- [Narrator] "Montana Ag Live" is made possible by the Montana Department of Agriculture, (upbeat music) MSU extension, the MSU Ag Experiment Station of the College of Agriculture, the Montana Wheat & Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery & Landscaping, and the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

(upbeat music) - Welcome everyone to another episode of "Montana Ag Live".

Coming to you live from the studios of KUSM TV, on the campus of Montana State University on this spring day.

We have a great program set up for you tonight and a great panel of guests.

We're gonna talk about malt barley and all the characteristics and production that goes into barley in Montana.

And I'm gonna introduce our guests first and our panel and we'll come back and we'll talk about malt barley.

So first on our panel tonight we have Joel Schumacher, who's an extension and economist, call in and ask all your economy questions to Joel.

We have Karl DeJonge, he's producer from Gallatin Valley, Gallatin Valley Malt Company, and he's a specialist in malting, producing malt barley, growing seed potatoes and all kinds of things.

So please call in your questions.

Next to him, we have Jamie Sherman, our barley breeder here at Montana State University.

You can call in and ask all your great questions of barley and barley genetics to Jamie.

And then next to me is Abi Saeed.

She's our extension horticulture specialist.

She said she really wanted to have some tough questions tonight about our spring garden.

And I'm Tim Seipel and I'm extension weed scientist as Jack would like to refer to me as.

And on the phones tonight, we have Judge Bruce Lobo and we have Nancy Blake answering the phones tonight.

Please give him a lot of questions to write down and call in with a lot of complicated words.

(group laughing) So, Karl, I'll hand it to you.

And I'm really excited to hear about malt, malt barley, all those things.

I really like a drink that's made out of malt in the world.

It's actually called ovomaltine.

You guys thought I was gonna say beer, but I'll talk about ovomaltine.

But tell us about malt and malt barley and how you produce it here in Montana.

- You bet, so we farm, not too far from here actually, grow a number of different crops, seed potatoes, malt barley, and other small grains as well.

So we've been doing the malt barley program going on three generations here on our family farm.

And yeah, so to be able to carry that on and then to be able to say not only as a producer of that, but what's the next step and what does this crop do after we harvest it?

Rather than just bringing it to the elevator, seeing it go after that.

So that was a big part of the impetus for me and the curiosity of that and then wanting to bring some value into the farm and keeping some of that value at farm level.

What can we do to add value to the crops that we grow and that, and then to be able to entice family members to stay on the farm and provide opportunities for that.

So that's a big impetus for being able to delve into that room that we're in now.

- Great, so Jamie, what are all the uses of barley and malt barley?

So I'm kind of a grass nerd, you know I like to talk about grass genetics and I think two row, six row barleys.

What does that mean and what are the different uses for barley out there?

- Well, so barley can be used for human food.

People just eat it as is.

They eat it like a cereal, but then it's also used as a food additive a lot 'cause it's very high in protein and it has some other nutritional qualities that improve its food use.

It's also used as an animal feed.

It's also grown as a hay or a forage.

But the biggest economic value is usually as a malt barley and sometimes as a malt barley then that's also used as a food additive.

But the biggest use for malt barley is in the brewing and distilling industry.

And when you add all that revenue that comes from malting and brewing and distilling and all the tax income that comes, it's a huge economic force in our country.

- Alright and so for maybe people who aren't familiar, what does it mean to malt?

What is malting?

- So I can give you a quick overview.

I mean Karl can actually show you some pictures of it if you'd rather have him do it.

- [Tim] Yeah, let's have Karl show us some pictures, you can tell us a little bit about what it generally means to malt.

- Sure.

In malt barley, it stores its energy in the form of starch.

And starch is not a readily convertible source of energy in the brewing process.

So malting takes that to the inherent characteristics of malt barley.

We start by steeping it in water and over a number of processes to do that, usually over a couple days.

This here is a picture of in my garage, the early, early stages of experimenting with malting.

But yeah, that steep process, we take grain from roughly 10% moisture out of the bin up to about 46% moisture and start that process of actually getting And its first step is to start to convert that starch.

And that's what we're trying to do in the malting process.

We move from steep to germination, different vessels that we do it in just 'cause they're better suited for that process, moving a lot of air and oxygen through there and holding and maintaining temperatures.

We want the internal process to happen inside the kernel, but we don't want it to grow green stalk.

Once it starts to do that, it starts to consume the energy and we want to save that for the brewing and distillers to use that.

So we're taking it from a starch to essentially a complex sugar and and a bunch of enzymes that have happened within that kernel.

And that's what the brewers and distillers want.

- Okay yeah, thanks, that was interesting.

Okay, so we have some other questions that are coming in.

