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

(upbeat acoustic music) - Good evening.

Welcome to another new year of Montana Ag Live.

Originating today from the studios of KUSM on the very dynamic campus of Montana State University and coming to you over your public television system.

I'm Jack Riesselman, Retired Professor of Plant Pathology.

Happy to be your host tonight.

For those of you who have seen the program in the past, you know how it works, just phone in the questions and we'll provide an answer or at least the best guess that we have.

Anyway, without those questions, this is a pretty boring program.

This fall, we're going to do a little bit of a soft theme called sustainability.

And sustainability is a buzzword in agriculture and a lot of other areas right now.

And we're gonna look at a lot of different issues involving sustainability, financial, agricultural, labor, so forth and so on.

And implements, things that are needed to sustain a successful operation.

So with that little bit of an introduction, let me introduce tonight, very esteemed panel.

Starting on my far left, Mary Burrows.

Mary is a Plant Pathologist by trade, somehow or another, they stuck her in the Dean's office for a while.

So she's done some stuff in the Dean's office.

She has a great job.

She's been here a lot and we appreciate you coming in Mary.

Our special guest tonight is Paul Nugent.

Paul's relatively new here.

Paul is with the Precision Ag Group.

And Precision Ag is something that we need to look at extensively if you want to maintain sustainability in an agricultural operation.

So if you have questions tonight about sustainability, Ag equipment, Precision Ag, electric vehicles, all these things, Paul is our expert.

Get those questions in.

Eric Belasco, Eric is our Ag Economist.

Eric will compliment and disagree with something that Paul is gonna tell you, but we'll have a lot of fun answering those questions.

And you all know Laurie Kerzicnik, Laurie is our Diagnostic Entomologist, extension entomologist, very capable, knows more about bugs than anybody else here in this panel.

So we're welcome you here this evening.

And answering the phones, John Holly and Nancy Blake.

They've both been here several times.

And with that, I wanna run back to Paul.

Paul, tell us what you do here at the university?

- Yeah, thank you.

I'm right now, I'm part of a team of four new hires who are working to establish a program here in Precision Agriculture.

We're within the College of Agriculture.

We are working a lot on looking at autonomous vehicles, both airborne systems and potentially infield vehicles.

We're also looking at ways to really optimize the uses of the inputs we have in our crops here in Montana.

So we have projects that should be starting up here soon.

Looking at ways of optimizing irrigation, that's gonna be starting mostly within potatoes as a target crop in the beginning, but then moving to broader crops across Montana.

And then also working on ways of working in, I guess, looking at ways of dealing with soil acidification and ways of detecting that earlier before it causes crop failure.

- Sounds interesting.

I know there's a lot of different things going on.

Ag technology has bypassed me just so rapidly, it's scary.

We had a little coffee where retired faculty this past week and Carl Igo, who is head of your department, told us that we can no longer use the word drone for autonomous vehicles because the scientific community prefers autonomous flightless vehicles or whatever you wanna call.

So I looked up drone and you can tell us what a drone is.

I mean, we've had an expert here.

So tell us what a drone is?

- It's a male honeybee, - It's a male honeybee.

And the term first showed up in 1946, where they had radio controlled aircraft without man or anybody in it.

And that's where the term came from.

But we're putting the word drone to bed tonight, from now on they're gonna be called what?

- Autonomous Aerial Vehicles.

- Okay, so that works good.

All right.

Eric, here's a question for you.

And this came in via Facebook.

They want to know how the Montana wheat harvest was this year?

- Yeah, the wheat harvest this year is looking better than last year.

So obviously, the drought has dissipated for most parts of the state.

And so, the yields are much higher in many parts of the state, add to that, the high prices which have expanded acreage throughout the state.

So you have more acreage, more yields, much higher production and prices are holding on strong.

They peaked as Russia invaded Ukraine and they stayed up there till about the beginning of summer.

And they've come down a bit, as you know, US production has increased as well as some Ukrainian shipments have been shipped overseas.

So still relatively high prices.

So high prices, good production, input costs are pretty high.

We'll talk much more about that today, but input costs are high, but still on net.

I think incomes we're expecting to be pretty good this year.

- Okay, on that note, and this came from last fall, Bozeman, and Mary or anybody can answer this.

Caller would like to know what the term chem fallow means.

So do wants to jump on that?

- Chem fallow is chemical fallow.

So in Montana, we don't get a whole lot of moisture.

And so common practice was leaving the ground without a crop and using herbicides, especially glyphosate or round up to control weeds to maximize a water storage from the winter and not lose it.

And then you'd plant your wheat crop following that fallow year.

- So how much water roughly do you think you can save by using chem fallow rather than tillage over a fallow, which is a non-crop year?

- I'm gonna bounce that to somebody else that might know.

- Well, last I heard is about 25%, but which doesn't sound like a lot, but that makes a difference between making a crop at times.

