- [Announcer 1] "Montana Ag Live" is made possible by the Montana Department of Agriculture, (upbeat music) MSU Extension, 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.

- Welcome to "Montana Ag Live," coming to you from the studios of KUSM on the vibrant campus of Montana State University.

I'm Tim Seipel, I'm sitting in the captain's chair tonight.

We have organized a great group of panelists for everyone, so please submit those questions about your lawns, your garden, your farm, weeds, soil health, rodents, and preparing for winter.

So tonight we have a great group of panelists organized here, and I'll go through and introduce them, and we'll come back to Susan, and she'll tell us about wind erosion in Montana.

So first on the far side down there we have Bruce Maxwell, Professor of Agricultural Ecology at MSU Bozeman.

Bruce was on my master's committee when I was a master's student.

Next to Bruce, we have Susan Tallman, she's NRCS Agronomist and Certified Agronomist as well.

And she's gonna talk about wind erosion.

Next to Susan, we have Stephen Vantassel, he's the Vertebrate Control Specialist for the Montana Department of Agriculture, and so if you have any questions about pesky, four-legged vertebrates, call 'em in.

And next to me is Abi Saeed.

She's the Extension Horticultural Specialist.

So call in and ask all those questions about lawns, gardens, and everything else.

We have some great show and tell we'll come back to tonight.

But our topic that we're gonna cover tonight, as our special guest, Susan, is you're gonna tell us about wind erosion in Montana.

You know, November to March is Chinook season, we know it's coming up, and you're gonna tell us about the status of wind erosion in Montana.

I thought it was solved when we switched to no-till, but you're gonna fill us in.

- Oh, great.

Thanks Tim, and thanks for having me on.

This is a topic that is important that we talk about in Montana, it's wind erosion.

Yeah, I think a lot of people had assumed that when we switched to no-till, that we wouldn't have problems with wind erosion, but unfortunately that's not the case, because the key to solving wind erosion is keeping enough residue and vegetation on the field, and that can happen with or without a no-till system.

And obviously you can improve your no-till system, so you can control for erosion.

So that's a real important message I wanna get out, is that there are management steps that we can take to control wind erosion.

- Great, so when I think of wind erosion in Montana, and as an extension specialist, I drive around the state, and I'm looking in the, I'm always looking in the ditches to see what color the ditches are, how much soil is in there.

And you do, during the fall, see a lot of soil erosion that's present.

Did soil erosion decrease, and then increase?

Where does our issues, where does, you know, historically we think of Montana, and its strip tillage, you know, we used to make strips and then leave fallow in between, and we kind of broke things up that way.

When we switched to no-till, we thought we sort of solved this problem by not disturbing the surface as much, but does no-till really function well to prevent soil erosion?

Or how do we think about this when we think about soil erosion?

- Well, there's been a lot of changes that we've seen across the landscape in Montana the past 20, 30 years.

So when I was growing up on the farm in the '80s and '90s, we were still doing the minimum tillage with the long narrow strips and alternating with fallow.

And now that's not the case.

People have switched to no-till, and a couple of things have happened with that.

We've gotten more diverse rotations, and that's really great.

There's a lot of great things that have come into play with the addition of pulses and oil seeds in the rotation.

The challenge with those crops is that the residue is just not very durable, and it doesn't last into our big wind erosion season, which is really November to April, but really from Montana, it's March and April.

And then the second thing is our field sizes have gotten larger, and so that creates an avalanche effect.

If wind erosion starts to get going across the field, those particles start to then exponentially expand.

And we've got a video that I brought in a producer sent in to us, and I'm not sure if we can bring that up.

It's an aerial photo, and you can see this avalanche effect as, there we go.

- Okay.

- I don't know if you can see this.

This was sent into us by a producer in the Triangle.

It's an aerial image, I believe Ryan Casillas sent this into us.

And you can see that aerial, excuse me, that avalanche effect as a field gets larger, especially if it's larger in that direction that is parallel to the prevailing wind direction, which in Montana is typically east to west.

So the broader you make that east to west direction across your field, the more chance you have for that erosion to just avalanche across the field.

- Great, thanks.

So we have a few questions that have come in, and I should, so I've failed to mention before, we have Nancy Blake answering the phone here in the studio with us, and we have Judge Bruce Lobo answering phones remotely.

So please send them your questions, so that we can get 'em onto the air and get 'em answered.

We have one that came in for Abby.

This is one about aspen's, and this also, I do have some of this in my yard as well.

"I have black spots on my aspen leaves.

Is there anything I should spray on that now, or how should I think about those aspen leaves?"

- Yeah, so black spots on Aspens, there are a couple of fungal pathogens that can be pretty kind of aesthetically displeasing on our aspen trees.

And generally at this time of year, those trees are gonna lose their leaves pretty soon.

So this is not a recommended time to spray anything, but there is something you can do right now with any of those kind of fungal issues in your plants is as those leaves drop to really take all that debris out and remove it from the landscape and destroy it as opposed to leaving it there, so that it can reinfect your trees over and over, and generally fungicide applications aren't recommended for leaf spots like that unless it's a really persistent problem, or a really important high value tree.

So generally sanitation practices like that can help reduce that incidence of these leaf spot issues.

- So I have to admit, I don't have a lot of extra time, and I just will let the leaves fall down onto the ground.