We've had one caller from Havre who's interested, has flea beetles that are destroying their and they don't want to poison their vegetables, but hope there's an answer to managing flea beetles, Abi?

- Yeah, that's a good question.

Flea beetles are very challenging to manage and if you guys have had gardens, you've of wipe out your veggie garden.

One of the things that you can do if you don't want to use any insecticides is you can use trap craps for flea beetles.

They usually like to go to the tallest or the largest looking plants in a garden bed.

And so plants like eggplant specifically, they really love eggplants, they like radishes.

So if you're not crazy about either eggplants or radishes, you plant those a little bit earlier than the rest of your crops, they're gonna be a little taller and you're gonna try and lure those flea beetles onto there.

You can also use row covers.

So I like to use row covers to protect my plants.

That'll prevent them from getting onto the leaves of your plants.

And those are a couple of ways that you can try to manage those.

- Okay, so out at the post farm I have winter canola trials, I have some brown mustard and I have lot of flea beetles out there.

There's probably no way to get rid of flea beetles out of your garden in general in Havre because there's so much brown mustard and canola that's being grown around.

- Absolutely, yeah.

- Okay, yep.

Alright, thanks.

So we have some other questions that came in.

We have a question for Joel.

Joel, this person was looking at the employment numbers recently and we're a little bit confused.

I heard on the news the other day that the labor force in Montana shrank by 150 people, but employment was up by 450 people.

How's that possible?

- Yeah, so it's kinda what we've all been hearing, right, that labor's been short across Montana.

There's actually more people in Montana working now than ever before.

But there's kind of two numbers, a few numbers you see on the news and one is the unemployment and that's the number of people who are looking for work but don't have a job.

So we see that number reported regularly, but the workforce is those that are over age 16 and looking for work.

So that means you're gonna subtract out a lot of like high school college kids that aren't working or retirees or a parent staying home.

So, but people can jump in and outta the workforce, right?

So you might take a few years off with a young child and then come back to the workforce or maybe you retire at age, whatever, and then two years later decide you want to work again, then you're back in the workforce.

So that workforce number can change all the time as people both age and jump in and outta the workforce.

But then that employment number, the other number you heard, that's the number of people that actually got like a W2 last week.

So that means you got a paycheck.

It does miss self-employed, but that's just a little harder to count.

So a lot of times you don't see that reported.

So that's why you see numbers that might look like they're going both ways and they can both be true.

- Okay, thanks.

We have a question about malt barley and maybe Karl and Jamie you can both answer this.

In the malt barley world, what is GN and what are you doing about it?

- I can answer that.

- [Tim] Okay.

- 'Cause I'm actually doing something about it.

- [Tim] That's good.

- So GN, if you distill in a certain way, GN can be converted to a carcinogen.

It's not a carcinogen itself, but if you distill a certain way, that process can convert it into a carcinogen.

And so that is a regulated compound in Europe.

And so that's not regulated right now in the United States.

It's kind of a gentleman's agreement to reduce its use, but maltsters are now becoming more concerned about it that it might become regulated or just wanna do the right thing and it would be easier for them if every malt variety was no GN.

So it's a specific compound that's created by a single gene.

And so we have no gene in varieties.

In fact, one of the varieties I released last year, we didn't know this when we released it, but Montana Boy Howdy is no GN.

And so we're looking at that variety to see if it could be useful to the distilling industry.

The other cool thing about Montana Boy Howdy, which protects against another issue is it has dormancy, it has two dormancy genes.

And what that could mean for Montana is that if it rains during harvest, if you don't have dormancy, then you can actually have sprouting on the head.

And if you have sprouting on the head, you won't have sprouting when you're malting.

And so it cannot be used for malt.

And so Montana Boy Howdy would have no GN and then this protection against rain during harvest.

So we're excited about that.

We just gotta test it and see if it really will work for distilling.

But it's got those two positive categories.

So it's just a matter of updating our varieties to create more no GN varieties.

Now the carcinogen does not form during the normal brewing process.

It's only during distilling.

So it's really only an issue of concern during distilling.

But as I said, maltsters would prefer to have all the lines be no GN.

- Certainly, yeah.

- And is it right now that if it does get rained on and we get that sprouting in the field, that then becomes probably cattle feed at that point?

- That's right.

And so most, most growers if that happens, they can only sell it for about half the price.

So it's a significant loss in value, yeah.

- Certainly.

Great, thanks.

We have a caller from Nashua and for those Nashua's, just east of Glasgow a little bit.

Caller as a valiant grape vine, which now extends 15 to 18 feet.

She would like to prune it back to about five to six feet, and the vine is about eight years old.

Is it a good time to prune a grape in Nashua?