- Yeah, it's been replaced in many of the areas of the state with low water using crops, such as peas, lentils and chickpeas because they'd rather get a crop than leave it fallow.

- True.

An important question from Bozeman for Laurie.

Why are there so many miller moths this year?

- Yeah, I don't really know why there's so many, we have had a big season and we see a lot of miller moths.

If you have miller moths, a big chunk of them in your area, it means that they were on their way to their summer migration spot to have a cooler place to spend the summer, and now they should be coming back.

And they will lay eggs in wheat and barley, and alfalfa, so.

But we're still seeing kinda...

They're still sticking around a little bit.

So it's just been a big year.

And I can't say exactly why.

- They are army cutworm moth, is that correct?

- [Laurie] That's, correct, yeah.

- [Jack] And I've also been told that they're a major source of food for grizzly bears?

- That's also correct.

- So we all learn something tonight, okay.

Paul, interesting question.

This person says the shift to electric vehicles has occurred more rapidly than most people could imagine.

In your opinion, can the power grid handle this rapid change?

- I would say, I guess in my opinion, I believe it can.

And the reason for that is even if hypothetically, we were to shift completely electric vehicles overnight, where all new vehicle sales were electric, it would still take somewhere upwards of 20 years to replace all the vehicles on the road.

'Cause right now there's about 280 million vehicles in general, and there's really only about 14 million new vehicle sales per year.

So it's about a 20 year replacement to And so we have time to adapt.

Will it cause a increase in the grid, somewhere about 25% higher electrical usage total, if we were to go completely electric.

- Okay, we have a follow up question here.

And this person was interested in the title that's been advertised for this program.

What's the status of electric tractors.

We have electric pickups, cars, trucks, and all kinds of battery powered toys for homeowners.

What about tractors?

- Yeah, electric tractors are...

They're still in their infancy, but they are coming into the marketplace.

There's two companies right now that you can go and purchase an electric tractor from Monarch tractors and Solectrac.

And these tractors, they're focusing currently on smaller horsepower, about 50 to 70 horsepower size tractors, and they're all catalyst tractors.

So they're really focusing on that smaller part of the industry.

And part of that is, I guess my opinion is part of that is that's where the battery technology is ready to be able supply the needs of those that sized tractor.

And then also there is actually more sales, per unit sales in that side of that part of the industry.

- Okay, say a Monarch tractor, which I'm not familiar with, but if you're using it for a utility purpose and so forth, and you have a fully charged battery, how long will they run?

- That depends on what you're using with the vehicle.

The Monarch tractor, they say up to 10 hours of operation, but that would be light operation.

If you're pulling an implement or you're running the PTO, the vehicle, it might be as little as three hours.

And so that is definitely a problem.

- All right.

- And it's one of the reasons they're working on ways of being able to have exchangeable battery packs similar to what you're using in just home power tools, but at a much larger scale.

- Yeah, we talked a little bit about urban agriculture and the rapidity that batteries have replaced gas-powered stuff.

I mean, it's literally happened overnight, it seems like, but if you wanna go out and buy a gas-powered trimmer, hedge trimmer or anything like that, it's literally impossible anymore.

Everything is battery operated.

And that change occurred with a two or three year period of time, probably, maybe longer, I don't pay that much attention to it.

- I feel it's been happening over a longer period.

But a lot of that is been driven by just the cost of the lithium ion batteries has decreased almost 90% over the last 10 years.

So what it got it's just made it more obtainable.

- Okay.

Mary, from Bozeman, this person has powdery mildew on their prickly lettuce.

Is this a good bio control?

And by the way, I have a lot of powder mildew on my zucchini, which is also a good way to slow down zucchini population.

So have at it.

- Yeah, so every fall we do get powder mildew on just about everything.

There's lots of different species that attack, lots of different hosts.

You'll see it on your grass.

You'll see it on your squash.

And a lot of squash are very, very sensitive to powdery mildew.

My neighbor once called me over to her greenhouse and it killed most of her squash.

On prickly lettuce, I don't think it's a great bio control because although it kinda infects the leaves.

It doesn't really harm the seed production.

It doesn't attack the seed.

There's a lot better bio controls for prickly lettuce.

And if you're seeking to get more zucchini, - [Jack] No.

- you could probably use like a copper product to spray or when you're choosing varieties, choose one that's has PM, which means powdery mildew resistant on the tag or on the seed in the seed catalog.

- Okay, thank you.

An interesting question.

And these are the kind, I kinda get a kick out of every so often.

It's from Three Forks and this person wants to know why steak is so much more expensive than good pork chops.

He says pork chops are a fourth of the price of a good steak.

Have at it.

- Worth, okay.

Well, I can tell you, I mean, the comparison, I'm not quite sure I can speak to, but I know why steaks are expensive.

You know, you think of all the inputs that go into steak and certainly over the last couple years, almost every part of that supply chain has gone up.

