- [Narrator] Montana Ag Live is made possible by.

The Montana Department of Agriculture, MSU Extension, the MSU Ag Experiment Stations of the College of Agriculture, the Montana Wheat & Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery & Landscaping, the Northern Pulse Growers Association, and the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

(country music) - Good evening.

Welcome to another new edition of Montana Ag Live, originating again tonight from the studios of KUSM on the very exciting campus we call Montana State University and coming to you over your Montana Public Television System.

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

Happy to be your host again this evening.

We're gonna cover something tonight we, you've heard a lot about over the past couple years called soil health.

We'll get into that a little bit.

But I wanna say a couple other things.

What a difference a week makes.

Last Tuesday, I mowed my yard.

Wednesday, I was plowing six inches of snow.

That's typical of Montana.

And the other thing for those of you who are interested, next weekend is Ag Appreciation Weekend here at Montana State University.

So if you're interested in participating in the Ag Appreciation Week and you can go online, look up "MSU College of Ag Ag Appreciation Weekend" and we'll give you a little bit of a litany of what you can expect next week.

With that, I'm gonna cut it short and go over to Joel Schumacher.

Joel is one of our panel members tonight, Extension Economist.

Everybody is always asking questions about economics.

Here's a chance tonight to do that and Joel is very good at finding answers.

In fact, I'll say something about economists.

He's one of the shortest speakers for an economist.

Most economists kind of do this.

(group laughs) Joel answers it succinctly and that's a hard word for me to say.

Our guest tonight, Marni Thompson.

Marni comes down from Gray, or from Fort Benton, one of my favorite cities in the state.

Marni is with the NRCS, National Resource Conservation Service.

She is our soil health specialist here for the state of Montana.

Tim Seipel, he likes to be called a weed ecologist, but I don't go for that.

I go for a weed scientist.

And of course Abi.

Abi is our Extension Horticulturalist.

Answering the phone tonight.

Nancy Blake here in the studio, and I believe Bruce Lobel is doing it remotely.

So with that, Marni, I wanna find out a little bit about what you do in a most beautiful setting up around Fort Benton.

- Well, I'm the NRCS'S State Soil Health Specialist, so I get to go out in the field, work with farmers and ranchers all over the state of Montana.

I do a lot of education and outreach, just planning soil health systems on farmers' and ranchers' places.

- Okay, before we go any farther, I need a definition 'cause I'm a little slow and you know, you, no comments, guys.

(group laughs) But what is soil health?

Give me a nice definition of what that comprises.

- Well, so I am not gonna be short like.

(group laughs) Like Joel here to answer that question.

It's, it really is farming and ranching in sync with nature.

So if you think about a long time ago when Lewis and Clark came and what the prairie looked like, and there's five principles that we can see on native range land that we try to follow in farming and ranching to improve soil health.

And it really all starts with a plant.

A plant takes energy from the sun, converts it into a sugar, and that sugar comes through the roots and it feeds the biology in the soil.

And so it's really about creating that environment for the soil biology.

And so there's five things.

One, keep the soil covered.

Nature doesn't like it bare, and it'll put a weed there if it's bare.

Number two, having a living plant in the soil at all times because it's feeding the biology and then the biology feeds the plants nutrients.

Having diversity, if you think about when Lewis and Clark came, there, they noted over 250 species.

And so all those different species had different root systems and they all fed the different biology, so it created more diversity in biology.

And no chemical or physical disturbance.

If you think about the native prairie, there was no plows disturbing the soil because that is really hard on the biology, to have that disturbance.

And then integrating livestock.

If we think about the native prairie, there was lots of livestock that were grazing out there.

So, the five soil health principles, if you can do those to the extent that you can in Montana on farms and ranches, over time we can improve soil health.

- Okay, better understood.

From Plains, a question for Tim.

How do you manage sheep sorrel?

What is sheep sorrel?

- Sheep sorrel, it's a Rumex.

It's like, it's a dock-like plant.

It's Rumex acetosella is the scientific name and it's like dock.

And actually we get a lot of questions that come out of Plains, Thompson Falls, Superior, people asking about sheep sorrel.

And it really likes it out there because the soils are super acidic.

We don't see it very much in the Gallatin Valley or in other parts in our hay pastures, but it really likes acidic soil.

So, I've had a lot of people ask me about managing it in hay pastures.

It usually comes on after you mow it off, your first cut of hay, and you take the hay off and there, it's rhizominous, so it's interconnected root system and then it'll come up and grow.

You can apply dicamba, clopyralid, kind of the standard range herbicides.

That should take care of it fairly well.

But I was wondering about doing a small experiment, if anybody out there is interested, and that would be liming or raising the pH of that soil a little bit if you could, because then you would probably have less sheep sorrel and more grass growth, so.

- Oh, okay, on that note, and Marni just mentioned that a little less soil disturbance and is better for soil health, but with that less soil disturbance, aren't there areas of state where we used to have higher pHs and because of less soil disturbance, now we have acidic soils and they're dropping rather rapidly?

Is that good soil health or not?

- Well, I think it's a combination of several things.

High rates of nitrogen fertilizer.

- [Jack Riesselman] Right.

- Have created acidic soils along with our cropping rotations.

I feel like because we weren't cycling the calcium carbonate in the soil back to the surface with our cropping rotations and fallowing, and so that calcium carbonate goes down in the soil and then the high rates of nitrogen fertilizer kind of create a perfect storm of that low pH.

And you're seeing it all over the state of Montana.

- Yeah, it's dropped pretty dramatically in a.

- Yes.

- In a short period of time is what fascinates me because I think (indistinct) has mentioned that something that was 7.2, 7.5 can be low as 5.5 in a 10-year period of time, I believe.

