

- That's a good question as well.

Yeah, I think so.

We've certainly seen that with the craft brewing industry, whereas a lot of that value comes from your own backyard.

And I think on the wheat side of things, we have grain craft and we have general mills.

They consume a lot of Montana grown wheat that's then getting exported mostly domestically and utilized in the United States.

So I do, I do think that that's a really important market and maybe one we haven't focused on as much, but there's always room for more.

- Okay, thank you.

Jason, question came in, it's an interesting one.

Is there any way to develop spring wheat varieties that are drought tolerant by selecting for very early flowering and how early would that have to be?

That's a tough question.

- Yeah, so that actually has been one of our breeding objectives as to develop earlier maturity spring wheat varieties.

It's always a balancing act because the plant needs to have enough time to produce it's vegetative growth which is in turn used to harvest the sunlight to make sugars and everything, so it needs to have time to do that.

And so, yeah, we can definitely make earlier maturing varieties, we're just trying to find that sweet spot where they're able to accumulate the right amount of sugars to have that yield potential that will then eventually go on a farmer's bin.

So yeah, it's usually, with like maturity and things, it's usually small little steps, and you're balancing out all the other traits that you're focused on as well.

And so we're slowly kinda getting them a little earlier, but it won't be super early.

It won't be like winter wheat.

- Is there a protein trade off on that early flowering?

- Well, interestingly, there's a gene out there that we actually have in a breeding program that does cause earlier maturity.

Basically, it controls the biochemical pathways that tells the plant to shut down, well, produce grain and then shut down.

And so that one does make it early and actually increases protein because the plant doesn't have enough time to put a lot of sugars in the kernels.

And so protein is based on percent of what's in the kernel.

And so if there's not as much sugar in there, of course your grain protein content will be higher.

So there's a gene for that, but there's, with everything we do in breeding, there's always these side effects in trying to do something, let's say, changing protein content or yield and so forth.

- Okay, thank you.

Mary, let's change tunes.

We're going to some forage.

This person from Dillon has had ergot in his grass hay in the past.

Is there anything that they can do to reduce the amount of ergot, and you might explain what ergot is to the audience.

- Great, so ergot is a fungus that infects the grain through the flower.

So that's when you have to try to manage the disease.

So cutting irrigation if it's an irrigated forage around that flowering to allow the canopy to dry out.

And also it tends to come in from the grasses in the ditches, so if you can mow it and just get rid of those heads, that can help to help stop perpetuating the disease.

It's toxic to livestock, so that's why it's such a concern.

There's no fungicides, it's just amount of moisture at flowering and trying to control the inoculum.

- Are some grasses, pasture grasses more susceptible?

- I would assume so, but I don't, I think some of those longer flowering, the rise, certainly.

- The rise would be, yeah, definitely.

From Bozeman, and Cassie, this is an interesting one.

Does Montana wheat have the same export markets as Russia and Ukraine wheat, and will our prices stay up as a result?

- That's another good question.

We've certainly seen genetics in Russian and Ukrainian wheat improve.

They're definitely a competitor.

I would say, Canada and Australia tend to be our primary competition with our markets, but we've seen more Russian wheat going into, especially some of those fringe markets like I was talking about, Indonesia, Malaysia.

However, that typically was because their price was much more competitive than ours which has not been the case as of late.

So when the playing field is actually level, our wheat is still preferred in all of those specific markets, but it's very, very tough to say what's going to happen in the future.

It certainly is ongoing and changes by the day, what the talking points are.

It does not look like there's going to be a quick resolution.

We're looking at, Ukraine's very similar to us with their seeding and their harvest timelines, so it's hard to believe that that won't be affected by this on some level.

So I would anticipate that coupled with the drought that we're looking at, especially Montana and really across the US, we will probably see some tight supplies again, and that price will potentially remain high.

- I think it will, but that's oh, I'm an optimist when it comes to grain prices.

Jason, which spring, you mentioned the drought, which spring wheat variety did best in last year's drought?

- So in our last year's test, Vida once did it again, it's historically been known as a really good variety under drought conditions, it did quite well.

Reeder, it's a popular variety, it's been grown in Northeast for a long time now, it was up there far as yield potential goes.