From the drought, which caused yields to drop and the expense of raising cattle to go up to logistic networks, fuel, getting it to the store, manning those stores, those have all gone up in price.

But the good news is steak is actually the last couple months has dipped a bit.

I wouldn't get too excited though because a lot of times when you have a drought, you get kind of a push of animals to process earlier.

And so, when we look out at the inventories that exist right now, and you look kind of a year, two years from now, it looks like you might see a similar price increase just from that drop in supply.

- Look for sales.

- Look for sales, but stock up now.

- Labor was a huge issue in that.

Is anyone looking at robotics for meat processing?

- Oh, you know what?

I mean, that's a great topic, I think...

So we've we visited this meat, I took a class of students to go visit a meat processing, kinda one of these 200 head an hour facilities.

And they still have a, you know, they're fully employed, even though there's a lot of automation, there's still a lot of employees that are in there just because each cow's just a little bit different.

And so there's definitely talk about changing, more automation there, but just because you have slight differences, it does make it a little difficult.

- Okay, this question does not surprise me.

It came in from Sheridan, somebody by the name of Becky in Sheridan wants to know, do they need to control wasp anymore or they on their way out?

I mean, I have seen more wasp lately than I did earlier this summer.

- Yeah, me too.

And actually found this on my way, I was at drinking horse today and well, I saw it a couple weeks ago, so I clipped this.

This is a mini bald-faced hornet nest.

I think they started it and then they must have abandoned it.

And so the wasps are still active right now, the worker wasp, but the Queens have made it and they found a place to over winner.

So it's not quite time to knock down the nest.

You have to wait for a couple of herd for us.

And then after that, you can knock down the nest.

But until we have a couple herd for us, we'll still be in there or lack of food.

Which whichever comes first, that'll take down the nest.

- What's the difference between a wasp and a yellow jacket?

- They're closely related, but they're a different gene as than the other.

- Which one bites harder?

- Well, the Western yellow jackets are the ones that sting.

Those are the ones that are more aggressive, but bald-face hornets will get pretty aggressive when you get close to their nest.

- All right, just curious.

Here's a question I really like, it's from Roger and this person has a theoretical question.

He says that if I have a 3,000 acre grain farm and I net approximately $150,000 a year over the past decade, would Precision Ag increase my profitability and by how much, and he just says, a guess will do.

- Want's a number, huh?

That's not an easy question answer and part of that, is that there's so many aspects to Precision Agriculture.

I'm one thing that might be easily attainable to look at profitability is starting to look at some per acre where things are yielding, where things are looking at your inputs and the amount of time you're spending per acre across the farm, and then potentially, choosing to focus your inputs on areas that are better performing.

And in that case, I'm not gonna be able to a number to it per se, but it, you should be able to increase your output.

- Yeah, 10% roughly.

I want a number we can't back out here.

- I don't feel comfortable giving in a number, part of it also is because it's, you have climate conditions.

- True.

- Your soil property of the particular farm and also management history.

And all of those are gonna kind of feed into that.

- Very site specific and then also just on the cost side of being able to maybe get a better picture of utilizing those costs in a better way.

So more accurate placement of chemicals in different areas, not over, you know?

- But if you want to talk, sustainability, people do need to start thinking and moving into better production methods and Precision Ag does that as I understand it, am I correct?

- Yeah.

Well, the other thing I'll say too is, if we look back at like the last 70 years, it's all been labor saving technology in agriculture, and this is another way where, I mean, I saw Paul release that drone and get a good picture of a field and that's just saving people time to focus on other things.

So maybe they can spend that time marketing their product or doing other things rather than spending their time trying to find out like, where their yields higher or lower.

- Okay.

Well, we kind of delved around that one and really didn't come up with solid answer, but that's alright.

Good answers though, guys.

- It's hard.

- Mary, from Kremlin, this person has a lot of flowers with powdery mildew.

Is there a particular product they could use for powdery mildew control?

Might be a little late this year, but.

- Yeah, I wouldn't bother this year, probably when it starts getting cool and damp in the fall.

And you can back off on your watering and look at just aeration of the whole area, and then go to your local garden center and look at the labels.

- Sulfur does a good job as of sort, basically, I believe that's an organic product.

- Yeah, there's a number of products.

- And while I have you up from Billings, this person has a lot of mushrooms that are overtaking their yard.

They would like to know, is there a product they can use to control the problem?

- There is, but it's usually not worth it.

It's decaying organic matter.

So unless you have a dog eating them or something, they'll go away eventually, me just irrigate and.

- [Jack] They really don't hurt anything.

- No, no.

- Okay, from Dylan.

Interesting question.

Does the Inflation Reduction Act impact Montana's agriculture?

Eric, that sounds like that's right in your Bailey way.

- Yeah.

Well, I mean, there's a lot of things in that act, but I think that for agriculture it's the investment in the conservation programs are probably the largest direct impact, the environmental quality incentive program.

