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

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

So I would really like to thank you all for tuning in tonight.

It's such a beautiful night.

So I definitely appreciate if you're watching.

I would also like to thank Jack Reselman for putting a great slate of shows together this year or this particular season.

He focused on women in agriculture and he'd brought in a number of guests, women that are actually performing a lot of very, very different roles in agriculture.

And we've got a special guest today that I think is gonna really put the icing on the cake for that.

So my name is Nina Zidak and I serve as director of Seed Potato Certification at Montana State University.

On my left is Tim Seipel, who is a weed scientist and oncologist, here to answer any of your weed questions, Laurie Kerzicnik, our insect diagnostician.

I don't think she actually has anything too threatening today.

(everyone laughing) We have Tracy Dougher who has been with us at MSU for a long time as a professor in horticulture, and she now serves as the academic director for the College of Agriculture.

So it's really gonna be great to hear from her and the academic programs that are going on at Montana State University.

On the end, we have Perry Miller who is a cropping system specialist here at MSU.

So please come to him with any questions that you might have on cover crops, rotations, that type of thing.

We are lucky enough to have Nikki and Joe Vredenburg answering phones with us tonight.

So thank you.

And to you in the audience, please get those phones ringing and get some good questions coming into us.

So Tracy, could you tell us a little bit about academic programs at Montana State University and your role in guiding that mission?

(Tracy chuckling) - So our office kind of oversees, we think about the student as a whole in the College of Agriculture, and recruitment and retention of students.

So how do we get students to come to our College of Agriculture and then also how we help them stay and persist at the university.

So we're starting off this summer with orientations and meeting those students.

We host programs throughout the year that engage our students and help them out.

In doing that, I also get to work with the faculty of MSU and the College of Ag to help them prepare and facilitate their classroom experience with the students as well as the programs that we involve our students in.

- Great.

Well, thank you.

And we look forward to hearing a lot more about those programs as the show progresses tonight.

So Tim, a question from Florence.

This person used weed and feed on their lawn and it did not kill their dandelions.

Do you have any idea why it might not have worked?

- Yeah, when you use weed and feed on your lawn, it kills just the broadleaf plants, but it really kills only the small broadleaf plants in annuals.

So if you have a big dandelion that's already established in your yard and you dig it up and it has a big tap root, those are not usually affected by the weed and feed herbicide.

There's just not enough to really kill - Can I recommend an alternative strategy?

So I do something I call yard yoga and I go out with a little hand tool and I look for those big dandelions roots And that does seem to take pretty much, if you get a good chunk of the root system, that gets takes pretty good care of them.

- I also do yard yoga.

(women laughing) I have a big Klein screwdriver and I part reach in and I pop them out.

- That's a great way to get your exercise, 'cause there's never a shortage of dandelions.

So Laurie, a question from Harden.

They found these long, skinny, white worms on their garden plants and they move really fast.

They haven't seen these before, what could they be?

- Well, I think, this year we've had, this could be horsehair worms.

This year has been a big year for them.

And they are parasites of grasshoppers and crickets.

They're much longer and skinnier than an earthworm.

We also have something called pin worms, but these horsehair worms are about four inches long and they look like they're about the width of a hair.

So completely harmless.

They're probably around, 'cause we had such a high grasshopper year last year.

And they meet and lay eggs in the water.

But when they mature, they come out for a little bit and they run around like crazy in the plants.

So nothing to worry about, just something curious.

- So I think I've actually seen these before.

Do they actually like see them in troughs of water?

- [Laurie] Yeah.

- And then you see the skinny little worms.

I've never actually seen them out outside of the water.

- Yeah, they look kinda freaky when they're on plants, but it's nothing to worry about.

(laughs) - Didn't know about that.

That's great.

So Tracy, Jack put this entire season together focused on women in agriculture.

Can you talk a little bit about the young women that are pursuing degrees in careers in agriculture at MSU?

- Yeah.

So our College of Agriculture is now about 60% female and 40% male.

So our programs are working to get young ladies into agriculture in a lot of our majors.

So we find them across the majors.

And so that's actually raised an interesting question about what's happening with our male students at the universities and why they're not persisting in our agricultural programs.

- Yeah.

Is there the possibility that maybe some of the young men from farms and ranches might be pursuing degrees in other areas that they're gonna take back to the farm?

Or I don't know.

I just kinda wonder about that.

- I think, well, in the national picture, we see them staying out of college, so they're not going to college.

Part of our recruitment is to go out and talk to all of our students across the state of Montana, and talk to them about coming to college and what an agricultural degree can bring them.

- Yeah.

And I think now that the precision A and I'm sure coursework is going to follow with that.

Yeah.

That we'll see even more opportunities for both young men and women.

- Yes.

- Can I just add a little bit to this?

So I've been teaching crop science course for a long time in MSU.

And the caliber of student has gotten a lot better.

Sorry to students that I taught 10 or 20 years ago.

(women laughing) We are really getting some strong students in that major.

Is that related to any retention or recruitment strategy or?

- I think it has everything to do with our recruitment that we've had been doing at MSU.

- Well, good job.

(women laughing) - Yeah.