Is that bad for me?

I'm not worried, I like the natural disease in my trees, and can I just leave it in my tree, and let it grow on the ground?

- I mean, if left like, and if it runs rampant, it can eventually lead to the decline in the health of your trees.

But in terms of just the lifespan of they don't usually live past 15 to 20 years in most landscapes anyways.

- Exactly.

- So if you like to have just that, you know, biological experiment going on in your trees, then go for it.

- I very much do.

I have a great stand, and they make a lot of young shoots that come up every year.

So I don't mow the lawn, I mow the aspens down that shoot up out of the ground.

(all laughing) Great, thanks.

So let's see, we have another question that came in, one for Stephen.

- Okay.

- And that's "Every bird season, my dog encounters a skunk.

Are there any deodorizing products that actually work?

Should I bathe my my dog in tomato juice?

- No, don't use tomato juice.

Actually the only reason why people think tomato juice works is because of all factory fatigue, how's that for a "Jeopardy" question?

Which means your nose is so overwhelmed by the skunk odor that it wants to smell something new, that's why people think tomato juice works.

No, you want to use one quart of hydrogen peroxide, one cup of baking soda, and one tablespoon of liquid dish detergent.

Dawn is particularly recommended because of the grease-cutting ability.

Mix it fresh, and then simply, you could wash your dog with it, keep it out of the dog's mouth, keep it out of the dog's eyes, and it actually denatures the skunk essence.

Make sure your dog hasn't bitten the skunk, or the skunk didn't bite your dog, because skunks are rabies vector species here in Montana.

So gloves are certainly, don't let the dog in the house, you're gonna regret that.

So, and it works very, very well.

Just keep those elements fresh.

Some people use it in a bucket, and just carry it with them when they're going out in the field.

- Thank you, that's good to know.

I do, I did wash my cat once with tomato juice, and that didn't work out well.

(all laughing) - So we have a question from Fort Benton, and I noticed this when I was in Northwest Montana last weekend.

It's much drier in Northwest Montana than it is in Southwest Montana.

So Jack, if you're watching, I'm gonna contradict you a little bit, the northern tier of Montana's in a hard drought, and this person says a moderate El Nino condition is predicted for the Pacific Ocean this winter.

What does that mean for Montana, and what might that mean for our weather conditions?

- So the way that works typically is that that means we'll have a drier winter, that's on average.

That doesn't always work out that way, but it has a very high percentage chance, it's like 70% chance of an El Nino.

So, and it's been building, So that makes us believe that if there's gonna be a dry winter, this is probably likely to to be one.

Now, having said that, we've also had those El Ninos break down fairly rapidly in the last few years.

And what that means is in the spring, we still can have a very wet spring, and basically make up for that loss in a fairly big way.

So it's not that it's all dire, and we're going to dry up and blow away, but we may not have the snow cover, so the skiers may not be as happy.

- Yeah, good reason to have good stubble on your field, I think when we go into those conditions.

So Susan, what are NRCS'S recommendations going forward to limit soil erosion for maybe just a producer, or a county, or thinking about how to manage soil erosion if we know this year might be kind of tough, you know, it's too late for harvest, but are there any things that people can think about moving into the future to control soil erosion or limit soil erosion in their situations?

- That's a great question, Tim, and I wanna get to that, but first I'm wondering if we can maybe show a little bit about the economic loss of soil erosion.

- [Tim] Oh yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, we can show some, yep.

- I brought a picture.

I'm all about pictures today.

I brought a picture just showing a bunch of soil in a ditch, and definitely not trying to call anybody out, but I'm wondering if we could show that picture of the soil in the ditch.

And this is in Northern Montana, I believe this is in Liberty County, and this was taken last year, so April of 2022, and you can see all that sediment in the ditch.

You can barely see the fence lines there, and this is off of a 300-acre field, and you can see how sugary that sediment looks in the ditch, that's because when wind comes along, what goes up into the atmosphere is the clay, the silt, and the organic matter, the most valuable fertility pieces of the soil, right?

Those are lost to the atmosphere.

What's left over is the sand.

So what you're seeing there in that ditch is the sand.

So our soils become less fertile and more sandy with the more erosion that they have on them.

So even though this is sand, our local staff went out, and took a soil sample in the ditch, just the top six inches.

We assumed that this field lost about a quarter inch of topsoil off of a 300-acre field.

We did calculations based on current fertility costs, and I had Cleon Jones check those assumptions.

We estimated in the ditch that there was about $7,800 that is lying there in the ditch.

So, another report- - And that was of nitrogen fertilization, not organic matter or other important things.

- Exactly, that was the NPKs, and there was a lot of potassium in that.

And there's probably more than $7,800 in that ditch, right?

'Cause that's what was available in a lab test, and we don't know what was lost with organic matter clay and silts, right?

That was up in the atmosphere, we couldn't test that.

So, you know, a message that we wanna get out before we talk about how do we fix it, is we want people to understand that there's a reason that you would wanna care about that as a farmer is that that's, if you're losing soil, you're losing money.

- That's your property blowing away when it blows away, I mean it's a big thing.

Yep, well, we have a whole bunch of questions that are coming in.

So let's cut to a couple of them.

