- [Announcer] "Montana Ag Live" is made possible by the Montana Department of Agriculture, the MSU Extension Service, the MSU Ag Experiment Stations of the College of Agriculture, the Montana Wheat & Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery and Landscaping, the Northern Pulse Growers Association, and the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

(folksy music) - Good evening and welcome to "Montana Ag Live," brought to you from the PBS studio at Montana State University.

It's beautifully green here right now, and we are also thankful for the rain, and we know there are parts of Montana that haven't been quite as blessed as we have been in the Gallatin Valley, so we are sincerely hoping that everybody gets some relief from the drought and gets a little bit of rain on this Sunday.

So we've got a great show for you today.

We have an economist, ag economist from the department here at MSU, Diane Charlton, and she's gonna be, excuse me, Diane Thronson.

Her name recently changed, so congratulations, Diane, and she's gonna be talking about labor relations and that's definitely something that's been of major interest throughout our economy and especially in our agricultural economy in Montana.

On my left here is Abi Saeed.

She's a horticulturalist here at MSU.

We have Laurie Kerzicnik tonight who is our entomologist, and then on the end anchoring for us is Mary Burrows, who's a plant pathologist and also director of the research centers here at MSU.

We have Nancy Blake in the studio answering questions, and we have somebody downstairs, and I apologize if I did not get the name of who is downstairs answering, giving me the questions that will be coming in over the computer.

So I'm Nina Zidack.

I am the director of the Seed Potato Certification Program here, and this is a call-in station.

So please keep our operators busy, keep the questions coming in, and we'll just start off tonight and give Diane the opportunity to talk a little bit about what she does here at MSU in terms of agricultural labor relations.

- Great.

Thank you, Nina.

Yes, so I work in the department of agricultural economics in economics.

So I teach courses in economic development and agribusiness management, and my research primarily focuses around labor markets, farm labor markets, specifically in the United States and somewhat in Mexico as well.

- Okay, thank you, and we're gonna get to some more of those specifics in a little bit.

Abi, can you tell us about, what is the best time to prune lilacs?

This is a question that came in from Billings.

- This is a good and timely question.

So lilacs, I would say the best time to prune them would be right after they're done flowering because in the summer they're gonna start developing those buds that are gonna flower the following spring.

So get those pruned right after they're done flowering this spring.

- Okay, yeah, and so I live south of Bozeman and my lilacs are still like at least a week or 10 days away, so they're very late this year, which I think is kind of indicative of this whole spring.

- I think so, mine too.

Mine are just starting to, just started to flower this past weekend.

- Yeah, that's great.

It's nice to see those.

So Laurie, a question from Bozeman.

This person lost the leader out of their eight foot tall spruce tree last year, and it looks like there's some holes from bugs around the base of where it turned brown.

Do you have any idea what they are and how they can get rid of them?

- Yeah, I, it, that's probably the white pine weevil, but usually those holes are at the top of the tree.

So maybe they were seeing the beetles and.

- [Nina] Oh, at the base of the brown part.

- Oh, the brown part, okay.

Yeah, that makes sense then.

Yeah, that's probably white pine weevil and you can, so that part that's dead, they usually start infesting right below that.

So you can spray with a pyrethroid insecticide or contact insecticide right below that, about six inches below that, where you're starting to see the damage.

Right now would be a good time to do that or you could actually, you don't even need to spray.

You could actually prune that out.

If it's a younger tree, you could prune that out between now, actually you wanna, they'd be in the tree right now, but you wanna make sure that you do it before the end of July when they exit the tree.

- Okay.

- So if it's a young tree, you can still train a new leader, but if it's an older tree, then you probably will have to spray because the tree will start to look deformed.

- Yeah, yeah.

We've got a tree that I think it's happened three years in a row so.

- Yeah, yeah.

- It's getting to be quite short and stubby, so.

- I know, it just keeps moving down, yeah.

- Uh huh, for sure.

Okay, Diane, can you tell us about the people that work on US farms?

- Sure.

Comes as no surprise to most people that the majority of our farm workers are immigrants.

It actually wasn't always that way.

If we go back to in 1900, about 40% of the US workforce was on farms.

Now it's less than 1%.

So the majority of our farm workers are actually from Mexico, and I think I have a figure on this as well, that shows the breakdown of crop workers and where they were born.

About two thirds of our crop workers were born in Mexico.

About 25%, actually a little bit less than 25% were actually born in the United States, and so the primary data source that we have for this is the National Agricultural Worker Survey.

It is nationally representative of the crop workforce, excluding H-2A workers.

So H-2A is a specific guest worker visa for seasonal farm jobs.

So it doesn't cover permanent jobs.

It's very specific.

So yeah, the vast majority of workers in the United States come from Mexico, and this is actually becoming a bit of a problem for the United States because fewer and fewer Mexicans actually want to work in agriculture.

So just as the United States transitioned out of agriculture in the 20th century and less than 1% of our population currently works on farms, Mexico's going through that same transition process.

So this is a normal phase in economic development.

As the economy grows, fewer and fewer people work in agriculture, so we kind of, as a nation, continue to produce a lot of labor intensive crops by importing workers from a less developed country, but as that country begins to develop, we're having to become more creative in how we solve this farm labor problem.

- Yes, yeah.

It certainly, it impacts the potato industry, for sure, and there are a fairly large number of H-2A workers, but one of the biggest trends that I have seen since I started in this industry 14 years ago was the increased mechanization.

The mechanization is huge in terms of, you know, the changes that we are seeing and the equipment that the farmers have had to employ to get the work done for the hands that they cannot hire.