So what is the our number one tool for recruitment?

(Nina and Tracy laughing) - It's all of our faculty that are out there across the state recruiting our students.

They're out there working with the farmers and ranchers across the state.

That's what attracts our students to see.

They come here and then they know somebody when they're here.

I think that's been our number one recruiting tool and our programs are out in the state.

So when at state FFA Convention, our faculty are there at the convention, and/or when they come for John Deere Ag Expo, those students are here.

- [Nina] Right, judging for the competition.

- So we know our communities around Montana.

- Yeah.

Yeah, that's great.

Thanks.

So Perry, from Lewistown, what is the best cover crop to build organic matter in a dry land situation?

- So organic matter construction, it's a pretty simple game.

The more biomass that you can put in that soil, the more you'll improve soil carbon.

And that could evolve cover crops that can just involve annual cropping systems that do a good job of producing lots of biomass.

To say, we've done a lot of work on cover crops.

Nitrogen fixing crops, do what you'd expect them to do.

They fix nitrogen and they bring that into the system.

And so depending on how that interacts with carbon, that can raise organic matter.

We think of our fibrous rooted species as feeding that carbon aspect more readily because of the higher carbon ratio in those grassy plants.

But after we've thought, after we've looked at our results and analyzed, it's just biomass is biomass.

It doesn't seem to matter where it comes from.

More is better when you're trying to build organic matter.

The trick in dry land situations is sometimes we use too much water in doing that, especially if it's a cover crop that doesn't bring any income back to the farm.

So that can be a whole other challenge as to whether we'll actually work economically, but it's really a simple equation and where biomass equals more organic matter.

- So I think one of the things that's really fun about this panel and doing "Montana Ag Live" is that when we come in, our purpose is to answer questions that come in from the audience, but we always come in with questions for each other.

(everybody laughing) And so I'm actually gonna let Perry, I'm gonna pass it back off to you.

I would like you to ask Tim one of the questions that you brought in for Tim today.

- Yeah, I don't know if we can get a close up on this and it's probably not.

- [Nina] It's diminutive.

- Yeah, it's very small, but it's not one of my prouder moments, but I have quite an infestation of this particular weed.

I mean, it's sizeable of the size of the studio that is spread in my grass the last three years.

And I was just asking Tim what it was all about, because I haven't actually seen it before.

And he's gonna tell you.

- Yeah, so it's an annual weed.

It's a Veronica.

I think common name in English is speedwell.

Veronica arvensis.

So Veronica of the field.

And it's a little very early season annual plan.

And Perry was actually asking about managing it.

I said, well, Perry, it's a little bit too late, because if you look down this annual plant, you'll see these heart shaped lobes on them and the seed is actually fairly ripe and already set.

So if you went in and you apply the herbicide to it that took a relatively long time to kill the plant, the seed would likely ripe and then fall onto the ground and you'd be at the same spot you were last year.

- Okay.

So I just have to be quicker next year.

- [Tim] Yup.

You'll have to be earlier to the game.

- Okay.

- Yup - So is this one of these weeds that actually, maybe if you were to fertilize your grass, it might be a little bit more competitive and you would have a little bit less of something like this.

I mean, it doesn't look like a real beast in terms of aggressiveness.

- Yeah.

I have a little bit of it around my house too.

And it mixes in with the bulbous bluegrass, the poa bulbosa.

And it's a really early season plant and I don't have a great grass stand there, but it does like to establish early when there's lot of disturbance there.

So I think if you did build a good grass stand, you could probably outcompeted over.

- I find if I fertilize my grass, I just have to mow it.

- [Tim] Exactly.

(women laughing) - And if you water it, it gets even worse, right?

(women laughing) - When I was younger, I worked at a golf course and the superintendent made the really bad mistake once of putting way too much nitrogen on the fairways.

And to prevent the fairways from burning up, he had to water it a lot, which led to me mowing fairways every day.

I'm as good as a GPS tractor.

I can drive a straight line, but we mowed fairways every day for a month.

And I'm with you, Perry.

(women laughing) If you fertilize it, if you water it, it grows, and then you have to mow it.

- And there's better things to do on beautiful evenings like that or like tonight than mowing.

So, okay.

Now, Tim, I'm gonna give you an opportunity to ask Laurie the question that you brought in.

- Okay.

So I have some early season planted Swiss chard and we've harvested some of it, but it started to get these white sacks that sort of fill up and they're hollow on the inside.

If you peel them apart and you open them up, and I don't know if I'll be able to do it now, but there's these little worms that are on the inside.

I don't know if we'll be able to find them, but they're lost.

And they basically eat the whole whole chard leaf off.

So how do we deal with it and how do I manage these little worms?

- Well, this is either the beet leafminer or the spinach leafminer.

They're too closely related species.

It is a fly as an immature.

So the little white things that you're seeing in there are maggots.

And then a lot of the black things that you're seeing in there are insect poop.

So the little feces in there.

At this point, the best thing you could do is just pick the leaves off that are infested.

It's something that you could hit early on with maybe some floating row covers to try to prevent them from laying eggs early in the season.

But at this point, it's really hard to try to control 'em.