We have a caller from Corvallis, Montana who had great cauliflower this summer, but they were always full of ear wigs.

Is there anything you can do to keep the earwigs out?

- That is tough.

So yeah, earwigs, they're omnivores usually, and so they will attack some younger plants usually, and it can be a little frustrating to deal with them.

But if they're a persistent problem, I wonder if they have any mulches in their landscape, but using kind of a barrier mulch, like a plastic mulch can help prevent them from getting from the soil into your plants, that can help reduce those population.

So I would recommend trying that, and if you have any kind of debris around, because they like to nest in kind of usually debris and cool, moist places, so like wood mulches and stuff are places where they would proliferate.

So I would reduce those, and then opt for kind of a more of a barrier mulch to prevent them from getting onto the plants.

- Okay.

- So Abi, my grandmother said they got in my ears.

- Yeah, that's definitely a misnomer.

They're, you know, people think earwigs, and they think that they're going to crawl into your ears, and they don't actually do that.

I've heard some kind of conflicting tales about why they're called earwigs, and some people say it's because of the shape of their wings because their wings are kind of ear-shaped, and some will say, because they like those kind of moist places to nest in, and when people would have those wigs that they'd store in those drawers, they'd also have earwigs in them.

But I heard an entomology professor say to me that you're just as likely to end up with a grasshopper in your ear as an earwig.

So it's, yeah.

- I don't like them.

- So it's a myth busted.

- So we have nothing to hear.

- No, nothing to fear.

They're not gonna crawl up into ears.

- Good (laughs).

- Okay, I'll take this, and we have a caller from Belgrade is asking whether it is too late to spray for thistles, and that would probably be Canada thistle.

And the answer is, nope, there has not been a frost yet in the Gallatin Valley, maybe Belgrade got one a day or two ago, a little bit, but it's not too late to spray for thistles.

I would put on a backpack, put some glyphosate in there, and just walk around, and spot-spray all those rosettes that are growing on the ground.

If you see a stem sticking up with flowers and seeds, just skip that because it's not gonna have any effect on it.

If you're gonna use herbicide, you should go in and spray those rosettes down on the surface.

'cause then that herbicide is translocated down below the surface.

So no, not quite too late.

Yep, we actually sprayed some thistle just in the last week or so.

So another caller from Missoula, maybe Abi, you and Bruce, or anyone who wants to field this, this is a caller from Missoula is asking about some good lawn substitutes which require reduced, little, or no water.

- That's a good question.

So this is kind of a hot topic lately in terms of people interested in alternative types of lawns.

Kentucky bluegrass is probably the most common type of lawn we have in our landscapes, and that has a lot of high inputs, water especially, it requires in the hot summer months, over two inches of water usually a week.

And it also has high kind of nutrient input requirements too.

But there are kind of alternatives.

So if you're looking for more of a lawn-like aesthetic, and still want that turf grass in there, fine fescues require less water than Kentucky bluegrass does.

And so I would recommend, if you want still a lawn that works in that regard, that's a good one.

We have a couple native turf grasses, like buffalo grass and blue grama, but those are warm season grasses.

So if you're okay, these would be grasses you wouldn't need to irrigate.

But if you are okay with your grass being dormant in those, you know, spring and fall months, usually when our Kentucky blue grass is green, if you're okay with the brown lawn at that time, and your lawn will green up only in those hot summer months, that could be a good option for you as well.

Bruce, do you have additional thoughts?

- Oh, just put gravel down, and paint it green.

- Yeah, I mean so- - Do not do that.

- I would often.

- You want, we want soil health, we want stuff to be alive, and the gravel gets to way too hot in the summertime compared to the lawn actually.

- Absolutely.

And so I would say like if you are opting to get rid of vegetation, mulches, like organic mulches, like arborist wood chips, that's a really good one, they'll add nutrients slowly back into the soil as well.

And you can use that as a landscaping strategy.

So if you have existing lawn, if you pile it with about eight inches of mulch, and let it decompose in there, then you can pull that mulch back, and plant those drought-tolerant plants in there, and turn your lawn into a landscape bed.

- [Bruce] Yeah, okay.

- Okay.

We have a call from Lewistown, your home turf, Stephen.

Caller has an infestation of pack rats.

They have live trapped about a dozen.

- Well, okay.

- Wow.

- Any better suggestion on controlling pack rats?

- Yeah, so I would ask, the first question is, are the pack rats getting into a structure?

If they're getting into a structure, then obviously hardening the structure to prevent entry is the ideal, right?

We don't have to trap, kill, poison the pack rat if we can keep it out of the structure where that it is.

Otherwise, I would say, why are you cage trapping your pack rat?

A rat snap trap would be far more efficient in my mind.

'cause I hope you're not like moving it somewhere, and letting it go.

That's not really the way to go.

The alternative is going to using some rodenticides, there are some rodenticides that are permitted for pack rat.

Typically they're produced by Leaf Attack, which is sort of a Rozol product.

Always read the label, it'll tell you whether pack rats are listed, and then follow the label on that.

- So Stephen, you have a show and tell in front of us, this is bait that you brought.

- I do, so.

- [Tim] And this is not for pack rats though?

- Well no, not necessarily, but it's just the principle, I want you to focus on formulation 'cause we're getting the cooler season, that means the mice are looking to get into your home.