- Yeah, well, and here's a breakdown of where H-2A workers work within Montana.

Montana has, I would say roughly 1,000 H-2A workers.

It was a little less than 1,000 in 2019.

This breakdown is from 2019, but H-2A employment has grown nationally since 2019.

So H-2A was about 10% of the full-time equivalent workforce in 2019.

I recently went to a conference where Daniel Costa said it was 14% now, so I'm gonna defer to him.

He's usually an expert on this.

So that is a substantial part of our workforce, which is a really interesting phenomenon because H-2A has been around since 1986, but very few farmers used it in 1986.

It's kind of a complicated process to recruit workers, bring them over here.

The employer has to provide housing, has to provide their transport from the country, from which they were born.

So, yeah, it's a complicated process.

1986, no one really wanted to use the program because lots of workers were available.

A lot of them were probably unauthorized workers.

There was, you know, a great big surge in unauthorized immigration from Mexico, particularly in the 1990s, but ever since 2010, and granted, I don't, well, even in more recent years, our, the unauthorized immigration has primarily been from central America, so since 2010 net immigration from Mexico has actually been zero or negative.

So fewer Mexicans are migrating here, and on top of that, fewer Mexicans are working in agriculture.

So it's putting a lot of pressure on farms.

You mentioned the mechanization.

I was just talking to some apple growers in Washington state.

Of course, apples are still handpicked.

They're like, bring us the robots.

We're ready, and the technology, we have the technology, we haven't quite figured out, engineers haven't quite figured out precisely how to make that technology work, but as the wages keep rising and, and I've been talking to these growers, like how efficient do these robots have to be?

How expensive can this technology be And then they tell me, well, this is what I'm paying workers, and I can't even find enough workers.

So this is the minimum bar and that bar keeps rising.

So I think in the next 10 years, we're gonna see some robots harvesting our fruits and vegetables.

- Yeah.

So, you know, Mary, Diane is talking a lot about labor in the agricultural industry in general.

What are we seeing across the College of Ag in terms of being able to find employees to work in the College of Agriculture?

- I think we're seeing exact same trend.

I mean, student labor research centers have a real hard time attracting farm labor and in keeping employees, and it's not just wages.

It's just, nobody is applying.

- Right.

So in the potato lab, for instance, we hire between 35 and 40 student or temporary workers every summer, and right now we're sitting at about 25, which we're, we have to feel pretty good about that because I think considering the labor market, I think we're actually doing pretty well, but we still need to get more people out to pick potato leaves and test them in the lab so.

- [Mary] So call Nina.

- Right, exactly, exactly.

(Nina laughing) I use every opportunity I can to pitch jobs at the potato labs, so.

Okay, great.

Back to Abi.

What do you do with a thin and patchy lawn?

- That's a tough question, and I've seen lawns in various arrays of thin and patchiness, but you wanna get to the bottom of why it's thin and patchy.

So one of the things that I would recommend if you haven't done this is to get a soil test to see what those soil nutrients are like.

There are a lot of things that you can do to keep your turf healthy.

A lot of times, for those thin and patchy lawns, some of the issues is, you're not getting enough moisture.

Maybe there aren't enough soil nutrients, you're not fertilizing enough, which you should do about three or four times a year, you wanna fertilize your lawn.

So try and get to the bottom of why, get a soil test, and then work from there on some of those practices to keep a healthy lawn.

We have a really nice lawn guy that's talking about taking care of your home lawns in Montana, and so that you can find at the MSU Extension store and download it from there, but that has some great tips on how to keep your lawn healthy and full and vibrant.

- [Mary] I think mowing height is also pretty important.

- Mowing height yeah, that's a good point.

I usually say two and a half to three inches minimum.

Don't go below that, 'cause you want your lawns to be competitive with any other plants that are gonna try and encroach in there, yeah.

- Yeah, and one thing we've noticed, we usually only fertilize one time a year, either once in the spring or once in the fall and our lawn is not the first to green up, but believe me, it does, and we have plenty of mowing to do so it catches up, so.

So Laurie, a question out of Billings.

This person's ash trees aren't looking great.

There's been some news about the ash borer.

Is the ash borer, could it be affecting their trees in Billings?

- No, we don't actually, don't have, we haven't confirmed that, they're probably talking about the Emerald ash borer hasn't been confirmed yet in the state, but it is, a lot of our ash trees, Bozeman, Billings, other areas are being, they're very slow to leaf out so they don't look very good.

I think that's changed in the last week or so, but we are still looking out for the borer, but I think, just give your trees a few weeks to just leaf out a little bit and look healthy again.

Usually, we think about July first, we, this has happened a few times in the last few years and July first is kind of a time where we just, something might be going on if by July first, you're not getting leafing out.

Do you have anything to add about it, Abi?

- Yeah, I mean, I was just gonna say the same.

The ash trees in the boulevard in front of my house too are pretty slow.

They're look, they're pretty slow to leaf out too this year.

So I was wondering if people are seeing that a lot pretty consistently, so yeah, I like that comment of giving it some time.

- Yeah, be patient.

- The crops are in the same boat.

You know, we're just behind.

- Yeah.

- So, thank you.

So Diane, this is a question from Bozeman and it's not specifically labor related, but it's definitely something on, that's on everybody's mind.

How have increased land prices affected farmers in the Gallatin Valley?

- Yeah, that's a good question, and I think we're all noticing the pressure of increasing property prices here in Bozeman.

My colleague, Dan Bigelow, is really the expert on this, but just like anything, you know, if there's an alternative of what we can do with our property, it makes it more difficult to stay in agriculture.