And then the conservation stewardship program, they call those the working lands program 'cause they give incentives to farmers to basically try to improve land that they're working on in hopes of improving either some conservation outcome or some environmental standard.

And so, I think it's about 20 billion going to those two programs and especially equip the majority of it has to go to livestock operations.

So probably a lot for livestock producers in Montana, I would guess.

- Okay, thank you.

This question came in from Ong, and this person says he's a senior in high school is fascinated by new technology, especially in agriculture, I.e Precision Ag.

He would like to know, is there a major at Montana State University that he could take if he were to come here?

- So there's not a Precision Agriculture major yet, we are working on the establishment of a minor in Precision Agriculture and that we're running the first courses in that this fall.

And then we'll have another set in this spring, but there, the minor itself is not yet approved.

There's hope that in the future, this could move into a full major, but that's just hope at this point.

So coming on this, so maybe to answer his question, though.

Right now, it would be, come into agriculture, take depending on where he wants to go and where he wants to specialize that and do that, get that minor in Precision Ag as well as you're going through and potentially pick up some other courses as well across the university and I would say computer science, maybe computer engineering as well.

- So we have a follow up question from Valentine and this person would like to know why Precision Ag is not in the engineering department and in the College of Ag in that respect, I'll add, is there some combination that both departments become involved with this minor program?

- At this point, it's all within the College of Agriculture.

And that's, I think largely because of how it got started here at MSU and that the push is coming from the College of Agriculture to establish this.

I know at a lot of universities, that's not the case.

A lot of the universities that's housed within engineering through an agricultural engineering program, but MSU does not have that program.

And so we're within agriculture and I think that has its benefits.

I mean, I'm actually an electrical engineer - Is it the Department of Agriculture right now?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- Yeah, it's in the College of Agriculture.

- So you could join any department like plant science, animal science.

- I see.

- Now for my information, I'm not up the university every day anymore.

How many students are in have declared a minor in Precision Ag, do you have a number?

- Right now, you're not able to declare a minor.

Because the courses are still in their test run.

We have, I think between both classes around 20 students enrolled.

- That's a pretty good number.

That's a good start.

- Yeah, I believe that that's across both of the classes we're running.

There is maybe overlap in students between those classes, I don't know the exact number.

- Okay, so it's spider season.

- [Laurie] It is.

- So we have one here, I'll find it.

This person has small brown spiders, do they hurt anything?

Have another question that came in.

This one was from the Yellowstone Valley and they have what they believe are a lot of black widow spiders and what should they do to control them?

And you have a spider to show us after you answer those questions.

- Yeah, so I'll try to see how, this is an immature hobo spider.

The first question that came in that about some brown spiders around the yard.

I bet those are hobo spiders.

This is the time of year that we see a lot of hobo spiders.

And this is what we call an immature.

So usually they're about the size of a quarter when they are mature.

And that's what we'll be seeing coming in the house, both males and females should be coming in right now.

They are harmless to humans, even though it might not seem, I think she's over in the corner here.

If you can see her right over here.

Yeah, I can't get her to... Oh, okay.

Well, didn't get a good shot of her, but these are what their egg sacs look like too.

Just so I can show you guys these two, but while I'm showing you the egg sacs, the hobo spiders will continue in the house through probably November.

These didn't hatch from last year, these are just in the container.

So we will...

They do not reproduce in the home.

And so we'll see those through the end of November and then we've had a lot of calls about black widows in people's yards this year, especially in dryer areas.

And we have black widows in every county in Montana, they're just kind of reclusive.

So we don't get to see them very often.

And they actually like to be at the base of plants.

I used to see 'em in agriculture and wheat all the time at the base of grasses and things of that sort.

And there's not a whole lot you can do to get rid of 'em except it's just been a big year for them.

So I mean, I think around the home you can spray, there's some products that you can spray to keep 'em from coming into the house, but in the yard, it's very difficult to control 'em.

- Okay, there's plenty of 'em this year.

- Yeah, there are.

- No doubt about it.

Interesting question from Flaxville, it's been a long time since we've had a call from Flaxville, do you guys know where Flaxville is?

- Nope.

- You don't?

Time to look, it's up in Northeast part of the state, you know where it got its name?

You can guess, it was where we grew a lot of flax, probably 35, 40, 50 years ago, probably 50, 60 years ago, hence the name, Flaxville.

And if you drove up there years ago, you saw a lot of blue all over and flax flowers, blue.

So that little bit of information before Paul, would hydrogen powered equipment be more feasible for farmers than electric?

- Interesting.

So you're talking the hydrogen with...

There's two ways of doing either a hydrogen fuel cell with hydrogen, or actually, essentially an internal combustion engine that's powered by hydrogen.

I know that there's exploration of both of those within these alternative fuel systems, sourcing that hydrogen is probably going to be much more difficult than sourcing your electricity.