The one new variety we're pretty excited about, it's called Dagmar.

This is the first real test we had on how it does in drought situations.

And it actually was, far as release varieties go, it was a top variety in last year's test.

And its yield potential, we would say is right in line with Vida.

The big differences, it has like right around 1% higher grain protein content.

And then its end use quality is much better, and also sawfly resistance.

So we're actually pretty excited about this new variety.

It's getting into farmers' hands this year.

We're hoping to have more seeds supplied, but of course the drought last year limited that.

So we're expecting to have plenty of seed next year year with this variety, and we're hoping to get it out, especially start replacing those Vida and Reeder acres so we can get a higher quality variety and one that's really performing well in our testing.

So yeah, we're pretty excited about it.

- You mentioned qualities and at MSU, we do a million in baking trials yet.

And one of people answering the phone this evening remotely is Mike Giroux, and Mike runs a lab that tests baking qualities.

Now, in the good old days, they'd put the bread out that you could have at the end of the day, they don't do that anymore.

And my kids missed it when they stopped doing that.

It was a great treat to bring home, work bread.

- Yeah, so it used to be in Leon Johnson Hall, so the smell of his bread would, I guess, go up to the eighth floor and then everybody knew it was time to come down and get some so.

- Okay, from Bozeman area, they see a lot of sprinklers in the western part of the state and through South Central Montana, but Does wheat in the Highline take less water to grow than the rest of the state?

Now that's interesting concept.

(all laugh) - Well, the varieties that are growing on the Highline are, well, the wheat will take all the water it can get, but because the Highline, it's a dry land environment, they grow different types of varieties than are grown on the irrigated acres in western part of state and south, this part, this region.

So yeah, the varieties are, they're adapted differently to those low rainfall environments, and so I guess you could say they require less water, although they will take it.

If you do get a really wet year, which we have had like three or four years ago, there's probably other varieties that do have higher yield potential that would outyield them in those conditions, but generally, in the dryer conditions that we typically see on the Highline, we develop varieties that are more adapt to that situation and will outperform those high, the Ferrari of varieties that are out there, they'll outperform them in typical situations.

- I remember when it was wet, they all complained that they were all falling over.

- Yeah, yeah.

So the ones that are growing on the Highline, they won't have the lodging resistance because it's not as big, well, we don't see it, and because it's generally dry and dry enough where you don't have the lodging problems, but in a rare year, yeah, they might start lodging, and so that'll definitely be an issue in those situations.

- Okay, thank you.

We have several questions that have come in this evening about horticultural plants, we'll get to those next week, we don't have a horticulturist on the program tonight, but I did bring a book along and it's called "How Not to Kill Your Houseplant".

I saw this out at one of our local nurseries the other day, and I stumped through it.

It's really a pretty interesting book.

If you have a green thumb and my thumb is pretty green when it comes to garden plants and so forth, but when it comes to house plants, it's brown.

So if you have problems with house plants, you might consider getting this book.

It's available at a lot of local gardening centers.

For Cassie, from Bozeman, this is good comment here.

They have enjoyed your YouTube videos on the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee channel.

Could the research project principal investigators like Jason post short video summaries of some of the work they're doing?

How about that guys?

- Absolutely, Jason.

(all laugh) That's a great idea.

We actually did just do a research review for the board and our board meetings are always public, so door's open and we've been able to do zoom links for all of them as well, but we did have a lot of our primary researchers do some short recap videos and it was great.

They were these three minute really condensed versions.

I'm sure that was easy to do, Jason, out of 1,000 pages of research, but it was great, it was really, really good for people like me who maybe need the layman's terms and the actual application in the field and what that looks like.

So that is a great idea and definitely something yes, that we will continue to explore.

I think certainly one of the jobs of the committee is to help our researchers that are doing amazing work get that information out to our growers.

So certainly, a focus of ours going forward.

- Okay, thank you.

A question came in from Malta.

This person is familiar with how the Wheat and Barley Committee funds their projects and research projects at MSU and marketing endeavors and so forth.

They're curious, has the explosion of pulse crops in Montana affected the ability of the Wheat and Barley Committee to fund projects?