- So valiant grapes are a really nice grape variety here.

In terms of if now is a good time to prune, I would kind of see if they're starting to green up, I would hesitate, if you have any sort of disease issues in your landscape, I would be a little bit hesitant about pruning, especially if you have kind of a series of grape plants.

But in terms of pruning it back to five or six feet, maybe I would say do that over a period of two years time and kind of cut it back to about nine or so, nine or 10 feet and then cut it back again to about six feet and do that in a period of two years.

But if you don't have a lot of growth right now, a lot of green leafy growth in your grapes, you could potentially risk kind of opening that wound up to a potential pathogen.

But if you can do it now if you really want to, but I kind of hesitate when things start to warm up and our pathogens start to become active in this time of year.

- Yep.

Before the show started, we were talking a little bit about the climate that we have in Montana and where this caller was from Nashua, which is out in the northeast corner of the state.

And we talked about Durum wheat last week on the show.

And Mike Giroux was here and that's the really the center for Durum production in Montana.

So when we're talking about malt barley production in Montana, what kind of weather, what kind of climate conditions do we look for that really makes good malt barley producing farmland?

- I think the limiting factor is really barley really likes cool nights and so that's why traditionally it's done so well in Montana, but barley does very well on dry land.

It does very well under irrigation.

A lot of malt growers grow it under irrigation to ensure that they make malt quality.

So it's a relatively flexible crop.

One of the cool things that we're doing differently now is we're trying to develop a winter barley, which means we could plant it in the winter, then it would have a head start in the spring and then it could be harvested earlier, which would be a big advantage.

The issue there is it's a little bit cold in Montana for, and even winter wheat sometimes doesn't survive.

And so we're working towards a more cold tolerant winter barley.

But barley does really well across Montana.

I guess where would you say the most acres are grown?

The Golden Triangle?

- The Golden triangle certainly has that reputation of barley production there.

But yeah, there's a lot of barley production happening right here in the Gallatin Valley, both irrigated and dry land as well.

Certainly I think the soil conditions, in the Gallatin Valley are great for barley production, but certainly the elevation, the cool nights and that spring rains certainly bringing moisture early to get plant development.

But then as a malt barley producer, boy if you could get to the end of the July and just shut the rain off and avoid the storms and hail, it's a great climb.

Other than those couple factors, yes.

- Alright, thanks.

So we have, here's a question that maybe relates and we can maybe all answer this.

A question that came in via Facebook.

They were asking, is this grain raised in Montana and do we have favorable weather and land for it?

They're asking about triticale or Triticale, people say it different.

And it's a cereal grain that's, and this person rightly points out it's a half wheat, half rye, it's a cross of those and it has some great traits.

And yes, we do grow triticale in Montana.

I actually have some really nice looking stuff at the post farm right now.

It survived winter very nicely.

Yes, we do grow it and I think, I don't know what our, we use it a lot for cattle forage in Montana, but I'm not sure how much we take it to grain.

I'll be taking it to grain for the first time this year as an actual grain.

So yes, we do grow it and it does grow pretty well in Montana.

That one to answer that one.

Okay, another question for Abi.

I have a large dead branch on my crab apple tree.

Is it too late to prune it out?

- That's a good question.

So in terms of generally pruning, we prefer dormancies and pruning and that's because our pathogens aren't active and you can see the structure of your trees better, but when you're dealing with dead branches, those can be removed at any time.

So yeah, you can remove your dead branches now.

- Okay, thank you.

So we have another question.

- [Speaker] And what's your question?

This is a good one, we have callers from Laurel and they're asking about whether the family garden should be rototilled or whether it should not be rototilled.

Each spouse has a different opinion.

(group laughing) (overlapping chatter) Please bring domestic harmony to these Laurel Gardens.

(group laughing) - Well, that is another really great question.

So one of the things that rototilling does is it can really destroy the soil texture and it can really impede that pore space that soils have, like the air and water space that help make them really productive.

And so if you rototill too frequently, you're kind of eroding your soil structure a lot.

Generally if you have severely compacted soils, you can rototill, but one of the better ways to manage your soil would be to use a broad fork.

It's like this large rake like structure and you can drag it across the top of the soil.

You're not disturbing it as much, but you're still helping kind of integrate organic matter into it.

So that can be a kind of a compromise of the two methods.

- Yep, today in my garden I did Tim's brute force precision.

I dug the quack grass out of where it should have come out and left the rest un-tilled and then planted my arugula and radishes with a hoe drill, we'll call it a hoe drill.

One row hoe drill.

(group laughing) Okay, thank you.

So I hope that brought some domestic harmony to Laurel.

So Joel, we had a question that's come in and maybe Karl you can answer some of this too.