Now, though for Montana, because a lot of our tractor use is large acreage, especially in Eastern Montana and you're driving very large tractors, there's definitely a use case for it, but I don't see anything on the market for it right now.

And I don't see a way of sourcing that hydrogen easily.

- But things are changing, you never know down the line.

Yeah, definitely.

I don't believe some of the changes, I've seen just from the last 15 years.

- Right.

- Pretty amazing.

Mary from Missoula, this person wants to know, is there any Precision Ag tools that helped control plant diseases?

- Yeah, I mean, there's a lot in development, I guess.

A lot of image analysis to identify stress in fields.

The research I've seen in the laboratory, they can discriminate between diseases, but really when it goes to the big scale, you still need humans.

- Okay.

Question from Missoula and they preface this by saying, I should never ask an economist what the cause of inflation is because I don't know if you have enough time to answer that question.

So have at it.

- Sign up for my class.

(chuckles) Come to MSU.

No, I mean, just very simply inflation is just prices going up.

And so, we do this exercise in class where you just, you double the price of everything, you double everyone's wages at the same time, and then you figure out, well, does do we need decisions actually change?

And really, it shouldn't change any decisions.

You're really just changing the numbers that you're dealing with.

The problem is that these inflations kinda happen at different times.

So like, you'll see maybe prices go up and wages aren't quite moving or you'll see some products where inflation is high and then other products where it's not.

And so, a lot of times, whenever you have demand chasing a shrinking supply, you'll see that bidding up.

Think about like when everybody wanted to buy, not everybody, but a lot of people wanted to buy a new car and there just weren't new cars on the market.

Well, what happened?

The only way to kinda get rid of that inventory is to raise the price of those cars.

And so, that price increase is just kind of what we think of as inflation.

- Makes sense, speaking of cars, I actually, about a month ago attempted to buy a new vehicle and I gave up, I did.

And I've got 175,000 on the one I'm driving now.

So I need a new one.

- It's a tough market, right?

- It is a tough market right now.

A follow up from Lewis down to question, Mary, Paul, where do you see real advantages of using Precision Ag techniques in Montana agricultural situations?

- I think some of the real advantages, short term are using... Short term it's using the data that we're already producing in the fields and finding ways of doing this.

And then longer term, I think there's some techniques as Mary was talking about being able to identify stresses and such in the field with the availability of satellite data now where we're getting revisit times of two to three days across the field, we can for free, go get an image of that field.

Look at its stress levels and start being able to at least identify where you have stress.

And then you send the people out to go and identify what that is on the ground.

Or you use this to adjust in a time inputs or, either water or chemical.

And so I think short term, those are the benefits.

- Out of curiosity, how many, or what percent of the producers in Montana?

I know this is an estimate because probably nobody's looked at it, but what percent do you feel are using Precision Ag techniques now that they weren't using say 10 years ago or five years ago?

- Oh, percentage using, it depends on how we define Precision Ag.

If we were talking simply things like tractor guidance, I think you're seeing fairly high adoption rates as people are replacing and getting that newer equipment, it's coming on board and they're using that.

Though, going beyond guidance and starting to look at essentially a site specific management.

I don't think the adoption is that high in Montana right now.

And that's one of the things that we're trying to do as a team is actually look into this and identify what those rates are, and start understanding what those barriers are for the state.

And some of that, we feel right now is very largely an educational need.

- How close are we to autonomous tractors?

- That's a great question.

It's here.

- It's here?

- So if you want an autonomous tractor, you can buy one today from a few manufacturers.

So Monarch tractors who makes the electric vehicle or sorry, makes electric tractor.

That tractor does come with, I believe it's level four autonomy.

What they mean by level four is somebody should still be minding it.

So similar to the UAV that we launch, somebody's still watching it and able to take over if something doesn't work.

And there's a couple other companies on that are selling that level of autonomy for vehicles.

- Pricey?

- It depends.

It's been more obtainable than I expected in terms of pricing.

So if you're wanting to replace a tractor, getting something with that autonomy is, I would guess around the $25,000 more to $50,000 more, so it's not inexpensive, but it's not unobtainable.

- But with the labor shortage that we currently have, that's very, very small.

- Labor shortage and then also just in Montana, we have larger fields and in the rest of the US.

So I think you kinda buy down those upfront costs much quicker.

- And so something maybe to add on the autonomy with the larger fields is that's what's not quite the market or large tractors with autonomy, we're not seeing.

- Interesting.

Amazing what the technology is doing today.

So back to hornets from Bozeman, this person has many different kinds.

And then they seem to prefer to reside on Bur Oak trees, is that normal?

- Well, I think I see a lot of this, a lot of nests on, on Bur Oak trees.

Yeah, a lot of the bald-face hornet nest.

And to go back to your question, I think I answered that incorrectly, that originally all hornets are wasp, so you said are what's the difference between a wasp and a hornet.