- Oh, that's a great question.

And I appreciate the concern, thank you.

We have certainly seen pulse crops come into Montana and it was a bit worrisome.

We've seen a lot of our neighboring states, North Dakota and Minnesota, really see corn acres and soybean acres take over and push wheat acreage out.

But I think with a lot of our alternate crops, the pulse crops and the oil seeds, they've really shown to be a tremendous compliment for what we're able to do with small grains.

They're actually giving us improved quality on a lot of the side with wheat things, improving soil health, really helping to maintain those crop rotations.

So fortunately, we also saw a lot of CRP acres come out about the time that pulses got popular, so we had another million acres of production available.

So really, we have seen our wheat acreage remain pretty stable.

And if you couple that with continuous cropping options when you are adding an alternative crop it's actually helped us maintain pretty steady acreage, fortunately.

- I think that's correct.

A lot of people that are watching probably how the committee is funded.

Would you give us a little bit of information of the checkoff and how that works?

- Yes, of course.

So we're funded by producers with money out of their pockets to maintain this work.

So for every bushel of wheat that they sell at the elevator, we collect two cents, and for every 100 pounds of barley, we collect three cents, which doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're in Montana and you're growing 180 plus million bushels of wheat on a normal year, it adds up to be around a $4 million budget.

So about 50% of that typically goes to MSU and various research programs, and the remainder of the funds go towards market development and education efforts.

- Okay, thank you.

Question for Bruce, and this is an interesting one.

This individual has an old combine, but he's kind of interested in some of the new technology like yield monitors.

He would like to know, could he put a yield monitor on a 20 year old combine?

You seem to be the tech specialist.

- Yeah, yeah.

Generally, I think you can, but this is a real issue, and this is something that's really slowed the adaptation of precision ag in the state, frankly, it's number one.

The newer combines are almost impossible to fix yourself, you have to take them to a dealer to get them fixed, so that that's an issue.

So we actually are working on this problem, because trying to come up with what are the ways that, what are the pieces that need to come together of equipment to be able to put a yield monitor that'll attach to a GPS and report out your information and save that data, real crucial for taking advantage of that kind of technology.

And there's no single company out there that's doing it right now, but it's a real challenge, and we have engineers working on it, and actually engineers around the country are working on this very problem because it's really slowed the adaptation of a technology that really can probably serve farmers regardless of what they're growing in a big, big way.

- That's interesting.

To promote a future program, we have DeImna Heiken from Triangle Ag Services coming later this month, another woman actually involved in agriculture and she started a precision ag company up there.

So I will pass that question along to her too.

- And we work closely with DeImna.

She's been a great collaborator for us in getting technology in our hands and having questions like this.

In fact, they have retrofitted a few older combines for us, but yeah, it's a stepwise process and it's interesting because there's different software, there's all these steps in the process-- - [Jack] It's beyond me.

- And it it's beyond me.

So it's not an easy thing to do, but we're working on it and we're hoping that we can come up with some manuals.

This is how you do it, so-- - Sounds good.

- So a regular person could actually set themselves up.

- Somebody that at least is into it a little bit.

Count me out of that, I mean that's-- - Well, no, we have farmers that are extremely sharp, some that have done it and have done it quite well.

Again, it's specific though, to their equipment.

So as you go down different forms of equipment or different companies, then it's not so simple.

- Mary, quick question from Manhattan, this person has a bunch of black looking goals in their chokecherries, what are they and what should they do?

- It's a fungus, prune them out.

- And very easily to do.

- That's how you recognize cherry.

- And the name is?

- Black knot.

- Black knot, good job.

Okay, from Bozeman, Cassie, this is interesting.

Are China and Russia buyers of Montana grain now or in the past.

And what, if anything, will change as a result of the Ukraine war with respect to China and Russia?

- Yeah, certainly an interesting situation.

Russia's never been a huge trading partner with us, but recently, they've really taken on the mandate to be the number one wheat exporter in the world, which in turn has certainly affected us in Montana and in the US.

China is really a hit or miss market for us.

One year, they might be our number one spring wheat buyer.

Last year, they bought a lot of wheat from Montana.

This year, pretty much negligible.

So really not one of those consistent markets.