So those of you that are using rodenticides, basically Rodenticides come in two flavors, a block or soft.

So soft has oil in it, and it's very palatable for rodents.

The downside is, is that it doesn't last as long.

So if you're dealing with a cabin that you're not gonna be frequenting often, then you may want to go with a block bait.

Block bait, of course, it has all these edges allows rodents to chew on it.

These are, it can be the same active ingredient, just a different formulation or a different packaging of the rodenticide.

So if you were able to use, if you're able to check your bait stations frequently, soft bait is really dynamite stuff, otherwise go with the block bait.

If you're dealing with areas of high moisture, or if you want to take it up a notch, use both, 'cause you know we all like variety, well rodents like variety too.

So give them a little hard and a little soft, and that way, you can see which one they like best.

- Well yeah, they may not be able to tell you which one they will favor.

- [Stephen] They will, because you'll see one get eaten, and one maybe eaten less.

So they'll tell you.

- Great.

Okay, Abi, we have another question about, okay, let's ask.

So we have a caller from Anaconda, says the new growth on his raspberries is 10 feet high.

- Wow.

- That's impressive.

- [Abi] That is impressive.

- Should he trim them to four to six feet when the plants go dormant?

- So I would recommend that a lot of times if you have just a lot of vegetation that's kind of crowding, it can cause more fungal issues in plants too.

So it depends on the type of raspberries.

So if you have like ever bearing raspberries, if you trim it back, you'll still have, you know, fruit.

But I would recommend trimming them back to a more manageable height, so they're not kind of crossing and crowding, and you won't have as many of those pest and disease issues.

- And do you have to wait until they go dormant, or could you trim them right now?

- In general, I like waiting when plants go dormant just because it reduces the likelihood of introducing any disease issues by, you're making an injury, you're making a cut into those plants.

So in general I like to err on the side of caution, and wait until they're dormant to do that.

- Great, thanks.

So Bruce, we have another, we have a question come in from Havre.

"How might a traditional wheat farmer best respond to changes that we're seeing due to climate change in Montana and over the last few years?"

- Well, I think the, you know, the important thing is that there's no question that we're getting hotter and drier in the summer.

So a lot of that is adjusting your cropping system to accommodate that.

And we've seen generally a shift toward winter wheat has been more successful.

And so because it's not maturing or not filling its seed in that really hot period, that's now starting to creep into June where it used to be in July.

So that's a very important piece.

(speaker murmuring) The other thing is, as Susan would indicate, is leave that, keep some mulch on that field, keep as much of that litter on the field as you can, that organic matter will help protect that soil, and maintain it as moist, and maintain moisture actually in that material.

Even some of the coarser material can hang onto that moisture well.

So there's a couple of things like that.

So keeping it covered with a crop, pretty important, even though it might seem like it's so dry that you're not going to get a crop, just keeping it covered is really, really important.

And you know it seems like a lot of people when they get really hot, dry conditions want to default to going fallow, and fallow with a tool even, and that's not preferred at all.

I mean the long-term, there's no long-term advantage in that.

I think Susan would probably agree with that.

- Yeah.

- So anything you want to add to that, Susan, to the?

- Yeah, I would say focus on your crop rotation.

So when we talk about getting more residue into your, you know, on the field, the best way to do that, and probably the least expensive way to do that is to just make sure that you're growing a high residue crop at least half of the time.

So what do I mean when I say high residue crop?

That would be a small grain, that would be corn that you've harvested for grain, usually a grass that you've harvested for grain is what we're gonna say is a high residue crop, anything that has high carbon in it.

And then make sure that you're not growing too low residue crops back to back, for example, pea and lentil, we are not gonna do pea and lentil obviously for disease reasons, and also make sure that you're not growing, even though we're not recommending fallow, some people are still using fallow, that you wouldn't be growing a low residue crop, then following it with fallow, because that just leaves very little residue on the soil surface, and so not only does that residue protect against erosion, it acts as a mulch that helps to trap soil moisture in the ground, and reduce evaporative soil moisture loss, so as we get hotter and drier, we need more residue on the soil surface.

And NRCS would recommend 60%.

You know, back in the day, in the '80s, we would say 30%, we've changed that now.

And I would say you should really strive to maintain 60% cover on the soil if you can.

- So how does having high residue, leaving high residue, does that affect wheat stem sawfly in the field?

Does that promote, or does that affect that dynamic that we have in Montana?

I worked with some students and producers, and we looked at, you know, where the wheat stem sawfly was over wintering and living, and does that make a difference in how high you cut that stubble?

Do some people want to cut it lower, because they can cut that wheat stem sawfly off, or anything like that?

- I'm glad you asked, and I really wish David Weaver were here right now, because I've had a lot of conversations with him.

But actually keeping that tall stubble is actually better for wheat stem sawfly control, because it's the tall stubble where the parasitoid, the natural predators live.

And so a lot of guys right now are cutting really low at that four to six inches, and that really doesn't leave any of the habitat for the parasitoids.

So in talking with Dr. Weaver, he would say that many of the things that we recommend for wind erosion control and for soil health are the same exact principles that he would recommend for helping to control wheat stem sawfly.

So he's a big fan of stripper header use as well.

- Oh great, yeah, that's interesting.

Good, good.

Okay, Abi, we have another question for you here.