So as a farmer, if my option is to keep farming and the cost of inputs might be increasing as well, I'm going to be weighing that option versus selling for a very high prices.

So I think we're gonna see more farmers moving elsewhere in Montana where the land prices are lower or moving out of agriculture together.

It's just another option, and it's a high value option right now.

- Absolutely.

Yeah, there's a lot of competition for especially in the Gallatin Valley.

So Mary, field day season is coming up.

Can you tell us a little bit about the field days that are gonna be happening throughout Montana this summer?

- Yeah, so all of our research centers and the post farm here in town have field day.

So we invite the community in, there's usually some sort of lunch provided, either during, before or after.

It's a good time to meet your neighbors and talk to maybe your ag lender, and look at all of the research going on at the research centers.

So I'll be at the vast majority of them and they're a fun time, get out, and learn about what's going on, and the one in Bozeman here is July seventh and the rest of them are on our website, so Kalispell, Havre, Sidney, I can't remember if Huntley, Conrad.

- [Nina] Conrad, Moccasin.

- [Mary] Yep, everybody's.

- [Nina] Corvallis.

- There's also some or other organizations doing field days.

So there's a couple, MO is doing a couple organic field days.

I think there's all kinds of other tours if you just look out in your local community.

- Great, great.

Sounds like a good time and maybe a free lunch.

- And sometimes a steak dinner.

- Oh, okay, okay.

That'll get the people in.

A question came in from Great Falls for Abi.

This person's rhubarb is putting out seed stalks.

Should they cut it off or leave it?

- I'd say if you still wanna harvest the more rhubarb this season, which I would want, 'cause I haven't gotten enough because it's been slow, I would say cut off that seed stalk and keep harvesting, yeah.

- [Nina] Okay.

- [Mary] Remind me to bring you some of my rhubarb.

- Yeah, please.

- I still have some frozen from last year.

- I feel like I've been missing out on rhubarb this year.

- So, so Laurie, you've got some samples to show.

Can you, oh, give us an idea of some of the, do you have anything that's creeping and crawling today or?

- It's, this one is creeping and crawling and this kind of relates to the ash trees we were talking about before.

This sample's from Havre.

This is the leaf curl ash aphid, and this causes curling of the leaves, right when the tree's starting to leaf out.

So some parts of the state, our ash trees are leafing out.

So the aphid definitely curls the leaves and then releases honeydew, so it gets pretty sticky, and then after the tree, this is nothing to really worry about.

It looks kind of alarming, but after the tree finishes leafing out that the aphids will leave and then the tree will recover.

I actually watched these back in Missoula, a couple trees that had leaf curl ash aphid, I just followed them through the season and they looked pretty, pretty bad this time of year, and then throughout the summer they started to look fine again.

- [Mary] So just don't park under them for a while?

- Just don't park under them, yeah.

That honeydew, that honey can drip on your car and then it could, and then it could attract sooty mold and just get yucky, so yeah.

- [Phone Operator] Are you actually?

- Good point.

So Diane, from Helena, since labor is relatively costly in the US, should consumers expect to be paying more for their fruits and vegetables at the grocery store?

- We might see some of that transfer into higher costs of our fruits and vegetables and granted, there's a lot of other inputs into production of all of our agricultural goods that could cause those prices to rise.

So I mean, I think the most obvious is just the cost of fuel right now.

So with transport, anything along that supply chain, that's gonna get passed along to consumers.

Farmers are under a lot of pressure to try to keep those labor costs as low as possible.

So as labor is still a relatively small share of the total cost of what you're paying for in the store, so you're probably not gonna see these huge jumps in prices of produce just because the cost of labor on the farm is increasing, but it does put a lot of pressure on farmers to try to find more efficient ways to employ workers and to keep them busy and try to complement workers with mechanization, as you mentioned earlier.

So, so even here, I remember we talked about this a little while ago, Nina, a lot of the H-2A workers in Montana actually come from South Africa, and I was just thinking about that, and we talked about Mexico.

Nationally, Mexico is a major supplier of labor to the United States, but here in Montana and in North Dakota, we see some H-2 workers, H-2A workers from South Africa, which is, seems like a long ways away, but if you're putting those workers on a combine, imagine all the work that that person can do.

So we can amortize that cost of bringing them over from South Africa over all that they produce, and so when we have these more mechanized jobs, they can be higher paying jobs and that won't necessarily bring a big change in terms of what consumers pay for their produce.

Also have to keep in mind that our producers are competing with imports from other countries as well.

So there's a lot of pressure on producers to try to resolve this issue.

- Absolutely, yeah.

We see, I mean, a huge amount of our fruits and vegetables, especially in the winter are coming from Mexico and Chile and you know, other countries in South America.

It's pretty amazing when you think of being able to actually pick something up in the grocery store that has been transported that many miles away.

- And some of the producers that are producing down there in Mexico are actually US producers as well.

So there's a big international network here.

- So do you think that the incentive for them to produce in Mexico is because of labor costs?

- That is part of it.

That's what producers have told me.

So, you know, US wages versus a daily wage in Mexico, United States wages are much higher and workers are still more available in Mexico than in the United States, but I think when I started working in shortly after I started doing some research on Mexico transitioning out of farm work, there was a big story in the "LA Times" about how there was this two week strike in Baja California, that workers were not coming to work, demanding higher wages, more benefits, and they actually held out for an entire two weeks, which is just consistent with this story of people moving out of agriculture.

Usually other people would move in if somebody tried to hold a strike.