So all hornets are wasp, not all wasp are hornets.

Just to clarify that.

- Mary, this person from Choteau thinks they have some wheat streak mosaic this year.

Do they anticipate having it again next year if they plant winter wheat?

- So we've seen some very early planted winter wheat come into the clinic with wheat streak.

- July.

- Yes, July.

Which was not a recommended practice.

- That's correct.

- You don't wanna plant winter wheat, when wheat is being harvested around you and all the wheats are coming up.

So wheat streak is pretty endemic to ditches and our green bridge, or serope, it's around.

And if we have favorable conditions in the fall, it will infect where we, if the winter wheat has emerged.

In the spring, we also need like a warm wet spring to really get it going, which is pretty rare in Montana.

It tends to be cold in the spring.

So I would say risk is pretty low unless you're doing special practices like planting winter wheat in July.

- Another question from Valentine, everybody in Valentine must be watching tonight.

This pushed and cut down a long dead tree.

I've probably been dead for several years is what I interpret this as.

And they found thumb sized grubs inside.

What are they?

This chickens by the way, really like 'em.

- Yeah, I bet the chickens do really like 'em.

Yes, so I think we have, depending on the type of tree, we do have some scarab beetles that will feed at the base of the tree, that are kind of detritivores and like to break down some of the organic matter, but it also could be a wood boring beetle.

It's hard to tell.

I'd be happy to look at a picture, if you wanted to email me at insects@montana.edu, we could figure out what that is, but it could be a whole host of grubs.

And we do get a lot of wood boring beetles that will lay eggs on the outside the tree and bore into the tree when the tree's starting to decline.

So it could be something at the base of the tree, could be wood boring beetle, but all across the board.

- Okay.

Another suggestion if the chickens like 'em and they're not too far from the Yellowstone River, grubs made great catfish bait, there are lots of nice catfish in the Yellowstone now in that part of the state.

- Now you're thinking.

(group laughing) Here's a good one.

So this person has a hypothetical question.

He says, if I bought a new electric vehicle, like Ford electric pickup and decided to leave Grass Range, headed for Jordan to go fishing at Fort Peck, I get to sand Springs and I run outta juice.

What do I do?

- Oh.

(group laughing) And depending on what you have available for charging.

And you could... And there's simple, you know, 120 plug-in charging that is possible on these vehicles, but it's very slow.

And so you could do that, you know.

- Might probably next town.

- It might take you well overnight to charge.

And that's a problem right now with some of the electric vehicle electrification Montana, and there's charging stations along the interstate routes that you can access fairly routinely, but a large portion of Eastern Montana., there's not those types of charging stations.

But now there are portable chargers that are the level two chargers that would need like a welder outlet type that you find on most farms.

And so, you could maybe bum some charging off somebody, if you brought yours along.

- Trick is, leave with a full charge when you're out in Eastern Montana.

- Right now with electric vehicles, it's I would say, plan your trip and look at your mileages.

- Okay.

It is a thought though.

I mean, I've literally considered an electric vehicle more for local than... What's the cost per mile fuel on an average electric vehicle, I'm just curious.

I don't know for sure.

- I've seen numbers.

I actually don't know that number on electric vehicle well, I think charging, it depends on what utility you're getting electricity from and such, but I think somewhere around 20 cents per mile or lower.

- That's considerably less.

- Considerably less, yes.

- Okay, thank you, good information.

Laurie, from Big Timber, this person has a small greenhouse in their backyard.

And every time they walk in, it looks like a thousand little insects hopping around, any idea what they might be?

- Well, if they're hopping, then it could be... - They're gray too, he says.

- Oh, they're gray.

They're probably spring tails.

And so we see a lot of spring tails in greenhouses and they're soil dwelling pests.

They're not really pests, they're beneficial.

So they're scavengers and feet on decaying matter in the soil.

So we commonly see those in the greenhouse.

We see 'em sometimes when our soil dries out and they come into our house.

So I wouldn't worry about 'em at all.

They're just part of the system and sometimes they can come build up a little bit.

There's one literature piece cited about them harming some seedlings, but usually they're just in the soil and part of the system.

- Okay, good answer.

A couple things on here.

We don't have a weed scientist on this evening.

We will have one, I believe next week.

We have several questions about, is this a good time to spray candidate thistles in yards or pastures?

The answer is, I know this for a fact.

In yards, yes, but if they dried down in a pasture, it's probably too late.

But most weeds at this time of year, have a tendency to try to produce a lot of carbohydrates to survive the winter.

And so if you got dandelions in your yard, things like that.

Right now, before frost, or as close to a frost, as you can do it.

It would be a good time to spray 'em.

- Good, you made me feel better about what I did today, Jack.

- You sprayed?

- I sprayed my thistle.

- So did.

Well, I got a shot Mary from Helena.

After recent rains, they noticed a lot of black spots on cold hearty, grape veins.