And this is a caller from Joliet, and they said their cotoneaster hedge was attacked by small slugs this summer.

They ate the leaves leaving only the skeleton of the leaf.

Will the hedge survive, and how can they prevent this next year?

- Yeah, that's a good question, and when they mention slugs, I'm wondering if it might be sawfly larvae that they were seeing.

So because sawfly larvae are really, you know, well-known skeletonizers of leaves, and they'll go in to plants in the rose family, rose slug sawfly specifically will kind of really defoliate a tree, but if you have just general garden slugs, I haven't seen damage to that scale.

But in general a few things to kind of do to keep an eye on, so maybe take care of this plant a little bit more starting next spring.

If you have one kind of period of defoliation, especially if it's late in the season, usually the energy reserves in those plants are enough to get it through, and it will leaf out again the following spring.

But in terms of the type of slug, I don't wanna make a recommendation without knowing what it is.

So if they wouldn't mind if they have taken pictures, or if they wouldn't mind giving me a call, or sending me an email to talk more about it, maybe we can narrow down what that exact pest was before I make a recommendation on it.

- Great, and Abi's phone number is up on the screen right now.

Let's move on to our, so I have another question.

Caller dug up some wild roses that's probably Rosa Woodsii, most common Wood's rose, most common in Montana, and transplanted them to their garden.

They are now getting scraggly.

Should he trim them back, or let them continue growing?

- That's a good question.

So they were transplanted this year.

- They were transplanted two years ago.

- Okay, two years ago, and they're starting to get scraggly.

Kind of for rejuvenating, it might be a good idea to trim them back, and kind of see if they become that shrubby kind of growth habit again.

But I would say yeah, it wouldn't hurt to trim them back to kind of encourage more growth.

Usually when plants are getting spindly, or leggy, and things like that, and you don't have very much kind of foliage filling in, if you prune them back a little bit, that encourages more of that green leafy growth, and more kind of branching, and so that would help fill them out a little bit more.

So it wouldn't hurt to do that.

- Yeah, And I think Wood's rose is also rhizomatous, so I bet if you trimmed them off, you could get some more shoots- - Exactly.

- To come up out of the ground and then you might get some better spread.

- Absolutely, and it's a really great pollinator plant as well, so yeah, it's one of my favorites.

- Wood's Rose evolved with with a lot of browsing, so that's- - Yeah, it does really well.

- We're just helping it out.

- Yep, I think so too.

- That's the pink one, right?

- Uh-huh.

- Okay.

- It can go pink.

Yeah, pink to white.

Yeah, there's really very- - You can see them this tall in Rangeland.

- Yeah, sometimes it'll be this tall, and sometimes it'll be two to three feet tall.

- Yeah, they're beautiful, okay.

- Yep, if any of my students are watching in class, we talked about phenotypic plasticity this week, and that is the ability of a plant to grow larger and smaller, you know, given conditions, moisture availability, and things like that, and Wood's rose is one that can really do that.

- Phenotypic plasticity, very nice.

- That's like a trivia answer right there.

- That's a good trivia answer.

- That's a good trivia answer.

- Phenotypic plasticity.

- Stephen, we had a caller from Kalispell, who asked if they would, you could quickly repeat their recipe for cleaning a dog that's been skunked.

- Sure, so it's one quart of hydrogen peroxide, one cup of baking soda, one tablespoon of liquid dish detergent.

Dawn is recommended for its grease-cutting capabilities.

Mix it fresh, never store it, because it'll have pressure, and it can cause a little cracking of glass or whatever.

So just package everything in a bucket, mix it fresh when you need to use it, and keep it out of the eyes and mouth.

And remember it's hydrogen peroxide, so if you do this on clothes, it will bleach clothes, or hair, but it'll, you know that hair is not a big of a problem.

- So Abi, in the spring part, in the spring season of "Montana Ag Live," I asked you about controlling codling moth on my apple trees at home, and you told me to wrap the trees, and I think it did help, but it didn't get them perfectly clean, but this is still an awesome apple, but if we want to come in and focus on the apple right here, we can see what we have on the inside.

- Yeah, so you see kind of the little galleries of the larvae and the frass in there, the coddling moth larvae feed on the seeds of those apples.

And this time of year, I was glad that you brought this sample in.

This time of year is a good time to kind of add more to the cultural control.

So other than that wrapping, you can do another season of wrapping.

Sometimes they have two to three generations, so you're catching the stragglers again.

But also as your apples drop to the ground, clean up all that debris again, like sanitation is a really good strategy.

So if you keep doing this, and keep catching those pupating larvae, and removing any debris that they can then attach to, and pupate on, that's gonna reduce their populations over time.

And then if this, if all of your apples are infested, and you really kind of wanna prevent that next year, I would contact your County Extension Office in the spring, and they can tell you based on the growing degree day model when the timing of spraying for those would be.

- Okay thanks, but it's still a delicious apple anyway- - It is.

- Even with codling moth into the middle.

- Yes, exactly.

- And luckily they're eating out the core, so we've had some nice apple cakes- - Exactly.

- Apple sauce, apple, apple, everything.

- And extra protein.

- And extra protein.

- Extra protein (laughs)?

- If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em.

That's what we say for weed management, right?

And it actually, there there are possibilities.