That's pretty amazing.

Question for Abi.

This person sprayed their lawn, from Bozeman, for broad leaves about a week ago, just before the snow.

Is that gonna work?

(group laughs) - I dunno, yeah.

- I think it will.

- I.

- It maybe depends a little bit.

We actually did an experiment, a demo experiment this year with spraying Canada thistle when we were trying to save lots of birdsfoot trefoil, vetch, things like that.

And we sprayed the thistle and when you had 2,4-D and glyphosate combined, it wiped the thistle out in a week.

And then you went a, and after that week you couldn't even tell the thistle had been sprayed where it was glyphosate only.

So did the translocation happen that we'd hoped before it got too cold?

Probably, and it'll get the clover and depends on what they used, maybe the dandelions and the clover.

The dandelions and clover are still doing biology and chemistry in the soil right now because the ground is not frozen.

- Mm-hmm.

- At least not in Bozeman.

- Mm-hmm.

- So a question I have, so if in agriculture or in lawn situations when you use a herbicide like 2,4-D or Banvel, which is dicamba or whatever the case may be, does that affect the soil health?

- I think it all has impacts to it, right?

Because it's not natural to have some of that there.

Now, to what impact?

I don't know but I think, you know, it all has side effects.

- And I mean, there's research that's showing that some of these herbicides have negative effects on pollinators too.

- Mm-hmm.

- And so we have some ground nesting.

We, most bee species are ground nesting.

And so the, these negative effects are things that we're starting to notice now beyond just insecticides, yeah.

- Okay, makes sense.

A question from Great Falls, and this is for Joel.

They've heard about precision ag and how precision ag is going to revolutionize agriculture.

Explain that, do you think it will?

- Yeah, well definitely precision ag is gonna come in and it's really a data-driven ag.

And I think where we're kind of at right now is you know, we're starting to gather all this data, but how can we usefully put that back into management decisions that pay off for our producers?

So whether that's understanding that a field could use less fertilizer in this area and more in another, if you have a fertilizer application that can take that data you have and then make that variable application as good, or the same for spraying of weeds, if you can target specific weeds or specific sections, but I think the rub right now is there's all kinds of data being put out there and whether that's drone data, whether it's yield data, whether it's soil sample data or satellite data, but then how do we get that into an actual management decision that's happening right now?

And I think that's where there's a lot of interesting things.

Some aren't gonna pan out and others are probably gonna be commonplace in 10 or 15 years.

- [Jack Riesselman] The change from.

- Yeah, for weeds, weeds, it's a little bit complicated and it depends on the price of the herbicide and things like that that you have in the field because you also have to pay a data fee to a lot of these companies and providers who are helping you recognize the weeds in the field and that comes with a charge and can actually make broadcast spraying more economical when you have certain, so I think a lot of that's gonna go through a process of changing a lot over the next five to 10 years and, of where all these, who's gonna charge what for what and it's gonna make a big difference, I think.

- I'm sure glad I retired when I did.

(group laughs) Because I can't keep up with all the changes.

- Yeah.

- Question from Conrad, for Marni.

This person has seen a lot of advertisement for various different bile additives to be put on the soil to improve the soil health.

He doesn't see a lot of data that makes it sense and he says they're expensive.

Your opinion, are they working?

- Well, I think there's a lot of them out there and you know what's in them to varying degrees, I think you have to be careful.

I come back to the whole idea of improving your soil health is to decrease inputs.

And that means even the biological ones, because nature does it on its own, right?

It didn't have any of those types of products.

And I think if we do it right and we install all the soil health principles, that we don't need to have that.

Now, does it jumpstart the system?

Maybe a little bit.

It maybe could, but I think it depends on where those things are stored also.

I mean, if it's living biology and you store it in your barn when it's 90 degrees, how do you think it's gonna do?

So I think there's just a lot of unknowns about some of that stuff.

- You know, I, when I was in graduate school, which is many, many years ago, there were a lot of bio-additives that and most of 'em were sold with testimonial data and not university-sponsored data.

And I've always said that if you're going to spend your money on something, look at the research and make sure it's working.

And most of the time, university-sponsored research, and I'm not patting university on the shoulders, but it's a lot more viable than testimonial type of data.

Abi, I know we've talked about apples and this year there's been a lot of deformed apples on trees and we talked about that a couple of weeks ago.

I think you brought in a photo that shows some of this deformity.

You want to explain why that's happening?

- Yeah, so we have seen this, you can see it periodically, anytime, you might have seen it maybe as deformed fruit.

In this case, there's a photo of an apple with a deformed stem that you see up there.

But this is a phenomena that's called fasciation and it's basically an abnormal growth in the apical meristem, which is just the growing tip of plants.

And what happens is it could be hormones, it could be genetics, it could be pathogens like viruses and bacteria that can make this happen.

But it results in this abnormal growth.

And so you may see it as misshapen stems, misshapen fruit, things like that.

But it's perfectly, it doesn't impact the long-term health of your plants at all.

It doesn't really have any kind of long-lasting, you know, impacts usually, unless it's a specific kind of pathogenic fasciation, which isn't as common.

But this is a really interesting thing.

So if you are interested, we, I wrote a blog about it on the Garden Professors blog, it's called gardenprofessors.com.

And so it's talking about what this is because we have seen quite a bit of it this year.

I've gotten a few questions.

- Okay, and I'm gonna put a plug in for Montana apples this year.

With the long fall, we've had.

- Mm-hmm.

- Man, are they good?

They are really tasty.

And even the apple cider, not hard apple cider but just regular apple cider this year is going to be exceptional.