Cut down on any sort of nitrogen fertilizer that you're gonna use, that'll keep that population down.

But at this point, yeah, it's just picking off the leaves.

- Yeah, I have a really bad population of these leafminers.

And I notice that the only time I get good chard is after the first frost of the year, when they seem to go away a little bit.

So I think I'm gonna just remove all the biomass to see if we get better chard later in the year.

- [Laurie] Yup.

- All right.

So here's a question that came in from Bozeman and we do not have an animal specialist on or an animal control specialist.

So I'm just gonna throw that out there, because maybe somebody has some advice for this person.

They've been having gopher troubles in their garden.

They've tried traps, sage and Tabasco sauce, but the gophers are still sneaking in and stealing her squash.

What else can she try?

She says it's kind of like catty shack.

(women laughing) - Dynamite.

- It's dynamite.

(women laughing) - Yeah, what's a legal.

- What's legal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I mean, maybe protecting individual plants with some wire or something.

- You know, who knows is Steven Vantassel from the Montana Department of Agriculture.

- [Nina] There you go.

- He knows all the tricks and can help you.

- [Nina] Okay.

That sounds great.

- Yeah.

- Exactly.

We can always pass the buck, but I think it's a great question.

So Tracy, a question from Helena, what is the most rapidly growing major at MSU?

- Right now, that's our environmental sciences programs.

So there's a strong interest from our youth and in our environment.

And with climate change coming, it's encouraging to see students going into that major.

And our environmental sciences major includes environmental biology, soil and water, and the geospatial program, as well as land rehabilitation.

So that program's been growing very rapidly.

- Wow.

That's interesting.

I mean, to give us a ballpark, idea how many people would be in those programs?

- [Tracy] Oh, that's a good question.

(laughs) - That's a good question.

(laughs) - [Nina] Is it like 50, 60 something?

- They've got over a hundred and some students in that program, yeah.

- Wow.

- That's great.

- That's a sizeable program, yeah.

- There's an introductory lecturer I give each year, where I show the salaries of different majors, and environmental sciences has not been one of the higher paying salaries.

If you can be in crop science agronomy, one of the crop management kinds of disciplines, this is coming back from a multi-university study from some years ago, but it was a pretty sizable increase.

So applaud students that are interested environmental sciences.

But if you wanna make some money, some of the traditional ag areas still, we need people.

- I think, yeah, we need people in every sector of agriculture now.

So yup, like everywhere else.

Perry, from Moccasin, this person remembers that you talked about winter canola when you were on the show last year.

And how is winter canola performing in Montana?

- So it's actually pretty exciting, I would say.

There are a number of things that are changing.

I call winter canola a fragile system.

And by that, I mean, it's just sort of one thing goes wrong in all the steps to grow the crop, that you may not get a crop.

But the genetics are getting better.

We're figuring out some of the management better.

So there are some farmers having some good success.

I had a farmer call me from the combine last year during a really strong drought that was combining a high yielding dry land canola field near Dutton, Montana.

And I'm like, wow.

If you can do it last year, you can probably do it in a lot of cases.

So we actually just put out a little MSU blurb on experiences we've had with winter canola, because it's getting close to the time to be thinking about planting it.

I think the safest or least risky option is to plant it in a chemfallow situation.

So normally, we'd be thinking about September, or maybe even October for a winter wheat canola, we gotta move that way forward to get it big enough to be hardy enough to survive the winter.

And so ideally, probably, the heat units would work out in August sometime.

Canola's a tiny little seed, we're not gonna plant it very deep.

Do we get it wet enough in August to get it emerged.

Last year, we did.

So there's some lovely stands of winter canola around the state this year, because we had that inch of rain in August that was pretty widespread.

- Yeah.

I can imagine that's a really tough decision to make.

So what's canola worth these days?

- I'm gonna be a little bit ignorant because I'm familiar with some Canadian prices and I know that was $20 of a bushel Canadian and up, and actually some spot prices that were higher.

That is worth a fortune, actually, at the moment.

If you can grow a crop of canola, you're gonna be a pretty happy farmer.

- When you're coming out of chemfallow, how do you typically manage weeds going into winter canola and thinking about this, I have some plots?

(Tim and Perry chattering) - But I'm thinking about conventional chemfallow widths double of some sort.

One of the things we've found with trying to grow winter canola as a sort of a post-harvest or a fall planted crop, we just don't get enough heat units to get it big enough to let it survive the winter in the very worst place where we get the least heat is a good wheat stubble field, right?

Because it's too dense, too cool, too shaded.

So we really don't get very good establishment there.

But in the chemfallow, some of that stubble has started to break down, and so you get that better microclimate in there.

Some farmers have actually seeded as early as late June, some of the first farmers that had success with this.

But then you get so much biomass that you have to you have to manage it.

And so in that case, they had some swathing operations going trying to keep the canola from getting too large, because if it starts to bolt, if it starts to make that reproductive stem or even starts to lift the crowns off the soil surface very far, it becomes very susceptible to winter injury or mortality.

That probably didn't answer your question.

So I'm looking at as sort of normal chemfallow.

And we actually seeded ours in July last year.

We did have a growth issue.