Stephen, we have another question for you, and I'm interested in this answer.

And these people have a pigeon problem, and the pigeons are becoming too numerous, and they really don't wanna kill them, and they're not Perry Miller, so they're not out trying to get 'em out of the field with a shotgun.

(Susan laughing) Do I have any other options?

- Sure, other than exclusion, things like netting, spikes, electric shock.

Then the other option is that there's a product called OvoControl P, which is birth control for pigeons.

And so it takes a while for, obviously, 'cause you're just stopping recruitment, but that is another option for you that you simply, you feed it to them, you only do it during the period of time when they're actually gonna be having mating, and having young, so for Montana, that's probably sometime between March to probably October, and you basically just feed it to 'em, and it's like The Pill for pigeons, so they don't reproduce, and over time the population will decline if you don't wanna wanna do exclusion, but exclusion would be number one.

But if you don't wanna do exclusion, and then you can go into OvoControl P. - So if I have a big pole barn, and I'm storing hay in it, and I have a bunch of pigeons in the top, I can use that solution to try to reduce the pigeon pressure out of my pole barn.

- Yeah, it would be, it would take time, so the fastest I've heard it reducing is 50% a year.

So you're gonna have to be patient, 'cause pigeons can last a while.

I would suggest other means of eliminating your pigeon problem, but if you didn't want to kill them, then we've obviously limited some of our options there.

So I would do exclusion for the barn, you know, drive them out, and then sort of close the barn doors so to speak.

But if that's not possible, then I would move into perhaps the OvoControl P. - On the MSU campus, the great horned owls and merlins have done a great job.

- Ah.

- Predation can help.

- Yep, they really.

- Susan, so we had some questions come in, and producers asked a couple of them, they were asking about, so what can they do to prevent wind erosion?

Are there any NRCS programs that they could get involved in or be a part of?

And how might that work for producers across the Golden Triangle?

Most of these questions are from the Golden Triangle.

- Yeah, you bet.

So as far as control goes, you gotta keep residue on your field, and that can be handled through crop rotation.

You gotta disturb less.

So that can be handled with no-till, and then cutting a lot higher.

And then also decreasing your field size.

And I don't want people to think that I'm saying we have to go back to 20 strips per section, but certainly if we had two or four fields per section, that would be a lot better, with alternating high and low residue crops, that's a lot better than having one large section.

So all those things, no-till strip cropping, and again, it doesn't have to be narrow strips, and then crop rotation, and then harvest management, all those things are NRCS Conservation Practices, meaning that we have a standard, and specification, and job sheet if a producer comes in, and is interested in that, that we could get them signed up for that.

However, in Montana, our EQIP funding is based on local working group priorities.

- Could you explain what EQIP is for people who might not be familiar with EQIP?

- Yeah, that's kind of our flagship program where we are essentially helping farmers to implement conservation with some financial assistance.

And how the Montana-focused conservation works is that the local working group gets together, and that's usually the conservation district, and other interested members in the community, and they set the top priorities for the county, or the conservation district, and then from there we will allocate EQIP funding.

So for some counties they have decided that, for example, spraying noxious weeds on Rangeland is their top priority.

Other counties have decided that, you know, solving wind erosion and cropland is their top priority, and so that's where their EQIP funding is going.

So I don't wanna imply that every county has funding for this.

However, I'd really let, currently, maybe I should say currently, I would like to encourage folks who believe this to be an issue to get involved with your local working group, and then you can help set that priority for the next round of EQIP funding.

And if there are other producers in the same county who also have this concern, that can set the priority for the funding that is received in your county.

- I noticed there was no, are wind breaks no longer a thing anymore?

- They are a thing, a lot of people have taken them out, but that would be another type of practice that we also have.

We have a whole suite of practices like you can even put in grass strips, you know, other things that can be used.

But those were just kind of the top ones that I listed off that were probably, people would be more likely to adopt.

Crop rotation being the first one, because that's something you don't have to go buy new equipment, you don't have to reconfigure your field necessarily, but I think a lot could be done in this regard if we looked at our crop rotations.

- Has anyone gone an- - Certainly windbreaks are a great idea though, and unfortunately with the increase in you know, larger equipment, and it makes it difficult, and they've gotten taken out that way.

I think we're not far from seeing programs that will encourage them again for all the positive parts to those windbreaks, wind erosion being one of them, but another biggie is it's one of the best ways to infuse carbon back into the soil, into the system, because you put woody material in into these windbreaks, and that makes a big difference, and so if we start paying people for capturing carbon, that'd be a great way to do it.

- You do notice when you cross the border north of Opheim, Whitewater, and you go into Southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, you see a lot more windbreaks on that side of the border than you do on the US side of the border interestingly enough.

- And I believe for folks who are interested, our state forester, Celie Meier, was on a couple months ago, and I think she talked about shelter belts and wind break when she was on.

So that's kind of where our forestry practices, and our agronomy practices overlap.

- Thanks, Stephen, we have a caller.

They want to know how they can prevent vole damage this year.

What should they do to prep for winter?

- Okay, so I'm assuming it's a residential lawn area, so you want to control now.

So that would be, look at your property and remove, you wanna make sure your tall grass is reduced, so that would be nothing taller than four inches.

And I would do either trapping or rodenticides now.