Great apple year.

From Great Falls, good question.

Our caller asks if lifestyle grazing and ranching stewardship are beneficial for soil health.

And we went over that a little bit with Dave Mannix last week.

You wanna touch on that a little bit?

- I think there's a lot of opportunity because of the same soil health principles, you know, having cover, having diversity of plants.

And so I think there's a lot of guys around the state that are doing some high stock density grazing where they, you know, some guys are doing it where they're moving every couple hours.

Now that's, you know, to one extreme, but moving every day.

And they are seeing drastic improvements in soil cover, production, diversity of species.

And you know, the guys that are doing it, moving every hour, they're not doing it, you know, year-long.

They're like doing special treatments to improve crested wheatgrass stands or old pasture stands.

So all of that helps the soil because it allows the plants to recover 'cause you're only grazing it an hour or one day and then it gets, you know, 364 days of rest.

And that's where you get the real impact because the roots are going deep in the soil and they're feeding the biology and then the biology feed those plants, so there's this great cycle that goes on.

- What I've seen has been pretty impressive.

- Mm-hmm.

- On some of the well-managed ranches around the state.

And there's a lot more well-managed ranches.

- [Joel Schumacher] So does this also come with a lot more fencing then, if you're moving them bit by bit, every day?

- So that's always the question.

But I think there's a lot of cool tools.

They have the Vence fencing, so that's like the, where the, they use the collars and they have a satellite.

And then a lot of guys use the cheaper version, which is just a little bit of polywire electric fence.

- Mm-hmm.

- And you can, you know, there's lots of cool things that, you know, you can put a lot of wire on a roll and lots of different types of posts and they've come a long ways with electric fence.

And I think the guys get used to it and it's just part of what they do 'cause they see the results and what it's given them on the land.

- Yeah, I've been impressed with it.

Interesting caller, and we assume a lot here and I apologize for that, but this Billings caller asked that pH values be explained, and that's a very valid question.

So Tim, you want to talk about pH?

- Yeah, pH is really, so pH is the measure of acidity or how basic something is, right?

Grandma's lye soap is very basic and lemon juice or acid is very acidic.

And so when we talk about pH it's really, we won't do the math too much, but it's really the ratio of the number of hydrogen ions to the number of OH or OH groups that go along, so an oxygen and a hydrogen.

And what happens in soil acidification is we put the, we put urea onto the soil, that urea has extra hydrogens when it becomes nitrate and is used by the plant.

And that extra hydrogen left over makes the soil more acidic.

So basic is seven, that's pure water.

And then grandma's lye soap is somewhere in the 12, 13, 14 range, and the Coca-Cola or lemon juice is in the 2, 3, 4 range.

And so we have some soils in Montana that have been down into 4, 4.5, 5 in terms of pH, which changes the chemistry so much that things become toxic, like aluminum or other metals in the soil.

- Yeah.

That's a pretty good explanation.

- Thank you.

- Yeah.

You can teach soil someday.

(group laughs) - [Marni Thompson] That's a tough one too.

- Yeah.

- Joel, from Glendive, this is, and we'll get into cover crops a little bit because I know Marni works on that, but this person has used cover crops and he's curious, can they get crop insurance on cover crops?

That's a good question, I have no clue.

- I don't think so.

- [Marni Thompson] I don't think so either.

- Okay, so the answer is probably no, but if we found out differently, we'll let you know that next week.

- Right.

- Grass Range, caller is trying to eliminate crested wheatgrass in his pasture by farming small grains and covering crops, cover crops using conventional and no-till.

He aims to eventually put the pasture back into diverse pasture mix.

Does anyone know if that approach has worked?

And that's a tough question.

- We've done it a couple times, or through some of our NRCS cost share programs where we've done two years of cover crops, mainly warm season cover crops so the producer has time in the spring to spray because you normally don't plant those warm season cover crops till the end of May, first part of June.

So it allows them to spray that cover crop out and then they graze those cover crops in the fall.

And so we've had a, some good luck in the Billings area doing that for two years, cover crops for two years and then back into a diverse pasture mix.

- [Jack Riesselman] Okay, thank you.

That answers that question.

Abi, from Dillon, this person's carrots had tons of hairy roots.

Did they overwater or underwater or what causes that?

- I mean, I'm not sure exactly what would cause that either.

- [Jack Riesselman] I'm not sure either.

- Yeah, I'm not sure.

- [Jack Riesselman] There is a.

- Could be variety dependent too.

- It could be variety dependent.

Also, there's a disease called, I can't remember the name of it, I should, but it's a plasmodium that causes hairy root.

- Yeah, they can cause the divergence of like the main, yeah.

- Right, yeah, and that's definite possibility.

- [Marni Thompson] I had some in my garden this year.

- Speaking of gardens, when we billed Marni, she practices soil health principles in her garden.

So, she's gonna explain to us how she does that.

And I'm curious too because my garden could use some help.

- [Marni Thompson] Well, it's always how do you plant a garden without rototilling it, right?

And so I don't rototill my garden 'cause that's disturbance that, you know, breaks up the soil biology and you guys can't laugh because how I plant mine is with a pizza cutter.

It's my little disc drill, right?

And so I cut a slit in the soil and then I just put the seeds in there.

You can get like jab planters.

You can order 'em on Amazon to do the bigger seeds.

And then it really is putting a lot of cover.

So once I plant those seeds, I cover it with all mulch from my lawn.

And that's very important because if you don't, I mean that conserves a ton of moisture and then it keeps it moist and then that feeds the biology.

And then wherever I have bare soil, that's where I have the weeds.