The crowns were lifting and so we probably lost 90% of our stand.

If you were to look at my plots right now, you'd say, oh, they look pretty good, but those are big wolf plants that have really branched out and made a lot of pods.

July, we weren't able to manage that growth when we seeded that early.

I wished I'd waited to August, but I didn't know it was gonna rain.

- And where were your plots?

- At the Post Farm.

- At the Post Farm, okay.

- Yeah, here in Gallatin valley.

Yeah.

- Great.

- Sorry, what's your ideas, Tim?

- For weed management.

Or most of the new genetics that are promising in the Roundup ready lines of canola that are not susceptible to the herbicide glyphosate, so that you can use Roundup in crop.

- Good point.

There are non-herbicide tolerant lines that some of them have better winter hardiness.

So we're trying to get that winter hardiness moved into these herbicide tolerant types, but I only work with Roundup ready types.

And part of that was because we were getting such thin stands.

I needed a way of managing weeds that was pretty simple.

We could still get some surprising yields if we can control those weeds.

And glyphosate's a pretty easy tool that way.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

Thank you.

So a call came in from Kalispell.

They would like to know, Tim, what is a good herbicide for yarrow?

And can you effectively spray and control it with a fall application?

- Wooh, that's a really good question.

I do not know what the best way to control yarrow is.

I would imagine it would probably be a 2,4-D, MCPA, maybe bromoxynil husky sort of combination in there.

And if you sprayed it this time of year, I think you could definitely suppress it, but I don't think you will control it in just one herbicide application, because it has underground roots and rhizomes and it's really tolerant to being defoliated and it will actually increase.

If they wanted to call me in my office on Monday or Tuesday, I'd be happy to look into it a little bit more.

I have a few ideas out there for products, but it may come down to availability too.

I've heard some Dicamba + 2,4-D is really hard to get a hold of in some situations now.

- Okay.

Great.

Thanks.

So we are getting some help from an outside call from Pablo.

So this caller has a solution to the gopher problem mentioned earlier.

She puts mothballs in the gopher holes and then puts a lid on them.

She has not had a gopher problem in years.

- Wow.

Simple solution.

- Yeah, sounds like a fairly simple solution.

I don't know.

Is it naphthalene?

- Yup, naphthalene.

- Yeah, naphthalene.

- It is toxic.

- Yeah, it is pretty toxic.

I don't know if there might be any issue having that in with your vegetables or something like that.

But again, that would be a great question to ask Steven.

- [Tim] Steven Vantassel.

- Steven Vantassel, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

Great.

So Laurie, let's see.

I know I saw a question that came in here.

I think I have to go up just a little bit.

Let's see.

Yeah, this caller from Bozeman has a healthy elm tree, except there are leaves that are clumped together.

She's noticed that there's some kind of organism in the clumps looks like an aphid.

Maybe she's wondering if that's something she should be concerned about.

Is that bringing anything to mind for you?

- Yeah, it's probably a, a wooly elm aphid.

There's a wooly elm aphid and a wooly apple aphid.

Sometimes a wooly apple aphid will use elm as a secondary host.

So it could be either one of those two.

And it creates kind of a cottony mass inside the leaf and will curl the leaf.

It looks kind of alarming, but if it's an established elm tree, I would just let it go.

You'll have a lot of natural enemies and beneficials that come in, and just keep an eye on your tree.

So if it's something really young, you can call me in my office and we could figure out a good plan or something to something to apply, which would probably have to be a systemic that goes through the root system.

But if it's an established tree, I wouldn't be overly concerned.

Elm trees do have a lot of pests too.

And as long as it's not causing any issues with the health of the tree, they can take a lot of insect pest issues.

- Yeah, and I think a lot of times with established trees, just making sure that they have sufficient water through the growing season is probably the best defense.

- Yeah, yeah, definitely.

- Because if they get drought stressed, then they become a little bit more susceptible to everything.

- I think, one thing people complain about sometimes with aphids too is that they've release honeydew.

And sometimes if that's on a sidewalk or near a car, then that might attract sooty mold or might drip honeydew too.

So that's one thing to consider.

- Sure.

Thank you.

So this is a question that I'm gonna throw out to kinda both Laurie and Tracy.

I think, it's intended for Tracy, but there's a chance that maybe Laurie has a little bit more experience with this.

They're asking, like what is the ratio of men to women in extension offices throughout the state?

- [Laurie] Oh, yeah.

- [Tracy] Wow.

- That is a good question.

I mean, I think as far as, I think, for the female, for the extension offices, I think, there's a higher female to male ratio for the extension agents that are in the offices right now.

And I could be wrong, but Tim, do you know?

- I don't know all the stats off the top of my head, but Mary Burrows was talking about this recently.

When she started in somewhere around 2005 or so in that general area, and if I'm wrong, call Mary and ask her.

(Nina and Tracy laughing) That it was a majority male extension agents in the ag natural resources program.

And now, we've seen a shift to almost majority female ag extension agents just within the ag extension program.

So yeah, it's a really... And there's some great smart agents out there.

Shelly Mills was on here just a couple of weeks ago.

- Good question for Shelly.

- Yup.