So that labor supply in both Mexico and the United States is getting tighter where, we are feeling that, but some producers are moving into Mexico if they're able to.

- Yeah, that's very interesting.

So Mary, this is a question that just came in today from Bridger Canyon.

This person has tulip leaves that have really scorched tips, and also the flowers are kind of burning back.

Is this from the frost?

- Well, it could be, but we did get a sample in diagnostic lab this week of a Botrytis, so a gray mold that was causing some leaf scorching and it's called tulip fire disease, and they could Google some images of that and they can always submit a sample to their county agent to get it diagnosed.

- Okay, yeah.

Well, and yeah, if it's a Botrytis, it's - The sclerotia and been in the soil a long time.

So just some sanitation to get rid of those leaves so they don't reinfect, you know, throw 'em away.

Don't just compost them.

- Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.

It's something that I have never seen before at the diagnostic lab.

- We've had enough moisture lately, then.

There actually is.

- Yeah exactly.

You get a moist year, you get diseases exactly.

Years that are good for producing crops and flowers and vegetables can also be very good for producing diseases so.

So Abi, from Polson, this person has, is wanting to plant a pear tree and they're wondering, how far does it need to be from another or how close does it need to be to another tree to get crosspollination?

- Yeah, so for crosspollination, I've read, usually you wanna be within, between 50 to 100 feet away from each other, definitely less than 100 feet.

You don't wanna go beyond that.

That's the best for like optimal, pollen transfer for your fruit set.

So, between 50 to 100 feet from the original tree for your different variety.

- Okay, great.

Thank you, and finally for Laurie, getting her back on her favorite home ground, a question from Kalispell.

Do we have brown recluse spiders in this state and how are they similar to the hobo spider?

- Oh yeah.

I haven't had a question about the spider in a while.

Yeah, we do not have the brown recluse here.

It is not, we say it's not established here.

We've never had a brown recluse identified here and it is, it could show up here if someone brings a shipment in from Mississippi or Kansas, where they're native and a very large part of the United States where they're native, but we haven't found it here, and the hobo spider we do have, and Kalispell, you have a lot of hobo spiders.

They've dropped off a little bit in the last couple years, but the hobo spider is a funnel web spider, and it doesn't cause any necrosis in the skin.

It doesn't have any compounds in its venom to cause necrosis in the skin.

So we call the hobo spider a harmless spider, a spider that is not of medical importance to humans.

- But it still gets a lot of bad press.

- It gets a lot of bad press, but we're working on that.

- Good.

You, yeah, love your spiders.

- [Laurie] I do love my spiders.

- Okay, to Diane.

Back to labor.

This is a question that came in from Stevensville, and I know there's been just, you know, a lot of rhetoric in the public about seasonal farm workers and crime.

Is there any evidence be, or of a relationship between seasonal crime workers and crime rates, or seasonal farm workers and crime rates?

- Yeah, actually my colleague, Brock Smith and I, along with another colleague from University of Alaska, Alex James, we looked at the association between seasonal variation in fruit, vegetable, and horticultural employment within US counties and crime rates, and we actually found a negative impact within a county year.

We looked from 1990 to 2016.

So we honestly, we looked at this thinking we might find zero impact.

We were kind of surprised to find a statistically significant negative association.

So, you know, we, you know, can't really tell what the causal story is, but our best guess at this is that we think that the additional economic activity during harvest and maybe labor intensive seasons leading up to harvest provides so many opportunities for people that crime rates actually decrease.

So when you see stories of people trying to resist seasonal workers from living in their communities, crime rate, we, isn't really a, there isn't evidence to support that they would increase crime rates.

Actually, evidence would suggest that crime rates decrease during those seasonally labor-intensive periods.

- That's good to know.

So Mary, question from Manhattan, do you need to worry about Aphanomyces in peas this year?

- I think with increasing temperatures and moisture, Aphanomyces might be a concern, but we have not found Aphanomyces to my knowledge in that area.

So I wouldn't be super concerned about it.

It's more in the northeast corner and then down into the Triangle where pea production has been very intensive for many, many years.

In the Gallatin Valley, we did have a canning industry for fresh peas, right around World War II, and it did decline because of a root rat disease called fusarium wilt, but that is a different disease, but as we get more intensive pulse production, we will get Aphanomyces.

- Of course.

Okay, so this is from Helena and this is a shout out to Laurie.

- [Laurie] All right.

- Please thank her for connecting her with, to a group of certified arborists who came to help with her elm leaf beetle problems in which are now solved because Laurie's wonderful help, so thank you.

- That's great to hear.

- Yeah.

- Very happy.

- That's good to know that you're actually - Yeah, it's very nice.

- So Abi, a question.

This is kind of an interesting question, and we're gonna throw this out to the whole panel because I don't think any of us are a specialist, but their flower garden has garter snakes.

Is there a way to get rid of them and are they creating any damage to plants?

This is a unique one.

- Yeah.

I have never heard of garter snakes doing any damage to plants personally.

I think it would be a beneficial sign of a healthy flower garden if you have garter snakes.

They're probably eating some small insects in there too that could potentially be pests, but I would say having garter snakes would be a badge of honor that you have a really nice hospitable environment.

(panel laughing) - Is it possible they might have some rodent infestation.

- It could be, it could be.

- I don't know, do garter snakes eat insects too?

They probably do.

- They, yeah.

I think that they eat a variety of things.

Yeah, whatever they can find probably.

- Pretty small and harmless, so I don't think that they would be hurting anything, yeah, so.

- I've never heard of anything like that.

Very interesting.

- Yeah, kind of like spiders.