How much malt barley does Montana produce and where does it end up?

- Well maybe I'll start and Karl can.

- [Tim] Sure.

- So one, in terms of like national ag statistics, I don't think they typically separate between malt barley and feed barleys.

So they're typically just reporting barley acres in total.

But I think, at least up in The Golden Triangle, and I know down by Laurel, a lot of the barley is pre contracted to some of the large brewers that you're well aware of.

So a lot of those contracts come out in advance and they're growing varieties that are approved by those growers.

But there's other barley that's grown that's open market or other contracts as well.

And Karl probably knows a lot more about that.

- Montana typically ranks in the top one two for barley production in the US so yeah, there's a tremendous amount of it and I think it's sought after for the quality that that we do produce, yeah.

- A really big advantage is that we don't have a lot of the disease pressure in barley that a And so honestly because of disease pressure, barley production has moved west.

And so now the biggest producers are in North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho, primarily because of disease pressure.

- Oh, interesting.

Okay, so we have another question about malt, about barley.

It seems the food industry wants waxy barley.

What is waxy barley and are we doing anything about it?

- Okay, so the starch, Karl talked about the starch.

So one of the things that we get out of barley is starch.

We also get actually a lot of protein too.

And it's shared in that same, stored in that same structure.

But the food industry has different requirements for how that starch is composed.

And so there's actually two molecules making up the starch.

It's amylose and amylopectin.

And the big difference between them, they're just chains of sugars, but the amylopectin is a lot more branched and the amylose is just a single chain.

And so those two different chemical structures have different quality parameters.

And so depending on what you wanna do with the barley, for example, the Japanese markets just wants to cook it like rice.

And so they prefer a lot of the amylopectin because all those branches makes it cook more quickly.

But another market may like there to be more amylose because it provides a different of chemical structure.

So what we're doing now, thanks to some donations, especially from a memorial fund of Dan Kids, we've purchased a new device called a rapid viscometer, which actually can help us determine the percentage of amylose to amylopectin and we're evaluating our barley and it also impacts the brewing industry.

So it's important for brewing as well.

So it's just gonna give us another bit of information to help us target varieties better.

And we have a waxy barley that we're hoping to release soon for the Japanese market.

- Interesting.

So does the waxy barley gives it the slightly chewier texture that, or that gives it, I really like.

- The waxy barley makes it cook more quickly.

Waxy barley's preferred for this Japanese market.

- Okay yep, okay thanks.

So a question for you Karl that's come in.

If you were to ask Jamie Sherman to breed the ultimate barley, what traits would you ask for?

(group laughing) - Let me listen to this.

- Jamie and I have had this conversation more than once for sure.

There's multiple facets to that.

As a farmer and a producer, there are qualities that I want that are just strictly selfish in that sense.

I want it to not take any fertilizer.

I want like low inputs and I want it to yield like crazy so that we get a lot of production, which we would interpret to mean dollars in my pocket.

So you have that aspect of it.

And I think as farmers, most of us would like those sorts of things and be successful at it.

As a maltster, those things can often clash in that they don't, as a farmer, what I want to have happen doesn't work well in the malt house and it becomes very complicated there.

So you have those aspects to say, well if I'm only a maltster, I want the barley to be this way.

And then you have brewers and distillers that say we want it to do this.

And so you ultimately you have to identify who your customer is and you have to do something that they want.

And so like Jamie and myself and the people within that process, trying to find that common ground that works really well.

For me, it's a yield production and some of the things that come along with that is shorter straw length, disease resistance, those sorts of things that help me to grow a good healthy crop.

I want it to happen in a very timely manner so I don't have a very long season.

Those sorts of things, good use of water uptake and those as well.

So yeah, and to be able to have a resource like Jamie right here at MSU is just phenomenal.

As producers, we couldn't ask for more than that.

- [Tim] Great.

- And so we've actually collaborated on a line that Karl's using.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- And so I like to talk to people what they need and then we try to find something that fits the bill.

Best case scenario is that we already have something that would work, because the breeding process takes about 10 years, so if we're starting from scratch, it's a long way, but hopefully we have something in the pipeline 'cause we're always looking ahead, what do we need?

Where do we wanna go?

Where do we see a weakness?

- And so where do you get your genetic material from or there's some heirloom varieties of barley that are out there and then you're bringing in different genetic material from other parts of the world, other ascensions.

How does that all come together to make a variety?

- So we make hundreds of crosses every year.

So we have the stuff that's doing well and maybe we have an issue that we wanna fix, so then we find something else that would fix it and then we make that cross.

And so it's a constant input of new genetic material, hundreds of crosses every year.

Those hundreds of crosses end up being 10 to 20,000 different lines.