(Nina laughing) - Exactly.

That's great.

So Tracy, from Sydney, what are the new courses that are being offered in the College of Ag?

Where are we breaking new ground?

- We're breaking new ground.

You mentioned it earlier, actually the we're starting to turn the wheels on that one.

And so this fall and then in the spring, we'll be offering four new classes in precision ag.

Starting with the general concepts in precision ag.

And then also a sensors class this fall.

And then in the spring, we're looking at a data science and kind of the business end of talking about, is it economically feasible to do precision ag?

And then also a course on the internet of things?

The wheels are starting to turn on and that all kicked off this summer with the precision ag boot camp that happened earlier the summer.

- That sounds great.

So can you also talk a little bit, a lot of the students that come to our lab just on field trips and things are in the sustainable foods program.

Can you talk a little bit about that and how we work with some of the different programs throughout the university for the sustainable foods program?

- Yeah, so the sustainable foods and bio-energy systems program is across through two colleges, three colleges.

Yeah, three colleges.

And couple of our departments have branches of those.

So agroecology program and the crop science.

- Yeah, sustainable crop production.

- Sustainable crop production.

And then there's also the food science aspect of that as well.

That program started across all those colleges, but we think about it.

It's another way of agriculture.

So that's definitely what we wanna teach in the college.

- Food is agriculture, right?

- Yes.

- [Nina] Yeah.

- Most definitely.

- Absolutely.

So Perry, you talked about this a little bit, but I think it would be great to elaborate anymore, even though in some parts of the state, we feel like we're maybe coming out of the drought, but I know in the triangle, there are areas that are still in some pretty severe drought situations.

Do cover crops make sense on dry land farms?

And also, how do you balance the decisions in dry land farms compared to in irrigated agriculture?

- Yeah.

So we've done a lot of cover crop research, none in irrigated systems.

It's all been in rainfed systems one way or another.

Both on farm and long-term plot studies, we ran an eight year study with one site at Amsterdam and one site at Conrad and had a couple sites that ran half that long.

So we've looked at this from a lot of different ways.

Cover crops use water.

There's this myth out that somehow cover A plant has to use water to grow.

So depending on how they cover the ground, they can probably do some things that reduce evaporation, but still the transpiration, the water use that happens with that plant, it uses water.

So on average, in our plot studies, we're finding that when we measure it compared to chemfallow, we've got about two inches, maybe a little bit more than, how would I say that?

There's two inches or a little bit more than two inches greater water in chemfallow than there is in those cover crops.

So two inches, that's a lot of water.

That could be 10 bushels a wheat.

There can be some significant yield loss if you're in an area that doesn't replenish that soil well over winter with precipitation.

I think, our average yield loss in this crop trop trial that I'm talking about was somewhere in the eight to 10 bushels an acre range.

And in the on farm programs where they were left to manage cover crops as they saw fit and tend to let them grow longer than we did.

So they used more water, used more nitrogen, their yield loss was just about double what ours was in the small plot.

So it was even worse in the on-farm case, But we weren't creating any value with our cover crops.

Like we weren't using 'em for forages.

And so there's a group out of Harvard that just published some papers where they didn't have as bigger water problems, which I'm a little puzzled about at Harvard, 'cause that's a pretty dry area.

- [Nina] Yeah, absolutely.

- But there was some real positive aspects on the forage side.

So there were some nitrate toxicity issues in the forage, I guess, that you have to be aware of.

But their assessment, I think, was a little more positive than what ours has been.

If I had to pick a number in the state, I would say if you're in an area that gets on average 14 inches thereabouts or annual precep or better, cover crops are probably gonna work for you.

If you're much under that 14 inches annual precept, we haven't found sites where it works.

And we thought, well, if we do this long enough, keep cycling, it will build up that soil organic matter, make it a whole water better, we'll do some positive things.

And that hasn't even happened as fast as we had hoped.

Economically it's pretty challenging unless there's a forage angle that really works for you.

- That actually, well, we did some of the research in Harvard part of it with the dared boss really set up years ago, and then with Pat Carr at moccasin.

I think, the forage aspect could be the most valuable portion of that.

I think, Pat Carr's research and yours has really sort of pointed to that.

We just also found great way to manage wild oats.

You have a really bad field with wild oats in it, you put in a winter triticale and Austrian winter pea or put in a spring barley spring pea, and you cut that off now as those wild oats start to bolt, you get some value in really being able to stop that wild oat seed set for that year.

So there is some trade-offs in there too.

- Sure, but can you have your cake and eat it too?

We wanna build soil organic matter.

It takes biomass to do that.

If you're taking biomass out of the system, I'll guarantee you you're slowing down the soil organic matter development.

- So in situations where you are a certified organic producer, would the value of the crop be high enough to compensate for the potential loss in yield?

- Yeah.

I mean, organic's a whole other game, because they're nitrogen limited and so they need to have nitrogen infused The best way to do that is with a legume cover crop.

Yeah.

It does make money.

It does make sense in organic systems.

I guess, I was speaking more from our... We're working in conventional no-till systems and there, it's been really challenging to try and make sense of it.