(panel laughing) So for Laurie, out of Livingston, a lot of their pine trees have brown tips at the tops of the trees.

Will this kill the tree?

- Well, we started seeing brown tips in pines, maybe even starting around the pandemic in 2020, just a lot of Austrian pines with brown tips, and mostly that was environmental.

So we had, a lot of that was winter kill.

So we saw a lot of die back in the top.

We did see some, had some samples come into the diagnostic lab that some had bark beetles, some twig beetles, and another type of bark beetle, but that was in Great Falls and just kind of, one was in Stillwater so, but mostly that was environmental, and I've been kind of watching an Austrian pine across the street from me, which is still doing fine.

I would just keep an eye on it that, I mean, that the top part of that is still brown and kind of died back, but then just make sure that doesn't progress down the tree, but if you're working with a certified arborist or you could reach that top of the tree, and it's not gonna disfigure any part of that, then you could maybe prune that out if it's, you know, just for aesthetic reasons, but most of the time it's hard to get up there to your tree to see it.

- Well, and that's one of the things that always, I mean, confused me in the very beginning is because, you know, the problem that happens at the tips of our spruce trees is the white pine weevil.

- [Laurie] Yeah, right.

- And I don't ever recall when I worked in the diagnostic lab getting like a white pine that came in with pine weevil damage and it, so does it kind of look similar to what you might see on a spruce tree except where it's just taking the leader of the tree out?

- Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because it doesn't, it's, you would think that it would hit that pine would be a host for that, but it's, it is a little bit different just because it's, it doesn't, you don't see any of this big holes in the tree, and then you still see the needles.

The needles are still on there, and so basically it just looks brown instead of bare, like the white pine weevil.

I mean, you'll, the white pine weevil just looks stripped of all its needles.

So, but different pests and different situations, yeah.

- Okay, yeah.

Very interesting.

So, Diane, here's a question from Lewistown.

During the pandemic, they heard a lot about the extreme labor disruptions in the meat processing, and I know we saw that they were horrible centers for COVID and a lot of plants got shut down.

Has this particular labor issue resolved itself or is it still ongoing?

- Yeah, this is, to my understanding, it's still an ongoing issue.

So, the last I heard was, it was a few months ago, but workers have not returned to the meat processing plants in the same numbers that were working there prior to the pandemic, much like other industries are experiencing those difficulties right now.

So a lot of those plants are operating at reduced capacity, and many of them are looking into increasing use of robots in those processes.

So a lot of demand for engineers right now, as fewer and fewer workers are willing to do those jobs, and I think as most people are probably aware, like it's a lot of those refrigerated areas during peak COVID times was just conducive to spreading viruses, so particularly difficult place to work during the pandemic and people have not returned in the same numbers.

- It's also has to put a lot of pressure on breeders too, to make like, a more homogenous crop so that they can be harvested uniformly by robots.

- Oh, in terms of like plant production as well?

- Yeah, and livestock.

- Yeah, livestock.

Yeah, they have a uniform.

- Size and.

- Yeah, and I think I just saw something in the news, a plant in South Dakota, a huge plant that I think is going to be employing a very significant amount of robotics for meat cutting.

So it probably is gonna be.

- Changing the industry.

- Wave of the future.

- Yeah, definitely.

- So Mary, and this is something that Abi might be able to comment on too.

This is a question that came in from Billings.

They have an old, very sick looking arbor vitae.

The neighbor's arbor vitaes are green, but hers have gone from green to brown.

It appears to be frostbite.

If not, what could it be, and do you have tips to help this?

- I'll let Abi take that one.

- Yeah, so we're seeing a lot of, our Schutter Diagnostic Lab is seeing a lot of samples of winter injury in a lot of our evergreens just across the state.

We're seeing so much of this right now.

So I would say, give it time, take a look at it, give it some TLC, make sure it's getting enough moisture right now, but a lot of our evergreens are showing a lot of that winter injury and are, have that browning in there.

- [Mary] Arbor vitae in particular seems to age.

- They're, yes.

I've seen very few really excellent looking arbor vitae around, so yeah, I think they're pretty susceptible to some of these environmental conditions.

- And I would say too, that, you know, she's comparing, or they're comparing theirs to their neighbors and their neighbors might be in a little bit more protected location, might not have as intensive a southern exposure, you know?

'Cause I know some people will actually put burlap on the southern side of the arbor vitae in the winter to kind of give it a little bit of a sunscreen.

So yeah, probably definitely a winter desiccation issue.

- Yeah, that's what I would say.

- Also, what does boll damage look like on arbor vitae?

Is there a specific pattern that you see?

- I think in general, if you get significant boll damage, the whole plant or the whole tree will die, because it'll girdle them.

- [Laurie] Okay.

Okay.

- That's what, yeah, I would say.

I don't know if there's a pattern other than seeing the.

- [Mary] The teeth marks.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Okay.

- Okay, Laurie, from Billings, all of their plants this year are late and they've noticed very few bumblebees.

Should he be concerned about the lack of bees?

- Gosh, I think that might be a better question for Abi.

Sorry to pass this over.

- Oh, what am I thinking?

Abi really is kind of a bee specialist.

- Bee specialist here.

- So I would say, yeah, it's hard to say.

There is a concern because the bumblebees, the queen bees right now are working on starting their new nests, starting their new colonies and with the seasons being so slow, there aren't that many flowering plants.

So I would say it's hard to say it, how this is gonna affect bees, but it is something I was thinking about too, this season, wondering about food sources for bees right now, 'cause we were talking about hummingbirds earlier as well.

People were seeing some hummingbirds and wondering if there's enough nectar out there for them to consume.