And so you're doing several things with the soil cover, and then I move my crops around, add diversity, right?

I never plant the same thing for more than two years in the same spot.

And so I just rotate that around in my garden.

- Okay.

I rototill.

(group laughs) I don't, I have to admit.

- [Marni Thompson] I won't hold that against you.

- Mainly I get good weed control if I rototill in the spring and of course I have some come back in, but it's an interesting concept.

- Marni, I have a follow-up too.

So in terms of soil health, 'cause in gardening, we talk about mulches a lot, but are all mulches kind of similar?

Are all organic mulches similar in terms of improving kind of soil health?

Or what are your thoughts on that?

- That's a good question.

You have to be careful of what mulches you use.

I've had a lot of people that have accidentally used straw that had residual on it from when they had sprayed it.

I think you have to be a little bit careful if you use a lot of wood chips.

That's high carbon.

It doesn't break down as fast.

So, a good mixture of green, like lawn clippings with wood chips, compost.

Big thing is just having the soil covered so that the weeds, you know, don't come in.

- [Jack Riesselman] Question.

- Mm-hmm.

- Warm season crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, some, we're actually growing eggplant successfully in the state anymore.

If you put too much mulch on, won't that cool the soil down and not mature some of those plants?

- I have not seen that problem.

I think that's a valid concern 'cause people have, you know, said that even in crops with no-till.

- [Jack Riesselman] Right.

- But one analogy that somebody talked to me about is if you have more biology in the soil, it's like having a room of crowded people, right?

So what happens when you have that?

You have body temperature and things go up and so that energy creates more heat, actually.

And I don't know if that's true but I haven't seen that issue with warm season crops.

- [Jack Riesselman] Okay.

- I went to Alaska recently for IPM directors meeting and they were doing some hoop high tunnels, high tunnels upon high tunnels in Alaska and they were talking about a Siberian technique, actually, where they buried the compost, then they put the soil on top of it and then planted the plants into it because the compost breaking down below the surface.

- Created heat.

- Made enough heat to actually have the soil be warm enough.

- [Jack Riesselman] Interesting.

- Yeah, I've heard about using that compost base in greenhouses too.

- Mm-hmm, yeah.

- To help add additional heat especially in those really cold climates.

- Do they call that h gelkultur?

- I don't know what it was.

- Oh, okay.

- They just referred to it as the Siberian techniques.

(group laughs) - Okay, moving on to Joel here.

Interesting question 'cause I've noticed this too.

This person from Bozeman wants to buy some hay to feed cattle but he is seeing a tremendous variation in the price of hay.

Why does that occur?

Any clue on that?

- Well I mean, not specific to this year, but obviously quality of hay certainly varies.

You know, whether that's a first cutting alfalfa, whether it's been a later cutting, whether it's been rained on, whether it's a grass mix.

Shipping costs matter a lot with hay, especially if you're doing something other than big, square bales.

Round ship reasonably well but you get into small squares and they're pretty much a local product at that point.

So, those would kind of be the things I would look at.

I don't know if there's something specific about this year, but usually it's just quality and then shipping distance and what type of bale it is in terms of how shippable it is.

- There are several different classes.

- Yeah.

- Of hay, from supreme down to junk hay.

- Yeah.

- Or whatever you want to call it, so I'm sure that's where the price varies somewhat.

- Yeah, and some people certainly even look for some of those lower quality hays or high nitrogen hays to blend off with some other feeds to get a, to get an overall mix.

So, you know, I was talking to a guy from Big Timber that does some feeding and he was actually, you know, looking for some high nitrate hay that he could get cheap to then blend in with some corn and some other things he was using to background some calves, so.

- Okay, thank you.

From Helena, this caller wants to burn off sagebrush.

He's been told he needs to burn it twice to eliminate it.

Is that true?

And we're gonna get into burning because I have some questions there too.

- Well there's, we have nine species of sagebrush in Montana.

The two most common ones are big sagebrush and the other one is silver sage.

And silver sage you find more in the riparian areas in Montana or maybe in a wet coulee or something like that.

And it regrows below, it regrows after fire.

It has shoots that'll come up after fire.

Big sagebrush, it looks like a tree.

It's the single-stocked sagebrush, round, sticks up.

It's really susceptible to fire and one fire should, as long as it's a hot fire, should kill that and take it away, kill the sagebrush straight off.

I mean you might, you know, depending on what kind of burn you get when you're trying to do a prescribed fire like that is always a question but big sagebrush will die after one fire.

- Okay, so are there other methods of getting rid of sagebrush if you really want to?

I like some sagebrush.

- Yeah, I wrote my master's thesis on, partially on sagebrush.

- I should have never asked.

(group laughs) - And yes, I mean you know, they used to, there's actually USDA handbooks from the '50s and the '60s about removing sagebrush from range land, but it also led to a lot of cheatgrass invasion, so be careful about that.

If you're ripping sagebrush out, watch out for cheatgrass invasion.

There are other ways, there's herbicides, there's, you know, mowing, there's, yeah, there's some other techniques out there than other than just burning.

- Okay, thank you.

- Yeah.

- Abi, this person would like to know is it too late, and I think it is, to fertilize grass here in the Gallatin Valley?

- I mean if you're seeing grass right now I'd be impressed but yes, I would say it's too late now.

- Okay, question from your hometown, Fort Benton.

They would like to know is there equipment that people are using to improve soil health?

- So yeah, in our area in the Golden Triangle, a lot of people use a hoe drill.

It's a wider opener on your drill.

And so a lot of people, to minimize the disturbance as one of the soil health principles is to use a disc drill, a single or a double disc drill because that really minimizes this disturbance.