I know farmers that are still pretty keen on it, but when we put the pencil to it, it just doesn't seem to even come close to paying.

- Yeah.

I know, like in potatoes, a lot of our growers are using cover crops and they're finding they'll use it as a tool to prepare a really, really nice soil bed before they plant their most valuable crops, which is what we call the nuclear in generation one, the plants that are just coming out of our lab or just coming out of the greenhouse is minitubers.

And they want a really, really nice soil bed.

Occasionally, some of them are actually either having a neighbor come in and graze the fall before too.

It's definitely something that I'm seeing show up more in potatoes, for sure.

So, Tim, let's see.

I saw a question on red sorrel.

And they're wondering just how do you control red sorrel in pasture?

- Yeah, I don't know a lot about controlling red sorrel.

It's also called sheep sorrel quite often.

It's a really rise ominous plant.

So the roots are all interconnected.

You see the red patches out right now.

I just saw 'em yesterday.

And they can end up in your pastures fairly commonly.

I think if you have a mix of grass and legumes in your hay pasture, I think that's a harder situation to manage.

If you're trying to manage red sorrel or sheep sorrel in a just grass stand, you can really do it with the broadleaf herbicide and there's fair number of choices out there that would give you that to do it.

If you're trying to keep the grass, keep the legumes and get rid of the red sorrel or the sheep sorrel, that's a little bit harder thing to manage.

I would say, maybe 2,4-D, 'cause maybe the legumes won't be so super sensitive.

That might do it, but I'm not sure how the sheep sorrel will respond to it.

- Okay.

Thank you.

So Laurie, this color from Roundup has some weird cluster like gross on the branches of their cotton trees.

Some are brown and some are green.

Do you have any idea what they might be?

- Well, I did bring a sample of me today that this could be from the popular bud gall mite.

I've had a lot of calls about that.

So these are old galls.

And then the new galls are green.

They do look like they're part of the bud.

But anything in the populous genus can get these.

So poplars, cotton woods and aspens.

Typically, this is a cosmetic injury, but we've been seeing quite a bit, which means you don't have to do anything for treatment, especially for established trees, but we are seeing quite a bit more of this mite.

And what happens when you have a lot of infestation from the mite is you see a lot of dieback.

So if it's just a little bit and even established tree, just let it go.

But I think something we're gonna have to keep an eye on in the next few years, because I think the populations are getting just a little bit worse.

So it's really hard to treat.

The time to treat if you are gonna treat is when it's just right before bud break.

So putting some sort of miticide or some sort of horticultural oil on there will help before the mite start to make their galls.

So it's a difficult one to treat and one to kind of leave alone.

But I have to be careful about what I say about these cosmetic pests and the ones that aren't causing damage, because it seems like they're taken off the last few years especially things like oak.

All of our domestic or our deciduous trees definitely are having a lot more cosmetic damage.

- So I see you have another sample there.

I was wondering if you wanted to show that one too.

And what kind of damage this particular pest might be causing?

- Hopefully, it doesn't get me.

This is a southwestern tent caterpillar.

It was just up and drinking horse today.

It was feeding on chokecherry.

So this is the chokecherry plant.

It was actually causing quite a bit of defoliation.

So usually, actually, they hatch in April, May and they're typically done by mid-May, but they're a little bit late this year.

And they will create big tents in the middle of the chokecherry.

Something that you can physically remove if you put some gloves on.

They tend to congregate there during the day.

So you can go and remove the tent with pair of gloves.

I mean, they really can do quite a bit of defoliation.

So if you see the tent in there, you can go and remove that with your gloves.

But otherwise, if it's a really established plant, they're not doing much defoliation, then you can just let it be.

But they're out and munching around.

- So that's in the rose family.

So related to apples, related to cherries, related to a lot of our fruit trees.

Can these tent caterpillars then move on to affect our apples, our cherries, our plums, things like that, or?

- I've had 'em in my cherries before.

So actually, I don't know how many hosts they...

I mean, this is a prunus species, so I don't know.

I don't know which ones they actually migrate to, but I think, you see 'em a lot in chokecherry.

And I don't know how common they are in some of the other hosts as well.

Ooh, it's climbing up.

- [Nina] That's great.

(everybody laughing) - I've seen these types of worms infect apple orchards in Morocco and I've never seen them really move from our chokecherries onto other other things.

- Yeah, I don't see them as much moving on very much, but I don't know if those are potential hosts, if they don't have their key species.

- So in the Northern prairies, there's something called tent caterpillars that will do these massive defoliation events for aspen?

Is this the same critter or is that something different?

- Different species, little bit later.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this is an early defoliator.

So we have probably about four different tent caterpillar species that are common here in Montana, but this is one that we see kind of in forested areas that comes out early.

- You said to wear gloves, why?

- Wear gloves because their hairs are pretty irritating.

So they could be kinda irritate your skin a little bit.

So that's why you'd wear gloves.

- [Perry] Okay.

- [Laurie] Yup.

- Interesting.

So Tracy, we have a caller from Hisham and they have a student that is looking forward to coming to MSU this next fall.

What scholarships are available to students in the College of Agriculture?

- So the College of Agriculture at MSU has very generous donors too.