So it's hard to say.

- My crab apple was just buzzing the other day.

So there was at least some in my yard.

- That's fantastic.

- So probably, honeybees more on a crab apple or?

- I would say it, it all kinds of bees will visit crab apples.

- All kinds of bees.

- Yeah.

- Wonderful, wonderful.

Well, I am excited because a question came in from Anaconda about potatoes.

(Diane laughing) So they have heard that the, that potato plants stop growing after they bloom.

Does this mean that only the aboveground plant does or, does quit growing or does it affect the tuber as well?

Well, actually, after they bloom is when they really start bulking up and putting energy into the tubers.

So usually if you're just going to be picking some, or digging some new potatoes for your garden, you'll start digging probably a week or two after the potatoes are blooming, but then as the summer progresses and later in the season, that's, you know, the vines will even start to kind of lay down and go down a little bit, but that's when the tubers are really, or the plants are really putting all of those carbohydrates down into the tubers.

So they're absolutely still growing.

So, just a lot more is going on underground than what you see above ground.

So, back to Laurie.

Wasps, are they active right now?

This is a question that came in from Three Forks.

- Oh yes, they are active.

So I've seen a European paper wasp and then actually I put my Western yellowjacket traps out about a week ago and, maybe a week and a half ago, and June third was when I caught my first queen, Western yellowjacket queen, in Bozeman, so I figure that most other areas probably have queens active already.

I haven't seen any bald faced hornets yet, but I think most people are concerned about the Western yellowjackets and not having those nests established.

So yes, they're out.

- Okay.

- So putting out traps, would now still be a good time to do that, or?

- If you haven't put 'em out, you can still put 'em out now, and they'll still trap workers.

So it'll cut down the population, but you really wanna try to get them out there.

There's, the Queens are active, still active right now.

So you will prevent them from starting new nests, but yeah, you could still put them out, but think about Memorial Day or a little bit sooner next year if you haven't put your traps out yet.

- Okay, so this is just a comment, again for Laurie, that came in from Missoula.

Their Austrian pine started with brown tip three years ago and now it's nearly dead.

- [Laurie] Oh really?

Okay.

- Yeah, so.

- Yeah, it's good if you're really worried about your tree, if you can get a sample from the top, we're more than happy to look at it at the Schutter Diagnostic Lab.

So it's just been a case by case basis, and if it is a bark beetle, that will kill your tree, but it's just been all across the board as far as environmental conditions, but yeah, if you're worried about your tree, please send it in.

- Okay.

Okay, very good.

For Diane, from Bozeman, there have been a lot of stories again in the news about unemployment and then also about labor force participation.

Can you tell us what the difference is between unemployment and labor force participation?

- Yeah, it is a little bit confusing because the way we measure the unemployment rate, it's based on workers who are actually actively looking for a job, but not employed.

So if someone has left the labor force entirely, they would not be counted in the unemployment rate.

So if they quit looking for a job, they just leave the labor force.

So we could have a very low unemployment rate as we do right now have a low unemployment rate, but labor force participation rate is also low.

So there are many people who dropped out of the workforce entirely during the pandemic.

Some of these were, you know, people who were close to retirement age and decided to retire a little bit earlier than they planned, and some of them are people, you know, a lot of people have termed it the Great Reassessment, so quitting their jobs, thinking about what they want to do with their future, more career path oriented, perhaps, and then there's another term that I heard some economists talking about recently, a Great Reshuffle, in which they noticed that there are a lot of people who quit their jobs, but other people who are joining and just a high turnover rate.

So if you think about in terms of productivity, if people are staying in a job for just a few months, it's about how long it takes to train them and then they might be leaving again.

So we have, you know, early retirement, we have people just reassessing their futures and maybe not back in the workforce yet, and then we have this reshuffling and all of these are reducing total economic output.

So there is some concern and in terms of how much we're actually producing, it's gonna be challenging to get these supply chains straightened out.

- Yeah, exactly.

- [Diane] While we have this lower labor force participation rate.

- Yeah, because where are the workers going to come from?

Yeah, it's definitely a big question.

From Hardin, this grower has spots on the leaves of their barley.

Should they spray a fungicide?

- Fungicide recommendations generally depend on what your potential yield is.

So assess what the cost of the application is, what your potential yield is, and then see if it's gonna pencil, and what you expect your yield savings to be from application.

Early in the growing season, sometimes it doesn't pay directly, but that flag leaf is what you wanna protect.

That said, if it's really severe, you probably wanna put a fungicide on it, probably when, with your herbicide application.

- Okay.

Okay, a question about hostas from Fort Benton.

They have three hostas on the west, southwest side of their house.

Can you tell them why their hostas are not doing well on the south or the west side of their house?

- It would, I'd say it's hard to say.

If they've been healthy for a while and they're just starting to decline now, it could be a few things.

Usually my hostas do better in the shady environment.

So if they're facing that west, southwest side, you know, maybe they're drying out a little bit more.

Maybe they need a little bit more moisture or maybe they're just slow, like a lot of our plants.

My hosts just started to spring back up right now this past weekend.

So I would say maybe reach out to your local extension agent and see if you can work with them to get to the bottom of what might be going on there.

- Right, and just probably try a shadier aspect of the house too.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Yeah, I think that would be a good recommendation.

So from Great Falls, Laurie, what would you use as an attractant in your was traps?

- Oh, if you buy the wasp trap, it's a yellow trap and the attractant comes with the trap and it's, the chemical's called heptyl butyrate and that's, it's, that's it just, you, I think you just squeeze it onto a cotton ball and that'll attract the wasp.