And then a newer type of equipment that we are using is the stripper header, so it is a header that goes on your combine that strips the grain off the top and leaves the whole stem standing there.

And so we can really get a lot of soil cover and retain a lot more moisture, which is very important in the state of Montana.

And guys are really excited about the stripper header.

- There's a lot of 'em in the state now.

- Mm-hmm.

- And what I've been told, I'm not an expert on equipment, far from it, but I think some patents have gone off the stripper headers, so now they're gonna be more readily available at maybe a better price.

Is that true?

- Yeah, so Shelbourne had the patent on that and it just went off.

And I think John Deere and a couple other companies are coming out with some, so that will make a difference.

I'm hoping it'll make a difference.

- It really works.

- [Marni Thompson] Yeah.

- It saves a lot of moisture, there's no doubt about it.

- Yes, and we did some moisture sensoring, tested the soil and you could see that definitely in the spring.

The thing that you gotta, have to be careful with is you can't use a hoe drill and a stripper header.

You have to have the disc drill with a stripper header 'cause you couldn't get through that residue with a hoe drill.

So that's just something for people to know, that you have to have the two, two pieces of equipment in combination.

- Okay, thank you.

Now I have you, this is a, I think a common myth, but correct me if I'm wrong, this person from Dillon would like to know the number of earthworms in the soil an indication of how healthy the soil is?

- It is an indication, yeah.

- So more earthworms, what about nightcrawlers?

I mean, if you've got a yard full of nightcrawlers you must have good soil health, right?

- Yeah, they do a lot of good things and bringing residue from the soil surface down underneath the soil surface for the other microorganisms, they aerate the soil.

Yeah, create holes for water to go in.

So yeah, worms are a great indication of soil health.

- Okay, thank you.

Whitefish caller has a single worm drilling into most of his apples.

And Abi, this is up to you, sliced into an apple, but no worm there.

How to safely treat apples to prevent future worm problems?

So.

- So I'm assuming that the worm that they may be talking about is probably codling moth.

- [Jack Riesselman] Yeah.

- That's our most common boring apple fruit pest.

There are a few strategies that you can use to help eliminate them.

And I would encourage them to go to our Western Ag Research Center website.

So go to MSU, Western Ag Research Center.

They have a long, kind of detailed list of a multi-step IPM approach of how to reduce overall codling moth.

But some of the things that we talked about in the show in the past, including if you have any kind of fallen apples right now, any debris, get rid of that.

You're reducing the numbers of those pests.

You can set up in the spring, you can do a spray treatment, but you can set up some strips around the trunk of the tree.

And if you do that for multiple years, you can reduce those overall numbers too.

And, but for lots more information, Western Ag Research Center website has a lot of great info.

- Yeah, codling moths have always been a persistent pest in this state.

- Mm-hmm.

- I followed Abi's advice earlier this year though, and I did by wrapping the trunk, I think I did reduce codling moth.

I admit, I had fewer codling moth.

- Do you know what variety of apple you have?

- I do not, actually.

It was a gift.

I think it's a gala or something like that, based on the test, but I'm not, or the taste, but I'm not quite sure.

- [Marni Thompson] So how does wrapping the tree help codling?

- So when their larvae are coming down off of the tree, they're looking for places to nest in the bark.

- [Marni Thompson] Oh.

- Like, so usually in like kind of really textured bark.

And so by putting cardboard in, they're gonna try and nest in there and then you remove that and you're removing a good chunk of those trying to nest.

- Cool.

- Okay.

I learned something too.

(group laughs) There's a lot I need to learn.

I've been told that many, many times.

Interesting caller here from Billings is a flower grower with a cut flower business for the past 15 years.

She had her soil tested this year and it was depleted of all major nutrients.

What is the best way for her to rejuvenate her soil for next year?

Fertilizer, compost, combination, what And I mean, flowers do yank a lot of nutrients out of the soil, so if you haven't been taking care of your soil, you're not gonna be growing great flowers.

So it's up to you guys to give a recommendation.

- So in that, and I'd love your feedback too, but in that kind of situation if you have a lot of nutrient depletion, you might do a combination of compost, which will help overall that soil texture and will help the nutrients, but I, for something that's intensive where you're taking a lot of energy out of that soil, you would probably need a nice fertilizer schedule to make sure that your flowers are getting what they need.

That would be one of my thoughts.

What do you think, Marni?

- Well, I definitely think compost, you know, as a natural way to do it without fertilizer.

I guess I would be careful maybe rotating the flowers and planting something to add nutrients back in, like a cover crop or some clovers or something like that that would fix some nitrogen and cycle some nutrients back in and then come back with the flowers, so you'd be adding some more diversity to the soil just by rotating the flowers around and that would rejuvenate the soil too.

- [Tim Seipel] I wonder if you could put a Austrian winter pea in in the fall and let it go into the spring before you plant it, and that might be one that would work kind of well.

- [Jack Riesselman] You have to have water to get 'em up.

- [Tim Seipel] That's true.

- [Jack Riesselman] And if you're growing flowers, you probably do have an irrigation system.

- Mm-hmm, yeah.

- So, and the issue there, don't you have to get 'em in by early September?

And people are probably.

- Yeah.

- Still growing flowers at that time.

- Yeah, yeah.

It'd be interesting to know what the flowering time was.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Maybe you could inter, put it inter row or something like that too, yeah.

- Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

- Yeah.

- So how long would it take to get your soil back to better health with these different, is there a difference between adding fertilizer versus compost or some of these and getting it restored?

- I think compost is slower, right?

It has to be broken down by the microorganisms and then when the microorganisms are there, then they feed the plants and so that takes time.