The college has the largest scholarship pool.

So there's a lot of varied scholarships available to our students.

And every year, we ask the students to apply to the Cat Scholarships program.

It's online.

That'll open up probably in about October, November, that application, and then that's due by February 1st, the next year.

And that's a whole plethora of scholarships that can be very specific to some areas of Montana as well as very broad.

And so there's a lot available to those students.

Just that one application puts you in for all those different scholarships for covering all of our majors in the college too.

- [Nina] That's great.

- Is that a recruitment level scholarship?

Is that something they do at a high school or does that be your first?

- Some of 'em, we encourage the incoming freshmen to apply, because some of 'em are recruiting scholarships.

Right now, we have very few of those, but we're working on towards more of those, but all levels of students should apply.

- Okay, great.

- Okay.

So Perry, we're gonna kinda take a lot of our conversations back to beginning because we have a call from Bozeman.

And I think this is a really good point, us in academia, sometimes to go back to the beginning.

What is chemfallow?

- Oh, yes.

That's funny that that comes up because I often get tripped up.

I said, I give an introductory lecture each year and I throw out chemfallow like it's a term that everybody understands.

And even sometimes with my crop science, there's some of the students in my crop science classes.

So fallow is just the way we say it.

Summer fallow is just a practice of leaving a field bare, managing it to be weed free throughout the whole season.

And chemfallow just means I'm using a chemical to do that.

So rather than tilling it to keep the weeds out, I'm using a general herbicide like glyphosate to keep it free of plant growth, to prevent them from using water.

There is kind of a myth out there that fallow does some positive things for soil.

And it does not.

Fallow is actually one of the most harmful things we do due to our soils.

If you till it, it's even worse, but it is important for moisture conservation.

If you're in an area of the state where you need that extra couple inches of water to make the difference between growing an economical crop or not, it's nearly required.

- So one of the things that I've heard something about but I haven't really gotten up-to-date on the cause of it and what is going on, but I've heard some anecdotal stories about significant pH changes and problems that have developed over time in chemfallow situations.

Can you describe that a little bit and what the best way is to remedy that?

- So I can't, but I can tell you that we have a lot of people here at MSU who are very concerned about, we've got some soil scientists who are very concerned about this pH issue.

Manbir Rakkar is a new faculty faculty member who's targeting research in this area.

Clain Jones has been looking at this.

Rick Engel had quite an emphasis on this at the end of his career.

And it is alarming the degree of acidification we're seeing in a number of situations.

And fallow does seem to have a role.

We don't know.

Obviously, it's caused by nitrogen, right?

Not necessarily by mineralize nitrogen, but by applied nitrogen.

But if you apply nitrogen in a timing to try to build up soil nitrogen when there's no plants there to use it, the net result of that can be a pretty significant movement towards lower pH.

We're discovering a lot of that on our own research farms actually, because when we're getting ready to grow winter week, unless sometimes we'll throw a bunch of nitrogen out there to get it ready.

Or even to grow spring crops the next year, we'll put a lot of nitrogen out there to get it ready for planting the next year.

Those are the fields that are showing up with astonishingly reduced pH, which is really not a good thing.

- So historically, this is not something that we've seen in traditional fallow where cultivation has been used for week and so.

- So our soil in Montana tended to have significant lime content, so calcium carbonate.

So that increases pH.

Some of that lime layer exists a little deeper in the soil.

So if you actually tilled and brought that up, you're probably actually, at times, had soil that was too high of pH.

But the practice of applying nitrogen fertilizer over time does cause a chemical reaction, especially if the plant doesn't use that fertilizer, it's worse where you get a drought and the fertilizer isn't used, or there's some timing mismatch where the plant doesn't use that nitrogen in a timely way.

It appears like the chemical reactions are occurring the worse.

But if you wanna know more, Clain Jones, boy, he's a soil chemist.

He knows this stuff inside and out.

And Manbir Rakkar is doing some new research on this topic too.

- Great.

I would anticipate that some of this information might possibly be at the field days this year at the various egg experiments stations.

If you go on our College of ag website, you can find information on where these field days are, when they're gonna be happening.

You can actually hear it right from the horse's mouth, from the people that are doing this very important research at MSU.

- Yeah, July 7th at the Post Farm Field Day on Huffine in Bozeman, Clain Jones and Manbir will both be presenting on some of their- - On the night issue.

That's wonderful.

Yeah.

That's good to know.

So Tim, this is a question from Miles City.

These folks have weeds in their gravel driveway and they've sprayed them with both Roundup in 2,4-D and nothing has killed them.

Is there a better solution to kill weeds in a gravel driveway?

- There's a whole class of herbicides that are called soil sterilant and people use them around gravel buildings in different situations, and you can certainly use those.

Those will do a better job.

We've sort of cycled through product names and trade names.

They always have a desert.

Mojave, Sahara, things like that are a couple examples.

You can find that at the regular hardware store and you can spray it and it will give you a residual.

But be careful even with 2,4-D and glyphosate about getting too far off of your driveway and spraying your trees next to the driveway.

Or if you use a herbicide that's a little bit more powerful and has a longer residual.