Aside from pruning, what other, quote, "organic control" options can they use?

- Bordeaux mixture.

There's lots of options for grapes.

The decision is what is it?

And is it important if it's on dying leaves, it might just be a secondary fungus and just good sanitation.

And don't use that as your mulch, just get rid of.

- Okay, thank you.

Now back to Flaxville, how will we get power to electric tractors in the field if they are using and that's a good question because a lot of these tractors are considerable distance from where their home operation is.

- I think that's where the exchangeable charging packs come in.

Very similar to you use a pickup truck to transport diesel to your field now to fuel up your tractor, you'd use a truck to transport your charging pack or your power pack.

Switch that in the tractor, bring the power pack back to the farm where you then would charge it with a charging capability.

I think that's the model that's gonna be practical.

Unless, some fields, do have the electrical infrastructure to have infield charging stations because anything where we have center pivots, we already have the electrical infrastructure there.

- Can't we get our UAV to change the battery pack?

- Our UAV just got very big.

- I want another robot.

- Yeah, yeah.

Now autonomous battery packs maybe, a few years.

- Back to Laurie from Fromberg, their apples have worms in them, what should they do?

And by the way, we used to have a lot of apple orchards down in from Burry, Joliet area.

There's a lot of hundred year old orchards still in existence down there.

So what do you do if you got worms in your apples?

- Yeah, so it's probably codling moth and maybe you see evidence of worms that were there once, or they're pretty messy feeders in there and when you're cutting up your apples.

So right now there's not much you can do about it, except to make sure you clean up your apples and they're in a stage right now, they call the pupation stage and they'll be in that stage, they're usually in the bark or somewhere close by, and they'll be in that stage until spring.

So just clean up your apples and then keep a look up for next year.

And if you do have a lot, then there are several options for spring once the adults are out again.

- So what are you do with the apples now that have worms in 'em?

- You can compost 'em and they're not gonna be actually, if the worms... You might see evidence of worms, but they should be outta the apples most of 'em, but if you do find 'em in there, I wouldn't leave em on your property.

I would definitely get rid of 'em.

- Well, a good friend of ours who used to be on this program quite a little bit, Pete Fay, took wormy apples and made some of the best cider.

- Oh, I bet.

Yeah.

- A little extra protein in it, but anything, so.

We has several questions come in and are kind of interesting from Gallatin Gateway.

Paul, what is the battery life roughly for electric vehicles and what's the replacement cost?

I know that's pretty high.

- Yeah, so battery and within the electric tractors, we're looking at, are we talking battery, not charge life, but total lifetime of the battery.

With the electric tractors, some of that it's a little bit too new because they haven't been on the market enough to fully understand how the batteries are gonna respond with typical users.

Typically, the typical farmer using that tractor.

Within electric vehicles though more on-road vehicles, we're seeing that we still have 75 or 70% lifetime after 10 years.

And that's with older battery technologies.

And so as we're constantly improving, but the cost of those battery packs have been dropping very significantly over time.

And so right now I would, I know within the tractors, it's around $10,000 to get an extra battery pack.

And in vehicles, we're seeing, I think similar prices.

So about, 10, 15% of the purchase price of the vehicle.

- You want to trade 'em off at the right time.

- Potentially, right.

- Yes, I'm just thinking ahead.

This is a great question and I've considered this myself a couple of times.

Eric, I'm gonna let you have this one, it came from Big Timber.

And they want to know how our road tracks is collected on electric vehicles.

That's a great question.

- Say that again, road?

- Well, do you have gas taxes if you have gas, so how do you tax electric vehicles?

I got him.

(group laughing) - I mean, yeah.

Maybe someone else would be better at finding specific ways to tax everything, but yeah.

Well 'cause gas, it's a per gallon tax.

- Per gallon, right.

- Yeah, with EV I'm not quite sure.

I mean, most of what we see are kind of the subsidies and the upfront purchase of those, although I'm not sure I see any kind of subsidies or taxes on the actual consumption of that electricity at this point.

I mean, there are still like with electric cars, for example, there's still the wear and tear on roads that would need to be repaired where you'd have to have some right state taxes, at least going to repair.

- Does anybody know if any states have instituted specific type of tax on electric vehicles?

- I think is the other way, I think, like California, we were talking about earlier has pretty big subsidies for EVs.

- There has been talk of doing a per mile type tax on these vehicles.

But so far what I know of that's only been discussed.

There hasn't been anything implemented anywhere.

- Interesting.

- There's been proposed for gas taxes too, by the way, the per mile, some economists are looking at, you know, 'cause you definitely have some, you have a heavy truck that's really fuel efficient and you have a per gallon tax.

Well, there's a lot of wear on the roads, that's not really being accounted for there.

At the same time, you have a small car that is less fuel efficient than some of those newer trucks.

And so, they're paying a higher tax, less road damage.