I think like with the fertilizer, you could do that at first and then, you know, have the compost come in later.

- [Jack Riesselman] Okay.

- But it takes time to help address kind of those soil issues usually.

- Good to know.

Question from Power.

This person would like to use soil health principles and he's tried cover crops, but he said the years following the cover crops he has suffered a rather significant yield depression.

So in some dry areas, cover crops might not work too well.

- Well I think we often associate cover crops with soil health and soil health, or cover crops are one tool.

It really is about the whole system.

So it's about your cropping rotation, it's about, you know, minimizing disturbance with a disc drill.

It's about, you know, adding cover.

And so cover crops, and it depends when the cover crops are planted and what species are planted, so we've had some guys that have planted earlier season cover crops, especially if they know they're gonna go into winter wheat, and they would plant those cover crops more in April and then they would terminate them to allow the soil to come back.

But I think it takes time.

Our soils didn't get this way overnight, and to plant one cover crop in Montana, especially and expect it to be, you know, a silver bullet is not realistic.

That can happen in Minnesota, where they get 35 or 40 inches of precip, but in Montana, you know, it just doesn't happen that fast.

And so unfortunately we have to be a little bit patient, which is hard for a lot of us in this day and age but it's really about the whole system.

The cover crops are really beneficial for cattle, for cattle grazing, which can add, you know, the livestock back into it.

And so that can make it definitely more economical if you have the cattle part of it.

- Some of the ranchers or farm ranching operations out in the eastern part of the state have incorporated cattle quite successfully.

And if you don't have livestock, it's a lot more difficult to pencil it economically, I've been told.

- Yeah, and I would encourage people maybe you don't need cover crops, but just to diversify your crop rotation and make sure that you have a living plant you know, on your soil every year.

- [Jack Riesselman] Okay.

- And then also the, you know, the best way to improve soil health the fastest is planting perennials.

And I know a lot of farmers don't wanna hear me say that, but that really is the fastest way if you think about nature.

- [Jack Riesselman] Yeah, I agree.

- [Joel Schumacher] So you had mentioned terminating the cover crop.

- Mm-hmm.

- Is this, are we disking it back in or are we waiting for it to just die out in the fall?

Are we grazing it or what, what's?

- Great question.

I think in the organic scenario, you know, they would till it, most of the time it's just spraying it or using cattle to terminate it by grazing it.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- [Tim Seipel] Or using a little of both.

- Mm-hmm.

- We actually did a project in Moccasin where, and this has economic benefit and he, this caller is from Power.

And I think about the ferocious wild oat that comes out of the Fairfield, Great Falls area.

And so we had a Austrian winter pea, winter triticale mix, and then we had a spring barley, spring pea mix and we cut it about the 4th of July when everything was kind of in the soft dough stage.

So you do get some forage out of it you can bale up and actually use, but what you also got out of it was cutting off that wild oat and then spraying it with a non-selective herbicide or tilling it back in.

So even though you don't see that benefit of reducing the wild oats seed bank really quickly, you are, there is some benefit to reducing some of those wild oats that are in the soil too.

- How long will wild oats stay active?

I mean the seed.

- It depends on how deep that they, how deep they're buried but you know, four or five, six years.

And if you bring them back to the surface, Dave Witchman actually asked me a question when I started once and he said, "Why do we have so much less wild oat in the state?"

And some people might disagree.

(group laughs) But he said it was the switch to no-till and wild oat is a weed that really likes tillage.

- Tilling.

- So when we switched to no-till systems, the wild oat maybe went down a little bit, but maybe in Fairfield, Power, that area, we still use a lot of tillage under those irrigated pivots there.

So we have a lot of wild oat in the, especially the irrigated sections there.

- [Jack Riesselman] Well we do, no doubt about it.

- Which makes sense because the weed seeds on top of the ground actually, you know, the sun can kill them.

Whereas when we till, we're just planting the seeds right back into the soil.

- Yeah.

- And putting it in contact with the soil.

- Mm-hmm, okay.

You know, we mentioned or had a question about burning of sagebrush.

Are we still burning stubble in parts of the state?

Primarily the Fairfield Bench area or.

- Fairfield Bench, Highwood Bench, yeah.

They still burn quite a bit.

- And the effect on soil health?

- It has an impact because you're.

- [Jack Riesselman] Good or bad?

- I would say bad because you're taking carbon, that's carbon, that's nutrients in that stubble and you're burning it so it's just going up in the air.

(Marni Thompson laughs) And you're making your soils bare and susceptible to soil erosion, and we've seen a lot of that in the last few years in the Great Falls area.

- And I was surprised to hear that we had Susan Talman on to talk about soil erosion and that's come back with a vengeance in the state.

Bigger fields, increased wind with climate change and less cover.

There's no doubt about it.

- Yeah, I sat in a storm in between Fort Benton and Great Falls a couple years ago for two hours and there was a 16 car pile-up and the road was closed.

- [Jack Riesselman] Not good.

- No.

- Okay, I always ask people if you have comments, call 'em in.

And we have from Fort Benton, caller says, "Marni's son called and he never knew how smart his mom is."

(group laughs) So I always like these comments here.

Now, Helena caller asked if the snow melts this week, is it too late for him to compost his garden?

It's a good question.

- I would say no, it wouldn't be too late to compost your garden if the snow melts and it's looking like we're gonna get a bit of melt.

But I'm, I like composting in the fall because it'll slowly, you know, integrate into the soil.

So I would say no, it's not too late.

- Yeah, I would agree.

- Yeah.

- I would agree with that entirely.

Joel, interesting question from Three Forks, your stomping grounds out there.

- [Joel Schumacher] That's right.