Those 10 to 20,000 different lines are evaluated over consecutive years until we end up hopefully with the one line that's the winner that we release.

So it's a long process and can be evaluated agronomically for disease resistance but then also for malt quality.

And now with the new brewing facility we're actually evaluating for brewing quality as well.

- Yes so, do you want to tell us about some of the new facility?

I was on with President Cruzado a couple weeks ago and she mentioned that as well.

- Yeah, a lot of people pitched in to make that happen.

So we had groups like the Brewers Association that fought for us and then individual representatives that supported it and then the university supported it.

So a lot of people worked really hard to get that law changed so that we could legally brew.

That happened last spring.

And then it's taken us almost this whole year to get all of the governmental approvals.

So now we finally got all of our approvals, we actually have our license and we're starting to brew.

And one of the best things I did is I hired a professional brewer who had worked for a number of years for Anheuser Busch, Bruce is starting new brew for us and it's just gonna open up a whole bunch of new areas that we can explore.

I'm really excited about it.

- Great and some value added to our production systems.

- Right, well what we're trying right now is to come up with the perfect recipe for malting and brewing for all of our lines we've released.

And then what we're doing with experimental lines is we're malting and brewing 'em and then a brewer or a maltster can come in and actually taste them and pick which ones they think taste the best.

Which we don't really have a better way to measure it other than people just tasting it.

- Interesting, thank you.

Okay, we have some calls that are stacking up here.

We have a caller from Stevensville who has two maples that are three years old and the bark is starting to peel back.

Should they be wrapped in some other way or treated?

- That's a good question.

It's hard to say why that bark might be peeling back.

It would be, this one might be a good one to contact your county extension agent and send photos, if there's some sort of an injury or an excess of moisture that can cause kind of bark to be peeling back.

If it's on a certain section, so if it's on the south, southwestern then it could be sun scald because maple can be thin barked and it is pretty susceptible to that type of damage.

Usually if you have bark damage, wrapping it in a tree wrap, those kind of plastic wraps that you get can help prevent additional bark damage.

But it won't address the current damage that's already there.

But trees are really good at healing their own wounds.

And so I would give it time and if you're continuing to see this bark damage to wrap it, especially while the trees haven't fully leafed out yet because that's more sun pressure.

But also sending pictures to your county extension agent to kind of get to the bottom of why that bark is peeling back would be a good strategy.

- Great, thank you.

We have a caller from Whitehall and any of you guys can maybe answer this.

Whitehall caller says he feeds wheat distiller grains at his cow calf operation.

What nutritional value does it have?

- So I'm not necessarily a cattle feed expert, but that's a really common thing, whether it be breweries or even ethanol plants, facilities, distiller dried grains is kind of the byproduct left after you've produced the alcohol out of it.

and that is the use for that is to go into cattle feed lots or hog operations.

Sometimes it's dried distiller grains, sometimes it's actually wet if it's short distance and it's actually almost like pumped to a feed lot nearby.

So then you don't have to spend the energy to dry that down.

I don't know of the specifics on sort of the nutritional value, but that is the main use for once you've got your brewing process done, you gotta do something with this and there is some value in feed.

- Yeah, so is that usually, what happens to barley that doesn't make malt quality or what determines malt quality and then what happens when it doesn't make malt quality in the barley?

I think we mentioned before a little bit about it.

- So it needs to have a certain percentage of plump seed is one characteristic that it can be rejected for.

If it's (indistinct) sprouted, it can be rejected.

Probably the most common thing is too high of protein though.

So generally above 13% protein would be rejected for malt.

- Okay.

- And those things usually happen if we don't get enough rain right before we are filling our grain, just if it's droughty during that time.

So for example, in 2021 it was a big issue, yeah.

- So when we talked about Durum, when Mike Giroux and Jack were talking about Durum last week, you're typically aiming for very high protein content in that Durum but this the opposite, in malt barley we really want low protein.

- Which is an advantage because usually yield is in opposition to protein, the higher yield you have.

So we can kind of get what we want with malt barley, we can have high yielding and then it's okay if the protein's lower.

Other barley end uses food and feed.

Of course we want it to be high protein.

So we want both things for barley in general.

- Okay, great.

Okay, we had a comment from an 80-year-old caller let us know that they drank Ovomaltine in the 1950s and they're very interested in how malt is used in Ovomaltine.

I just will say this, the largest sponsor of Swiss ski schools is Ovomaltine.

- Oh come on.

- And so it's a really funny, if you've ever spent time in Switzerland, you will know that Ovomaltine is still very much a cult national drink.

- And I grew up drinking a lot of it in Pakistan.

We drank Ovaltine a lot.

- Oh you did?

Interesting.