Making sure you don't get runoff that affects those trees around your driveway or your lawn at the same time.

You have to watch out for that.

I would imagine that the glyphosate 2,4-D didn't work, perhaps the weeds were covered in dust.

So you didn't get much uptake in the gravel driveway.

I sprayed some glyphosate couple of weeks ago and I think it was much too cold and nothing happened for quite a while.

So there could be a lot of reasons that you made that the application didn't work, but generally, the sterilant are what people use.

- Okay.

Great advice.

So Laurie, from Three Forks, this caller has a pine tree with white scale and they've been spraying something.

It doesn't say specifically what, but it isn't working.

What can they do to control scale?

- So that's probably pine needle scale, which is pretty common.

It's especially common in dusty area.

So I don't know if the caller lives off a dusty road or if this is in a shelter belt situation.

Timing is very important to control the pine needle scale.

So if you're using a contact spray, they're only active during the stage called the crawler stage.

And we're past that because usually, that's right around lilac bloom.

I guess, we're still kind of in lilac bloom.

It's usually when the crawlers are out.

But I think, at this point, there's an active ingredient called dinotefuran, which one of the common names or one of the common brand names of Safari, which can be pretty expensive.

That's one systemic that goes through the root system that you can use that will work on pine needle scale, but it could just be a timing issue.

So if you don't get those crawlers in the right stage, then they're protected underneath that hard shell.

It's hard to control them.

A few isn't that big of a deal, but if it looks like bird spacklings or some bird poop all over and it's not heavy, then that could really cause some dieback on the tree.

- Yeah, and especially if they're drought stressed again too, It seems like that's a bad interaction.

Yeah.

So Tracy, a question from Ronan, can you talk a little bit about the opportunities for indigenous students at MSU?

- Sure.

We've started up a program called Indigenous Pathways in Agriculture, and this program was born out of a grant that we have from the USDA, it's a New Beginning's grant.

That's focused on recruitment and retention of native students just to go to college.

So we partnered up with Blackfeet Community College for this grant.

Mostly, we wanna encourage indigenous students to go to college, but we started Indigenous Pathways in Agriculture to start going from our end out into the state and learning about their agriculture and what those communities needs, those tribal communities need for their agriculture and how we can support those students when they do come to college to make them more comfortable in our community.

But it was meant to big town.

(laughs) - Exactly.

I came from a small town, so I can sympathize.

It's a bit of a culture shock.

- Yep, yep.

Beyond that, the culture is different in the way that they operate, and so getting them comfortable when they come here.

So it's a place they know.

The person that runs that program, Rikki Ollinger is our native student program manager.

So throughout the year, she provides activities and programs.

We also try to connect them with resources on campus as well.

But it's also provided us with an opportunity to train our faculty to go out and immerse themselves in these cultures and learn more about what their needs are across the state and how to help that student when they come to campus as well.

- So if somebody was to come to campus and drive down the east side of the campus, they'd see a big interesting new building.

- Brand new building, yes.

(laughs) - What's that all about?

- That's American Indian hall.

So that program or that building is a place for our students to gather, but it houses the native American studies program.

And that has places for those students to go to feel comfortable in programs.

But we also have students that are in agriculture.

And so we want a home and a place that they touch with us in agriculture as well.

- I haven't been it yet, but it looks gorgeous from the outside.

- It's incredible.

The time and consideration and thought that was put into that building is amazing.

And then there's aspects from all of the tribes incorporated into that building.

So the drum room is incredible.

- So one of the things that I thought is cool, I've just, on noontime walks, walked through the building, but the part that I like the best actually is the landscaping that they've done around the outside incorporating native plants.

Also, I think there's a small area where they're going to have some native plants that tribes traditionally have cultivated.

So yeah, it's just a really cool building.

And like you said, very, very thoughtful.

- Yeah.

So some of that garden that's going in is going to produce some of their traditional, I'll call 'em, agricultural crops that they're producing that seed.

Right now, Joe Macken has been working out at our horticulture farm producing those seeds so that they can distribute them across the state.

And so schools can call in and order those seeds for their programs.

Jill's got that program started.

There's a welling of interest in an indigenous food systems program.

And that's starting to get off the ground.

Jill is in education, health, and human development.

- That's great.

Very interesting.

So I'm gonna let Perry ask last question.

We've got a minute.

So if you could ask Tim about your herbicide injury on heat question really quick.

- So just coincidentally, this call came in from a farmer at Big Sandy just yesterday, and showing some injury on his peas, which is not really cool.

And I was asking Tim what he thought that injury might be.

And I think we have an image of it, perhaps.

Can we bring that up?

The peas with the, there we go.

- [Nina] Wow.

- Yeah, so this is a pretty common injury to our peas.

I looked at the picture and I said, oh, sulfentrazone injury on peas.

And it's a fairly common herbicide injury that we see from the use of sulfentrazone, which is Spartan charge is another common one we use.

We use it as a soil applied herbicide in the fall generally before peas and then after that.

So I'll hand it back to Nina.

(chattering) We are on the same.

- Okay.

Well, thank you everybody for tuning in this season and especially tonight.

We look forward to seeing you again next fall for another great season of Montana.

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