It doesn't attract bees or any other species.

It does do another Vespula species and, but it's not something that's common in Montana, so.

It comes with the trap.

- Okay.

Okay, Diane, so we hear a lot of talk about how supply chain issues are affecting us as consumers.

How are supply chain issues affecting producers?

- Sure, I think one of the classic examples right now has been the fertilizer supply.

We just don't have as much fertilizer this year, so it's been more expensive.

So as things are less available, the price goes up, but also equipment.

A lot of equipment we might import from abroad or the supply chains just might be kind of in disorder right now.

So for producers, this can be very frustrating.

Sometimes if it's essential input, we might see less, less production.

So we're definitely hoping for the best here, but this is definitely a huge difficulty in all industries, including agriculture.

- For sure.

This could be a question for Mary or Abi.

This is a question for, from Wolf Point.

They have a Ponderosa pine that is starting to leak a lot of clear sap along the bottom half of the tree, but they don't see any signs of in insect damage.

Do you have any idea why this tree would be losing a lot of sap?

- I would, usually when they're losing sap, there's some sort of a physical injury, whether that's through insects or some other mechanical damage.

- [Mary] High winds, like, sand, soil blowing.

- Yeah, that's possible.

Yeah, high winds.

- Especially if it's the lower part of the tree.

- Yeah, so it's, it would be hard to say.

- They could check if it was more on the western side of the tree.

- Yeah, yeah.

It is interesting that they're not really seeing any signs of injury, I mean, and this is the time of year where the sap is kind of like rising in the tree, so.

- At least they got enough water to get sap.

- Yeah, I guess, I guess that's a good thing.

So Laurie, a question from Denton.

Can you talk about the outlook for grasshoppers this year?

- Whew, yeah.

I'm not a very good grasshopper predictor at all.

So I'll just throw that out there, but we have had a really wet spring and when we have a consistently wet spring, that will often create a lot of natural fungi that will, that are, that will attack the grasshoppers.

So I think it looks better that we had an extended rain season in most areas in Montana for the, it just depends on what you're talking about.

Oh, Denton, I don't know how much rain Denton's had, but if it's, if they've had a wet spring, like we've had, then it it'll look a little bit better for the grasshopper situation, but we also had so many grasshoppers over wintering that.

- [Nina] Right.

- We're still gonna have some grasshopper pressure, but.

- From watching the weather maps, my family is from central Montana.

It seems like they're kind of on the edge of getting this rain.

They're, they've been getting a little bit.

- Okay.

- But not, not in, not a lot.

They haven't been really nice and wet.

- Yeah, it'll probably be, there will probably be some grasshopper pressure there, unfortunately.

- So, okay.

Okay, so Abi, let's see.

Yes, oh, how to preserve honeybees.

They are getting into their basement.

This is from Butte, probably because it's cool and wet.

How they, how can they save them safely, but also get them out of their home?

- That's a good question.

I would say contact a local beekeeper.

A lot of local beekeepers will come and take those honey bees and rehome them, or you can reach out to like a local beekeeping club if you know one.

There are a few beekeeping clubs across the state that are pretty active, but in, from what I know, beekeepers would be happy to take those bees off someone's hands and just take them and put them in a new hive and try to get them established over there.

- Okay.

This is a question for Diane that came in from Great Falls, like, relative to inflation, how much do you see wage and salary increases in, changing for agriculture workers over time?

Do you think that they're going to be able to keep pace with inflation or are they gonna be a little bit disconnected?

- Yeah, so I think that the past couple decades we've seen agricultural wages rise more quickly than inflation.

However, obviously inflation is going at a much more rapid pace right now than it has the past couple decades.

So the, for H-2A workers, those workers have to be paid what's called the adverse effect wage rate, which is set by the Department of Labor, and it's based on the agricultural worker and so that will probably rise similar to inflation and increasing wage rates in similar jobs.

So we, I think we can expect farm wages to rise similar with the wages of all the other similar jobs of, you know, being similar jobs, probably construction and service industries, jobs that don't require high levels of education.

- Okay.

Mary, also coming in from central Montana, what is the wheat streak mosaic outlook for this year?

- We've had a couple of samples come into the clinic, but mostly from situations where they had grazed it and they knew they had a problem, and then the crop this spring showed symptoms.

We've had three years of drought, so we don't have much of the vector.

So unless you've kind of created a green bridge situation, I don't see much wheat streak.

- Okay.

There's a fairly recent publication that's been put out by Extension, and Abi's got a copy of it here right now, and I actually have a copy of this on my coffee table, and it's really, really a wonderful resource for pest problems on ornamentals.

- Yeah, so this is put together by Laurie and the other ladies at the Schutter Diagnostic Lab, and it's really, really nice publication that goes through pest problems and just identifying plants here in Montana.

This is available at the MSU Extension store.

So this is not available at those local Extension offices.

So if you want a copy, they're free.

you go to the MSU Extension bookstore and you can just order it there and then pay for shipping and it'll come to you, or you can pick it up in person as well from Bozeman.

- [Mary] And there's a PDF available as well.

- There is the PDF available online as well, if you want, if you don't want, but I have one in my car, I have one in my house and one in my office, and.

- Yeah, it's an amazing resource, especially when you consider the price, so.

- Absolutely.

- It's the best deal in town.

So, Laurie, I think you have another show and tell.

- I do, yeah.

I, this came in from Gallatin Gateway and this is actually, I, the phone call came in and he was saying that he had a bunch of beetles and some frass and things of that sort, insect excrement coming in, and he's has an 1890s home in Gallatin Gateway, and I'm trying to get this even here.