So how is malt used in Ovomaltine?

- So malt is a food product, it's so sweet.

You eat your malt, don't you?

- [Speaker] Certainly, that's part of the thing.

- Yeah, it tastes so great to taste just the malt.

It's so sweet.

And then malt flavored.

So it just gets ground up and used like in Whoppers or as a food additive or to make, and I don't know the exact process to make the malt, that drink, but it's just ground malt.

- We were looking, my wife and I were talking about this the other day and we looked at the ingredient list and malt is the first, malt and then usually milk and sugar depending on what's in there.

So yes, it is delicious.

If someone wanted to start a business in the Gallatin Valley, I think they could start a sort of niche Ovomaltine business.

Okay, so we have some other call that have come in.

We have a Glasgow caller who would like to get a hold of rye flour.

Are there any flour mills that are milling rye flour in Montana?

I know of just one or two producers who are producing specialty rye, but I don't know where it ends up.

- [Speaker] Yeah, I don't know either.

- Yeah, I'm also a fan of rye flour and really, we don't do it here.

And I think when you talk to people sometime and you talk about feral rye, we tried to get rid of feral rye for a long time in Montana.

Yeah and I think there's some opposition to rye.

And then we had another question that came in and they had heard that there are restrictions on buckwheat in Montana and they wanted to know if we grow buckwheat in Montana.

So buckwheat, we do grow a little bit of buckwheat, but it's not really encouraged.

And it's largely because there's a lot of allergies to buckwheat in Asia and since most of our grain is exported to Japan especially, they have zero tolerance for buckwheat as a contaminant in grain.

So you never want to put buckwheat in a field that's next to your spring cereals especially, but some of your other ones and then avoid it in your cover crops, especially for two years prior to make sure you have none of that volunteer buckwheat that's in there.

And we do have a weed too, wild buckwheat that shows up in our fields, but it's actually pretty fairly easily managed.

Yep, yeah, so that one will cover the buckwheat.

So we have some other ones that have come in and we have a caller from Laurel and they have, lotta calls from Laurel this evening.

Laurel caller has advice on privacy.

They want advice on privacy shrubs to plant around their property that will grow quick and top out between eight and 10 feet tall.

- Off the top of my head, one of the ones that comes to mind is caragana.

- [Tim] Yep.

- It grows really quickly, it reaches that height and it does really well in the kind of dry soil conditions to alkaline soils, it does really well.

So caragana would be a really nice option.

- Yeah, caragana would be one.

It does lose its leaves in the winter time though.

- It does.

- So you'll be able to see through it in the winter time.

- Yes, you may consider looking at an evergreen option.

There are some, some of the evergreen options can be challenging to grow.

For example, people like Arborvitae, but deer love them.

It's like candy, but caragana is my favorite.

- Okay, great.

Karl, we have a question that came in.

How did you decide to produce the types of malts that you do produce or the type of malt that you produce?

- Some of it is customer driven obviously, and asking what are they looking for in that.

Early on in my endeavor in that, there was quite a bit of barley malt and it still is brought over from Europe and the quality that they're producing there.

So one of the malt brewers in particular said, "I buy a lot of this malt from Germany, particularly, if you could do something similar to that, we'd love to do it."

So that was a big early on of exploring that as to like what varieties would be typical for that and that sort of thing and producing that.

There's a bit of this artisticness that I really love to experiment with and say if we can erase or somehow look away from what's already out there and if I said I've got these things, parameters to work with, what can I do with that?

And so I find that fascinating.

As both a grower, a farmer and growing the grain, what can I do to manipulate some of those things that I want to do?

And then yeah, if you can just kind of tune out what's already out there and look at that.

And a lot of times we do some stuff, we've got like a, we call it a wedding malt where it was my son and daughter-in-law's wedding day and it went terrible in the malt house and there is my wife calling, "Where are you?"

And we're trying to fix things in the malt house and it didn't go well but we finished it and we liked the malt and so we've got some aspects like that.

But, so we've got the creative side of it that I really enjoy immensely.

A lot of times, my neighbors have cattle and they are the recipients of some of that that doesn't work out.

So there's that exploration in that as well.

But malt has been around a long time and so people in the brewing and distilling industries have their preconceived ideas of what they want.

And so we're trying to take things that tools and grain that we have try and fit some of those, put our spin on them, make them unique in our sense.

And so not necessarily competing with a large malthouse that I grow grain for.

It wouldn't be practical to compete with them at their level, but trying to do things that are more of a niche in that and very personal in that sense as well to what we do and then as well to be able to relate people to what we do if we can get people out to the farm, and they'll say, "Can we actually walk in the fields?"

And it's like, yes.