- It's unfair, right?

- Well, nothing's perfect.

- Okay, fair enough.

Paul, from Fort Beton.

Are there any incentive programs for electric tractors like there are for electric vehicles?

- Not in Montana.

There's not that I've seen.

The electric vehicle incentives, your electric tractors do not qualify for that.

In some states though, there are various incentive programs that are in existence.

And I think California is one of the most prominent ones right now where there's a fairly decent incentive program.

I don't know the exact numbers on the.

- Down the line, maybe Montana will have one.

- Down the lines, potentially.

Down the line, there may not be a need for 'em as costs come down.

- With the Inflation Reduction Act too.

There were some funds in there, I'm not quite sure how they're gonna be disseminated, but there were some funds in there for rural energy production, which could be something like, improving the grid in some of those areas where you would need the tractors.

- Mary, from Plentywood.

It's a canola question, we're growing a lot more canola in the state than we used to.

There's a couple serious diseases that this person is curious about if we have 'em in the state, one is called blackleg and the other is clubroot.

Have we found it in the state yet?

- We have not, I can't say that we've looked very hard.

I did get some blackleg from the Gallatin County several years ago on winter canola.

And I suspected it came in on seed and we had one suspected case of clubroot in Western Montana on very intense canola acres, but we decided it was not clubroot and we sent it for verification.

But it's something we were looking at because we know there are races in Canada that are breaking resistance.

- And as the increase of canola is projected to increase, the likelihood of finding.

- Yeah, and the other thing is that canola is very subtle to white mold, so, and that will affect our pulse acres as well.

And then some downy mildew.

- All right, thank you.

First question, ever from Judith Yap, how long does it take to charge an electric tractor?

- It very much depends on what type of power source you're using for charging.

The one that's currently being recommended is essentially a welder outlet.

So a 240, 50 amp outlet.

And with those, it takes about six hours to charge electric tractor.

- Okay, why have you up, this is a good question from Fort Benton, by the way, one of my favorite cities in the State of Montana.

How does a temperature change from 70 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit affect the charge on electrical vehicle battery?

- I actually don't know the answer to that one of affecting the... With the modern lithium batteries, I know it's greatly reduced.

And I know of just speaking with people who run electric vehicles here in Montana, that they say they have not seen any issues in the winter, but I don't know the exact numbers on that if there is definitely an effect.

- Okay.

Well, I diesels have the same effect.

You know, if you're 20 below diesel, can it be a little hard to start sometimes?

So nothing's perfect as we talk about.

Okay, from Thompson Falls, Laurie, this person has a pear tree and there's not many places in the state where you can grow pears.

They have brown spots, they're getting worse, and I think it's on the pear.

Any idea what that might be?

- Yeah, so we do have a pest that hits the leaves called pear slug or pear saw fly.

So this time of year we see the brown on the leaves gets a little bit harsher.

So I would suspect it'd be pear slugs 'cause that's most often what we see on pear and on the leaves.

And at this time of year, they probably already dropped to the ground.

And so I just keep a lookout for 'em in June.

If it's an established pear tree, it's probably wouldn't be that big of a deal, but the numbers can start to increase over time.

So it's something to look out for.

They look like a slug, like a green slug, but they actually are an adult wasp.

They they're related to wasp when they're adults.

- Do robins like them?

- They might.

- Okay, I see a lot of birds on places where you have pear saw and that's cotoneaster hedges and stuff like that.

- Yup, cotoneaster and hawthorn and also apples.

- Okay, we're getting down time.

I got another one here for you.

This person from Bozeman has a small raised bed where they grow beats and they have a lot of leaf miners.

What can they do to control the problem for next year?

- Oh, maybe do some, cover your seedlings next year early on, is once they're actually in the leaves, it's really hard to control 'em.

So definitely gets maybe try to protect your seedlings before the adults come out.

They're flies as adults.

So if you can try to break that cycle early on, try to do some row covers.

- Quick one here for Paul and urban agriculture question.

Do they have electric riding lawnmowers available?

- [Paul] Yes.

- Any John Deere, you know?

- I don't know the brand.

I don't know if John Deere has one, but I know you can go down to Home Depot and buy one.

If you wanted one.

- And curiosity, how long would a battery pack last on one of those?

- [Paul] That I don't know.

- Mary, your prediction for winter weed acres going in this fall quickly, up or down.

- It'll be great if we have water.

- Pardon?

- It'll be great if we have water.

- That's a big if right now.

Okay folks, we've come to the end of another show.

I appreciate all the phone calls tonight.

I wanna thank Paul and the rest of the panel for coming in.

It's always fun to look at something new that we're not really familiar with.

And I tell you what, I am so lost with Precision Ag right now, that anything I can learn is beneficial.

Next week we have Kathy Zabinski, she will be talking about ecology and sustainability in crop production systems.

Have a good week.

Join us next week, good night.

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