So you can look at your residential labeled products.

These are things that's usually used for a house mice and rats.

If you look at the label, a lot of them will have voles on it.

You can put your bait stations within a hundred feet of your house, or a structure and control voles now before the winter, and then you don't have the grass damage over the winter for next spring.

I have a publication on voles.

Now we'll have more information there as well from our website, Montana Department of Ag.

- Great, okay, we have a couple other questions that are coming in here.

So we have a caller from Helena, has an infestation of thousands of small translucent bug-like creatures.

What are they?

The internet suggested they might be white ash flies.

Ash white flies.

(all laughing) - [Susan] Careful, careful Tim.

- Yep, they sort of, Perry Miller actually, we can ask him.

They sort of look like a flying aphid.

And I think I did see these recently, and they came out after the dew was over, and they were there for a couple hours, and then the humidity dropped, and they disappeared.

This was in Kalispell.

- So with a description like that, it's difficult to kind of narrow it down.

There are a few critters that I'm thinking of in my head that could, that resemble translucent-like bugs that are whitish that there are tons of, but white flies are an example of those.

Aphids have wings, so the wing generation of aphids, they could be flying aphids, but I'm hoping that they might have a couple, if they saw them, if they collected them, it would be good to get a sample to take a look.

So if they could send a sample to their County Extension Office, or if they have pictures of this, if they could send them to me, I could narrow down exactly what it is.

- And you can submit photos to the Schutter Diagnostic Lab at MSU.

- Exactly.

- And we can identify those for you.

- Absolutely.

- Practice your macro shots.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- It's always kind of tough sometimes.

Okay, we have another caller from Anaconda who transplanted a wild raspberry from the forest five years ago.

It grew a little fruit earlier this summer, went dormant, and is now starting to grow small berries in the late season.

Any idea why the plant has developed fruits so late?

- It's hard to say.

I mean, if you have kind of a delayed season, so my raspberries produced later this year than they did last year, and they kind of had a delayed start this spring too, ,ut part of it was because the deer did a really good job of pruning my entire raspberry patch.

So the little flora canes that popped up, there were just a few of those left, and they produced a little later in the year.

But sometimes when plants are stressed, or if there are nutrient issues, there can be delays in fruiting, and flowering, and things like that, so it's possible.

A few things to kind of keep in mind, if they've had problems with this in the past, contact your County Extension agent to see if you can maybe send a sample of that plant or consider if they haven't had a soil test to kind of look into the fertility of the soil.

If there are fertility issues that can also cause delays.

- [Tim] Yeah, I wonder how much a wild raspberry out of the forest would actually respond to fertility too.

- Exactly.

- I think it would be- - That's true.

- They're kind of keyed in to being long-term survivors, and they may not want to make a lot of fruit.

They may just want- - Exactly.

- To make make it till the next season.

Yeah, it's always tough with some of the wild relatives.

So let's see, we have a search through here.

Make sure we go back and get all of these.

We have a caller from Missoula, who would like to know if this is a good time of year to transplant rhubarb.

- Yeah, you can transplant rhubarb now, rhubarb is really great.

Spring is my favorite time to transplant rhubarb, because by then, I'm itching to do something in the garden after a long winter.

But you can definitely transplant rhubarb now as well.

Rhubarb is a pretty forgiving plant here in Montana.

And so yeah, you can definitely do that now.

- So when you want to cut a piece off, how big of a piece do you need?

- Yeah, so you want like three nodes usually of that, and you wanna make sure you get into that root system, and get a good chunk of that.

But you want kind of three buds in there per kind of section that you section it off.

Good question.

- So Stephen, we've been talking a little bit about climate change.

Things are getting a little warmer and drier, and I'm gonna put you on the spot.

Do ground squirrels become more active earlier in the spring or stay active later when we have a later spring, or a later fall?

Do they stay more active, or what cues them to go into hibernation?

- Yeah, so great question.

I wish I knew the answer to that.

So it certainly makes sense that if it warms up sooner, they'll come out of hibernation sooner.

And if it stays warmer longer, they may delay, but I've heard stories, reports from people, who've seen ground squirrels come out in December.

So they'll be going into hibernation, and then maybe we'll have a warm spell, and they're popping up through the snow, or through the, or from the ground.

So I don't have good data on that.

So I would just say as animals always break the rules, so when we talk about what animals do normally, we just talk about what the normal group does.

There's always those outliers and situations can be different.

But it would certainly make sense that it would be a little longer.

But I think once they hit enough fat where they think they're fat enough to make it through the winter, I think they're kind of going down, and also cooler temperatures will probably trigger that as well.

- Okay, thanks.

Susan, we have another, we have one more question, and they're asking about, they have a field that's pretty undulating and rolling, and they have some knobs and hilltops on there, and they always thought that they had, that it was water erosion bringing it down.

But is that, they wanted to know, is it wind, water erosion?

What happens to our hilltops, and tops of our hills, to the soil there?

And how does that affect crop production, and what, other than tall stubble, what could they maybe do to think about managing those areas?

- Yeah, great question.

So the top of a knoll, especially on the windward side, gets more erosion than any other part of the field.

And that's because the wind pressure, or the wind becomes compressed as it moves over the top of that.

And so there's just more energy that's driving across that.