I mean if you haven't walked in a field and dragged your hands through grain, it's just a great feeling to be able to do that.

So to be able to get people involved in that, anything ag related I think is a benefit to all of us, that they get a better understanding of what we do.

So I enjoy that part as much as well.

- Great, thanks.

- We got a comment that came in, callers from both Stevensville and Missoula said you can talk to Judy and Shodo at Conservation Grains and she has rye flour.

- [Speaker] Oh cool.

- I actually should have thought of that one.

Yes, thank you for your comments.

We appreciate those every time that they come in.

Abi, we have another question for you and that is, how often should you replace your strawberry beds?

- That's a good question.

So one of the factors in that is usually seeing how productive they are or if there have been any disease issues.

But usually I like to kind of aim for every three to five years, especially if they're starting to get a little less productive and aren't performing as well as they normally do is to replace those plants out every three to five years.

If they are still doing well, it's still a good idea about every five or six years to swap those out because it helps increase vigor in general.

- Okay, so in commercial strawberry that like an annual system and take those out of the ground every year and put them back into the ground every year?

- Well, I'm not sure if they do it annually, but they yeah, do a replacement of their strawberries pretty regularly.

- Great.

So Abi, we have another question that's come in about pruning and about how you would go about pruning some of your fruit trees this year.

And I think you have a little bit of a video that you're gonna show, - Yeah.

- About how to think about pruning some of our different trees.

- Yeah, so one of the questions that I get a lot is how do you prevent damage to your trees when you are pruning a larger branch out, how do you prevent that bark damage?

And I wanted to comment and recommend the three cut method and that's a really nice way to kind of reduce damage.

So once you've selected a branch, you wanna that branch a couple inches away from either the lateral branch or from the trunk itself.

And then you kind of prune it over the top of it like two inches past that so that the weight of that branch is not gonna rip that bark from underneath, it's gonna be stopped where you made that cut and then you cut the rest of that out and so you have a really nice clean pruning cut as a result.

- Yeah so what happens if you don't get a nice, clean pruning cut, for example if you're using a pole saw or something like that?

Can that lead to disease problems?

- Yeah, so the more kind of damage to bark, the less of a clean cut there is.

You can damage that kind of branch collar, which is where all the kind of compounds that help callous over the branch cuts are.

It's what the tree uses to heal itself well.

So if you cause more damage to that, it takes longer for it to heal, it can open up a greater wound for pathogens to get in and infect your tree.

So overall it can impede healing and also be a risk of entry of pathogens.

- Yeah and how much longer can people prune their fruit trees?

We actually have a caller that says their apple tree had already started to bud out.

Could they, well that's a two part question.

Could they still prune the tree and then when should it be sprayed for worms and what is a less toxic?

- So that is a good, so in terms of should they still prune, in general for fruit trees, fruit trees are at risk for so many different types of pathogens, bacterial and fungal pathogens.

I would hesitate if it started to butt out from pruning it right now.

Unless you have a really problematic component that you want to remove, I would say it's better to wait until the dormant season to do that.

I would say we've gotten a little bit past that pruning ideal threshold now at this time of year.

In terms of treating for worms and I'm assuming you mean codling moths, their larvae, the little caterpillars are the common kind of worms that are found in those apples.

We have really good resources at our Western Ag Research Center website.

So if you go to Western Ag Research Center, MSU extension or you can send me an email, they have really good recommendations for as the variety of different treatment methods you can use for codling moth control.

But the timing usually depends on, they have a degree day calculator, so it depends on the degree days and whether that moth is present during that time.

You have to time that application really well to catch that ideal timing to impact those pests.

There are also mechanical methods, and we've talked about this in the past, where using kind of corrugated cardboard in a couple of sections around the base of the tree, especially in about a few weeks when those larvae become active and are finding their way up, that can capture them and then you just destroy those pieces of cardboard because they're gonna try and hunker down in those.

But that's kind of a later on in the summer strategy.

- Yeah, the cardboard definitely helped with my codling moth problem last year.

It did actually clean it up.

I'm gonna hopefully clean up some more of the codling moths this year.

Question for Karl and Jamie, where do you, where and how do you learn to produce malt and is there something that can be done by the home brewer?

How does a home brewer become involved in thinking about malt and learning malting process?

- I'm a member of the craft malt organization, which is a huge resource if you are looking into malting and that, I would highly recommend that.

That's where most of what I would say the technical side of malting, where I learned that from.

They actually put on an annual course to take in that.

So that's one thing.

There's a lot of resources on their website as well.

As well as interaction among members there too for questions that come up in that too.

So yeah, definitely.

You can always, we always are, people are calling and asking us questions and that as well and we love to do that and people stop by and wanna see how it's done.