So the spider beetle on this, the cause from this, this spider beetle, which you see in this, in the white container here, these spider beetles were burrowing into the wood and creating all this insect excrement, and this home had been abandoned for quite a while and not really doing too much structural damage to the wood, but he said the beetles were pretty much everywhere and the insect excrement and the sawdust was everywhere too, and then also in addition to this, there were a bunch of another beetle called the carpet beetle, and so not something that we typically see in our, as for, it's not really considered that much of a wood borer, but it does, it is kind of excavating in the wood and for a home that's abandoned like that, the spider beetles just completely took over.

- So I did not think of this until now, but I knew somebody that in their basement, the people that had built the basement had actually put carpeting like, up the walls and onto the ceiling, and I think they might have gotten those like, into the studs and everything, I mean, and created, like they got hundreds of pounds of like, frass and wood and chips and things like that that came out of it.

- Yeah.

- I'm wondering if that's the same thing.

- Yeah, this, they're scavengers.

So they feed on lint, carpet, pet fur, other insects, and yeah, they can really.

- [Nina] Yeah.

- They can really build up.

That's the first time I've seen a sample like that, where they've been that heavy and then the whole insect world comes in and they decompose.

- Right, exactly.

Yeah, it was a huge, huge issue and yeah, it was yeah, pretty almost terrifying to hear about an infestation like that, that could happen in your home.

- Yeah, yeah, and I think this person will be okay because they're doing a remodel.

So it's getting rid of the source and putting new wood in will be very helpful in this situation, and I think they will call a pest control professional to kind of really target those areas to get rid of the beetles and make sure they're not gonna have a problem, but they're not boring into the woods.

So they're not causing any structural damage but they will be around if they're not taken care of properly.

- Wow, yeah.

Interesting.

From Ronan, for Diane, can you think of any other time in history where agriculture has had a labor shortage like this and how it has been creatively handled?

Is there any precedent for what we're going through right now?

- Well, I think these times seem somewhat unique, particularly as in our, the country that supplies our farm labor is transitioning out of farm work.

So I think kind of taking a more global context, you said, like the United States imports workers from Mexico.

If we go to Europe, the UK brings in farm workers from Poland and eastern Europe, and New Zealand brings workers from other south Pacific islands, so this is sort of a normal phenomenon, but now we're reaching this new phase where our source country's transitioning out of farm work, and then we have the pandemic on top of that, which makes things pretty complicated.

Back in the 1960s, in 1964, the Bracero guest worker program between Mexico and the United States was actually terminated kind of abruptly, and so farm employers were very, you know, stressed about this, of what would they do to actually harvest their crops if they couldn't bring in workers through the Bracero program, and there were a couple outcomes from this.

One of them was the creation of the tomato harvester.

So, all of our processing tomatoes used to be picked by hand, but with work from some agricultural engineers at UC Davis, and along with plant breeders, you were talking about breeding more uniform crops.

- We learned about this in school.

(panel chuckling) - Yeah, yeah, it's a classic one.

So yeah, they created a tomato harvester, much more efficient, really changed the way that we do tomato processing now, harvesting and processing, really expanded that industry.

So one of the major outcomes of the end of the Bracero program was this mechanization, tomato harvester being a really classic example.

Also created a lot of jobs in the processing industry.

So I think there's kind of this overall assumption that when we talk about mechanization and robots that it's taking away jobs, it can also create jobs maybe further down the supply chain or someone who has to operate that machinery.

So we're changing maybe the skills that are needed.

So I think that's a really classic example and sort of a helpful example for how innovation can some of these issues.

- Great.

Thank you, Diane, and probably just time for one more question, and this is a follow up since we've been talking quite a bit about hornets and wasps.

From Lockwood, referring to the previous conversation about hornet traps with pheromones in them, if you've not seen a lot of hornets yet, is it not something that you should put out at this time or should you be proactive and put it out before you start seeing the problem?

- Yeah, I'd put 'em out now.

Yeah, so, and again, it's just gonna trap the Western yellow jacket.

So it's not gonna trap bald faced hornets.

It's not gonna trap the European paper wasp.

Those are the two other really common ones, but yeah.

Get it out now and that'll keep any nest from forming around your property and probably your neighbor's property too.

So it's not too late.

Don't wait and you just might not, they might not be attracted to anything on your yard, but then if you put the trap out, it'll get 'em, so.

- That's great.

That's good to know.

So we just have a tiny bit of time left.

Diane, anything that you can add in just a few seconds about what we haven't talked about today.

- Oh, we've covered some good topics.

No, I love thinking about farm labor markets.

You know, agriculture is really unique, particularly in the sense that there's a lot of uncertainty and risk.

I think everybody here can agree with that, and then it does create some interesting challenges with labor as well, because farmer doesn't necessarily know exactly how many workers they will need and when they will need them, and from the workers' perspective, that also creates some uncertainty.

So interesting challenges and interesting and challenges, challenges with agriculture overall with all of their inputs.

- Okay, thank you so much, Diane.

Please tune in with us next week.

Our show is gonna be on the beef industry in Montana and Chaley Harney, who is the executive director of the Montana Beef Council will be the special guest.

Thank you.

- [Narrator] Visit MontanaPBS.org/AgLive.

(folksy music) - [Announcer] "Montana Ag Live" is made possible by the Montana Department of Agriculture, the MSU Extension service, the MSU Ag Experiment Stations of the College of Agriculture, the Montana Wheat & Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery and Landscaping, the Northern Pulse Growers Association, and the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

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