So here in the Gallatin Valley, we have a lot of undulating hills, and you'll see there's a lot of, the soil is lighter on the tops of those hills, or it's sometimes even white, and that's why, because those knolls have been eroded more than the rest of the field.

So obviously residue and vegetation, you know, maybe in some situations like that on very hilly ground, or on ground that is very sandy, because sandier soils are more prone to wind erosion.

Sometimes, if you've tried everything that you can, and it's still an issue, you might wanna consider just permanent vegetation.

- So putting it in perennial vegetation, putting grass in something like that.

- Yeah, it's not always possible, but for some people it can't be a solution.

- All right, thanks.

Let's see what we else we have on the, so we have another question for Bruce, and well this came in, we can all answer it.

This is for the Bozeman area.

Has this summer been wetter than normal?

- Yes, it's been wetter than normal.

Normal being the last 30-year average, but it's not the wettest, it was about the fourth wettest I think.

This month, you mean, did you say?

- [Tim] No, they were asking about the summer in general.

- Oh, summer in general.

If you take actually the three-month period, I don't think Bozeman was as wet.

In fact, I think it was, I think we've had plenty of other years where it was wetter, but it sure seemed like that because we've got, most recent years have been much more dry in our summer.

So I think we got used to that, and so it seemed like quite a wet summer.

But yeah, if you take the June-July-August period as the summer, then it's not as different as you would think.

I think it was above that average though for the last 30 years for sure.

- Yeah, it wasn't like that across most of the state.

And you know, I always view, my judge on the wet summer is did the C4 grasses grow in the Gallatin Valley, and the C4 grasses are the warm season grasses, corn being one of them, millet, sorghum-sudan.

And usually we try to be fancy in our experimentation sometimes, and we try to follow something with a warm season grass, and usually it's too hot and dry to ever get them to germinate, and that's the reason why our Native Rangelands are mostly C3 grasses.

And so whenever I see a C4 grass, I chalk and it grows in dry land situations in Montana, I'll call that a wet summer.

That's my judge for, and so Perry Miller's sweet corn down at the Post Farm actually right now looks really pretty good.

And he actually has sorghum that's growing tall enough to harvest as well.

So those are two kind of new crops we don't think about.

But when you have, we have warmer summers, and you can actually put water to it.

We can grow corn in some situations.

- That's true with some broadleaf species as well, the weeds.

Well, you'll see a shift towards pigweed, a C4 species in the hotter, drier, early summers, versus in a wetter cooler, it'll be lambsquarter, even in the same place.

It's amazing how those two species co-occur, but can be, they're dominant switches given the different kind of years.

- Yep, and I'm glad you came back to pigweeds, because on the show, I've talked multiple times about palmer amaranth, and actually for the first time, we found palmer amaranth growing in a crop field just recently in Daniels County.

It came in via contaminated millet seed, and that's the biggest vector into the state.

But that's a pigweed, but it's one of these diutius pigweeds that's evolved herbicide resistance to many, many, many modes of action of herbicides.

You go down and you talk about species, these genotypes that are six, seven-way resistant to herbicides.

So we run out of options.

So we're really on the early detection rapid response in Montana now trying to make sure they don't establish, but when we went to the pigweeds, they actually hadn't made seed yet.

They were just now flowering in late August.

So you see 'em flowering in that warm season crops.

So if you guys are out there, go look for your millet seeds, and make sure you, or go look in your millet fields, and make sure you don't have any palmer amaranth in there, and if you do contact your county agent, and it'll make its way to the Schutter Diagnostic Lab.

The other incidents of palmer amaranth found in the state actually came from contaminated bird feed, and someone put a photo, a very smart person in Shelby, put the photo up on iNaturalist.

iNaturalist is a webpage, and they put it up, and they want it, they suggested the ID was palmer amaranth, and we backed it up, and that was the first instance.

It was one lonely male plant in Shelby growing in someone's right next to their bird feeder.

- Wow.

- Wow.

- Yeah, so that was the second incidence of it.

So quickly, and the last time that we have left, Abi, I brought this lovely zucchini leaf out of my garden, and it's what a lot of the plants look like in the Gallatin Valley right now.

So maybe you could tell us about it.

- Yeah, so I'm glad that your garden is an experiment for lots of samples for us, but this is powdery mildew, and it's a pretty common issue, especially as we were talking about the cool wet kind of season that we're seeing right now.

This is a host-specific fungus, so the one that's gonna affect your zucchini is not the same one that's going to be affecting your lilacs and and so on and so forth.

But a lot of times, this fungus thrives in the high-moisture environment.

So making sure that you are reducing overhead irrigation, thinning out plants that might be overcrowded to increase circulation can help kind of reduce this issue.

You can also plant resistant varieties, and yeah, that's a good way to reduce the problem.

- Great, yep.

So yeah, my zucchini, that's good to know.

I have it on my lilacs and zucchinis too.

- [Abi] And they're different ones.

- So it's two different species.

- Yes.

- Great.

So thank you everyone for joining us tonight on "Montana Ag Live."

If we did not get to your question tonight, we will be happy to answer that question next week, and fill in those questions this week on Facebook, send them in, and we'll answer 'em next week.

Have a good summer week, or last fall week, and enjoy that.

Do some good gardening, and thanks again, goodnight.

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