So yeah, we are, we are always welcome to that too.

But yeah.

- Great, thank you.

So I've got a few more questions to see if I can organize them here a little bit.

So we have one question, a Helena caller is asking if it's a good idea to use shredded office paper in her garden to prevent weeds.

I kind of think the weeds will go between the shredded paper and I think it'll sink, it won't be a mulch with much volume to it for very long would be my fear with that one.

- I would agree with that.

I think straw might work a little bit better than that.

But if it's a kind of a permanent garden like a perennial bed or something like that, wood chips are among the best type of mulch to use.

But in terms of shredded paper, I'd worry about that making a little bit of a mess to kind of just coating the top of the soil.

- Yep and then we have a few, couple quick questions for Jamie and Karl.

What diseases, pressures do you have to worry about in barley and do you have any weed?

I'll add one on there.

What weed problems do you have in barley or dealing with weeds?

What are the big disease pressures and weed pressures in terms of barley production?

- One of the things that currently we're dealing with is wild oats.

And wild oats is developing resistance to a herbicide.

So that's an ongoing issue.

Works in how we struggle with that and manage that through rotation, crop rotations and that sort of thing.

The other thing would be head scab, some of those types of issues.

Bomotoxin is a very monitored in malt barley as well.

It certainly has a criteria that it won't meet malt specifications, gets cut out.

So those are some of the things that we, other broadleaf weeds are a little easier to contend with and that and those things.

But the upcoming one that just seems to be quite a bit tougher to deal with is wild oats.

- Yeah, wild oats and barley have gone together.

Fairfield Bench in Montana is right the epicenter of really herbicide resistant wild oats in Montana and we do see that more and more, certain herbicides like Axial just aren't working on wild oats like they used to.

And there's fewer choices in barley compared to wheat for some of those in crop herbicides.

So we actually do have quite a few research projects in plant sciences looking at how to manage wild oats in a lot of our different cropping systems.

One thing we actually did a few years ago was we took, I think we used Levina and we just cut it off as a hay barley early in the season, which took that wild oat with it before the seed was produced.

So that was one way of preventing it.

But forage versus malt or forage versus grain, there's a big economic difference in that outcome, outcome in that one.

So I hear a lot about Don, Don Mycotoxin.

And so what is Don?

- That's what he was talking about.

So that it's called scab, but it's caused by a fusarium, fusarium headlights, another name for it.

So it's just a fungus that infects the head.

It doesn't really make the plant that sick, it kinda looks yucky, but the main thing is the fusarium creates this toxin and it's toxic to people and livestock and it has a very, very low, I think it needs to be lower than one part per million of the Don.

And so it's a issue.

It can be rejected if the Don is too high.

But there's things that we can do about it.

For example, not watering the head, cutting off irrigation before it really heads can really help.

And usually, a lot of times our weather's too cool for it to really get going too.

So it requires wet, warmer climate than we normally have.

- Oh, okay, yep.

So does the irrigation timing in preventing disease make a really big difference in barley production?

- Certainly.

Certainly, yes, yes.

- So do you irrigate in the day or the night or how does that generally work?

- For us it's typically a timing as far as plant development and when is the time.

So we generally in irrigating a crop tend to build that soil moisture up early with the anticipation of cutting off in a time where we wouldn't want it to happen anymore.

So we'll build moisture early during plant development, but once we try and get to a term we would use as soft dough in those areas in the actual barley kernel, it'd be like then we are really starting to taper off irrigation in anticipation of those things coming together where it could be a possibility.

So yeah, certainly trying to keep all of those things aware in what you're trying to do and produce a good crop, yeah.

- Thanks, alright Joel, in the last few seconds, this caller wants to know how is Montana's employment growth compared to other neighboring states?

- Oh yeah and a lot of times we're majoring from kind of pre pandemic to now, so Montana's done much better than North Dakota and Wyoming and some better than South Dakota, but not nearly as good as Idaho.

And really what's happened is a lot of people have moved to Montana and they're working here.

So that's where we've gained all our workers.

- Okay, great.

Well I'd like to thank everyone for joining tonight, Karl, for being our special guest and telling us all about malt barley.

And Jamie, thanks for informing us and to the rest of the panel.

Next week, I will also be your host here in the studio and we're gonna have another look at Organic Agriculture with John Wicks, the owner of Tiber Ridge Organics up by Ledger.

So join us next week, bye.

- [Narrator] Resources, visit Montana pbs.org/aglive.

(warm music) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] "Montana Ag Live" is made possible by the Montana Department of Agriculture, MSU Extension, The MSU Ag Experiment Station of the College of Agriculture, the Montana Wheat & Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery & Landscaping, and the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

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