- This person would like to know if the influx of craft brewers in this state are using Montana products like malt, Montana malt and hops and so forth.

- Yeah, definitely there's been increased usage.

I mean we've always grown a lot of malt barley, right?

But a lot of it was contracted to the you know, really large brewers.

But I think you've seen some elevators handling some niche barley for these local brewers.

And I think in the Butte area there's a new malting facility.

- [Marni Thompson] Oh, right.

- And there have been, there's at least, we have a former graduate that's doing some hops growing here locally in the valley.

I don't know if it's widespread enough to, you know, make an impact.

But I think some of these folks are trying some of these things, and also with small batches, you can take advantage of a small amount of product and try something even if it's not maybe available year-round, you know, they can try it and that can be their seasonal offering.

- Okay Tim, from Bozeman, this person has been fighting a weed he calls mallow and he's used Roundup or glyphosate on it with very poor results.

He wants to know are they resistant to Roundup?

- The mallow is, so resistance is something we usually talk about that develops over time, where the mallow had previously been susceptible to the herbicide and now it's not anymore.

So it's not resistant, it's just it's very, mallow has a special leaf coating surface, saccharides, which are sugars, and then some cations like calcium and other things.

And it actually chelates the Roundup, which basically means it wraps it up organically and makes sure the Roundup doesn't work.

So I get more and more and more complaints about mallow across the state, especially and for people who deal with it in pulse crops.

And usually it comes on late.

It's a warm season, it's in the hibiscus cotton family, so it's a very warm season species.

Comes on really late.

I have a lot of difficulty managing it And I'll tell you really, the Roundup alone won't work.

Roundup and 2,4-D does better or Roundup and dicamba mixed together do much better.

There's some other things that you could use in a crop situation, but there's some risk of herbicide carryover when you're, that make it difficult to use.

Metribuzin is one that we've used previously for mallow control, but it has led, it causes some carryover issues in wheat sometimes.

- Banvel can or dicamba can also carry.

- [Tim Seipel] Yeah.

- A little longer than 2,4-D. - Yeah, the dicamba, yeah.

So in fallow I think you, even with wheat it's 45 days in fallow after a normal rate dicamba application before you can plant anything.

- Okay, thank you.

Marni, from Joplin and this person has tried cover crops but they would also like to know are there other things not associated with cover crops that they can do to improve soil health?

- Well, diversifying your cropping rotation, eliminating fallow, adding a disc drill and a stripper header I think are, and then if you can incorporate livestock, if you have cover crops, but incorporating livestock into the cropping rotation is also beneficial.

- Okay.

I find an interesting question here too from Billings.

This caller wraps his fruit tree with six-inch wrap.

I'm not sure what that means, but the codling moth worms come out of the apples and crawl down the trunk and burrow under the tree wrap and stay.

Then downy woodpeckers come in and eat through the tree wrap and eat the worms.

That's bio-control.

(group laughs) - That's definitely, yeah, exactly.

That's a great, yeah, bio-control.

- That's a well-trained woodpecker.

- Exactly, really, that's.

- You know, we don't have as many as we used to have.

But that must work pretty well.

- That, it would, yeah, I don't see why not.

- Okay, question about no-till and this person would like to know for cereal grain production what is best?

No-till, conventional till, I'm not sure what that means, or total conservation tillage?

So there are different types of tillage for grain production.

Any of them better than others, or?

- Well, I'm gonna say no-till because that's what's better for the soil and if the soil is better than the plant's gonna be better.

- Yeah, I think the tillage, I mean standard tillage runs a big risk of soil erosion.

Right, no one should be out tilling the ground this time of year.

Maybe, you know, I saw some pictures the other day of people who'd put tillage in and left the soil bare for the winter.

That's a tough.

- Yeah, it is, yeah.

- Situation to be in.

There are places where tillage is really important.

Mixing actually in with soil acidity, occasionally putting tillage in that might mix that top layer 'cause often our soil acidity problem is in the top few inches and mixing it below can, mixing it in with stuff that's higher pH can actually improve the situation a little bit.

But if I were gonna put tillage in, I'd follow one of the principles and keep it covered after that.

You want to put a cover crop back in.

You don't want it sitting there through a season of fallow.

- Okay, Abi, you're in trouble.

Somebody wants to talk to you next week.

They need your phone number again.

(group laughs) So why don't you?

- Yeah, my phone number is 994-6523.

Happy to help.

- Okay, and feel free to call her.

She's really good at answering her questions.

From Lustre, is there any opportunities for pesticide education points in the northeast part of the state?

Tim, you're kind of involved with that.

- Yeah, you know, actually November 7th I'll be in Glasgow.

There's AG Expo, I think that Shelly Mills, the agent in Glasgow's running.

And then there's some stuff being organized by Wendy Rivers, who is the agent in Roosevelt County.

And I'm gonna go to Wolf Point and Froid.

And then on the way back, I'll be in Circle.

So there are November 7th, 8th, and 9th, contact MSU Extension agent.

- Take your shotgun along.

There's a lot of pheasants out there.

(group laughs) - That's a, it's a good idea.

- I'm always looking at the bright side of things.

That's a long drive.

- [Tim Seipel] Yeah.

- Marni, what are ranchers in general doing to improve their soil health?

We hear regenerative ranching all the time.

You want to explain that a little more please?

- So a couple things that guys are doing is changing their calving date to be more in sync with nature.

Just like deer, elk have their young in May, June, that's when the nutrients requirements for the animal are the highest and that's when there's more grass.

And so a lot of guys are changing their calving date to be May and June, which is cutting down on a lot of costs, allowing them flexibility in their grazing systems.