However, when they are interested in buying wheat from the US, typically, it's going to come from Montana, 'cause they're interested in either that high quality spring wheat to fill the very limited quota that they have available to them or ultimately our high quality winter wheat, 'cause they, as Jason alluded to, like to use it as a blending wheat, they can't buy as much because of that quota of limitation, so they like to buy the highest quality.

With the situation in Ukraine, certainly is having effects.

We'll certainly see those effects again as we get into harvest further and I, yeah, to be determined, I think on that front, China's actually the number one wheat producer in the world, which is often a kind of a surprising fact, and they also control about 51% of the global wheat stocks in the world.

So they have a lot of wheat sitting there in storage as well.

So it will definitely be interesting to see as we go forward with this.

- I didn't know that, I'm happy to hear that.

That's interesting.

Jason, this person would like to know if Montana varieties can be marketed outside of Montana and are they adaptable to other areas or just Montana?

- Our varieties, especially our dry land varieties, they can go into like Western North Dakota fairly well.

The environments between, across the border is fairly similar.

Beyond that, we really, usually, we don't see our varieties going much beyond like Western North Dakota.

Just our environment is very unique compared to pretty much anywhere in the world, to be honest with you.

So what we develop here is just very, it's a unique type of wheat that doesn't, it doesn't grow well elsewhere, and then a lot of varieties from elsewhere don't do well here, so.

- We found that out years ago until we started some good breeding programs, well, thank you for the Wheat and Barley Committee to push that.

Who else produces spring wheat other than Canada?

North Dakota a little bit, a little bit in South Dakota.

- Australia kinda, they kinda a unique, Australia's kind of a unique market class.

- Yeah, Australia's that hard white wheat.

So it goes really specifically into some of those noodle markets in the Pacific Rim, but really Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, a little bit and Canada.

- Washington, yeah, a little.

- From Bozeman, high beta glucan in barley is so healthy.

Is there any export or domestic markets that takes advantage of the beta glucans in barley?

Kind of a tough question.

- Yeah, it is.

It's a tough one for us because the brewing industry and the malting industry doesn't like high beta glucans, it's problematic on that side.

So we're on two very opposite ends of the spectrum for a very similar crop.

Jason has a tough job and Dr. Sherman really has a tough job in that respect, but it's definitely something that gets a lot of overseas interest and something that I think we could push more domestically in the US, we really like to jump on health trends and high beta glucan wheat is heart healthy and something that's really easy to add into diets, but we do get a lot of interest.

South Korea, Japan, Taiwan have a pretty keen interest in food barley, but to Bruce's point earlier, if we had some ability to put those in containers and IP it because that's not a crop that's gonna be able to go in a Panamax vessel with 110 rail-car loading capabilities.

So definitely one of those very interesting niche markets that we need to work some logistics out on.

- Yeah, we're running a little on time.

Quick answer here.

I remember when it used to cost more money to move grain out of North Dakota to Portland than it did from Central Montana.

Is that still the case?

- I believe it is on occasion.

I know our directors in Eastern Montana often are envious of the freight rates out of the Golden Triangle region.

So I think that's still the case a lot of times, which it's a farther move, so in some respect, I suppose that makes sense.

Everything is so upside down right now with the way that that basis is and the just absolute need for supply.

And really, some of those other bottleneck issues we've seen on the rail that everyone kind of is taking what they can get at this point, but yeah, it's still a concern.

- And I know for years, people complained about freight rates out of here.

And I think Wheat and Barley Committee through the years were very proactive in trying to reduce those rates.

Folks, we've come to an end of a very interesting evening.

I've learned a lot.

Cassie, thank you for coming down.

It was really enlightening.

I've been around the Wheat and Barley Committee for a long time and what you do is wonderful.

Thanks to the rest of the panel.

It's been great having you here and thanks for your time.

Next week, our guest will be Sreekala Bajwa.

She is the Dean of the College of Agriculture, she'll talk about some new programs, so join us.

Have a good week and thanks for watching.

Good night.

- For more information and resources, visit montanapbs.org/aglive.

(country 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, Cashman Nursery and Landscaping, the Northern Pulse Growers Association, and the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

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