And then a lot of guys are just doing that high stock density grazing, rotational grazing, where they're grazing pretty intensively but they're allowing a lot of rest and recovery and that can drastically improve the plants and in turn improve the soil health.

- [Jack Riesselman] And I just, we had Dave Mannix from Mannix Brothers Ranch.

- Mm-hmm.

- On last week and they're doing that.

- Yeah.

- And to see their pastures and how their cattle have responded is pretty impressive.

- Yeah, I was on a place this summer and they moved their cows all through the winter.

It's about 1,000 head every day and on 11-acre pasture.

And the fence line contrast was absolutely amazing in production, number of species, the color of the soil, infiltration rates.

It was all, it was very cool.

- Yeah, you mentioned infiltration rate and then we were gonna put a demonstration here but we couldn't get it done tonight.

Explain infiltration rates to the public in nice, general, easy to understand terms.

- Okay, an easy way to understand it is I think about Cocoa Puffs.

So you have Cocoa Puffs that have a outer covering of sugar.

The biology in the soil creates those soil aggregates.

So, and they have a glue that's called glomalin that makes those covers.

Well, in between those soil aggregates are pore spaces and that's where our water and air is stored.

And so when we till, we compact the soil and it breaks up those Cocoa Puffs, right?

And then it fills those pore spaces and so water can't infiltrate.

So the more the biology, mycorrhiza fungi actually create those aggregates, which the more aggregates you have, the better your water infiltrates in your soil.

And we want every, every raindrop that comes in the state of Montana to actually infield in our soil and we don't want it running off or evaporating in the bare soil.

So, soil aggregation and infiltrates, infiltration rates go together.

- Okay, makes sense, thank you.

I don't think we have anybody on the panel who can answer this, but maybe Tim will take a shot at it.

Missoula caller asked how to get rid of their ground squirrel infestation in a nice way.

(group laughs) - Good luck.

- Call Stephen Vantassel, Montana Department of Ag.

I have seen a lot of his presentations lately, but I'm not gonna attempt it.

- Okay, and from Polson our caller is asking if leaves can be used as a good mulch to improve soil health?

This time of year, there are so many leaves.

Could this be a better use for them?

- [Marni Thompson] Yeah.

- Yeah.

Yeah, I agree.

And leaves also add the added benefit of like habitat, 'cause queen bumblebees nest in leaf litter and things like that.

- Oh.

- And so yeah, adding those leaves onto your perennial beds or leaving them, mowing them into your lawn, great ways to incorporate that.

- They do break down a little slower, so adding them in with, you know, manure or grass clippings would make them break down faster but I always put my leaves on my garden too.

- Mm-hmm.

- [Joel Schumacher] What about just leaving them under the snow that they fell on top of on your lawn?

(group laughs) - Well, I mentioned I mowed last Tuesday and my thought was when the wind came up that my neighbors would inherit because I mow it very short.

And this is a good way to have the leaves disappear, but the snow threw a wrench on that.

Anyway, Montana City caller would like to know when corrugated tree wrap should be taken off the tree.

And that depends on what it's used for.

- Yeah and I think I'm not sure, well, if it's corrugated tree wrapped for protecting your trees from sunscald and southwest injury, which is very common in our thin-barked and dark-barked trees like our maples and apples and things like that, I say in the spring is when you take that off of there.

You don't wanna leave it on year-round, but it's fine if you're a little bit late to take it off.

But I'm glad that question came in 'cause now is a good time to put that up.

- [Jack Riesselman] Wrap up.

- Exactly, protect your.

- [Tim Seipel] Do you think they're asking about codling moth too?

- Okay.

- Because I had it around my tree a few times and I cycled through the cardboard like.

- Yeah.

- Two times.

- So you do it twice for codling moth.

You would, 'cause they have usually two cycles.

Sometimes potentially more, but you would take it off multiple times.

- Okay.

- Usually based on that.

- We only have a few seconds left.

A short answer for Marni.

This person wants to know if you incorporate alfalfa into a rotation, does that really help soil health?

- It does.

I would recommend having more diversity than just a monoculture of alfalfa but it is, it's a perennial and it's adding nitrogen to your soil.

- And how long would you leave an alfalfa crop in?

I mean, you gotta make some money and it's not.

- [Marni Thompson] Right.

- Expensive to put it in, two, three, four years?

- Yeah, I think typically guys are doing at least four, four or five.

- Okay, one last question.

Lots of ladybugs into the house.

Why?

And I'm not sure they'd be ladybugs.

I'm thinking they might be something else.

- Lady, it could be ladybugs.

- Okay.

- It could be boxelder bugs.

But the reason why is they're looking for a warm place to hunker down in over winter.

And the best thing to do is seal up any openings to prevent them from getting in.

- [Jack Riesselman] And if they're boxelder bugs, get out your vacuum sweeper.

- Yeah, yeah, use your vacuum cleaner to get rid of them.

- Okay folks, we're down to another interesting program.

(country music plays) I want to thank Marni for coming down from Fort Benton.

Learned a lot about soil health.

Joel, it's always good to have you.

Tim, you'll be here again next week and I think Abi, you're here next week too.

So with that folks, I hope you have a good week.

Our next guest will be Lon Reukauf, rancher from Terry, Montana.

Join us next week.

You'll have a good time.

We'll see you then, goodnight.

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

(country music continues) - [Narrator 2] Montana AG Live is made possible by the Montana Department of Agriculture, MSU Extension, the MSU Ag Experiment Stations of the College of Agriculture, the Montana Wheat & Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery & Landscaping, the Northern Pulse Growers Association and the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

(upbeat music plays)