- [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 and Landscaping, and the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

(guitar music) - Welcome everyone to another episode of Montana Ag Live, coming to you live from the KUSM studios on the campus of Montana State University.

My name's Tim Seipel, I'm your host tonight and we have a great panel organized to talk about horticulture, to talk about organic agriculture, to talk about all our spring gardening needs.

Tonight, our special guest, I'll introduce the panel, we'll go from left to right.

Over here we have Perry Miller, he's our Cropping Systems professor.

Next to him, our special guest, John Wick from Tiber Organics.

He's gonna tell us all about his organic operation up near ledger, and all his crop health and crop diversity.

We have Mac Burgess tonight to answer all your very, very challenging and difficult horticultural questions about, especially in vegetable gardening.

And we have Abi Saeed, our horticulture specialist, and she's gonna tell us all about all the different issues we're gonna face this spring when we get to it.

So, you guys know how it works.

Call in with your live questions, get us some questions to the panel.

And I'm gonna come back to you John, tell us about Tiber or Ridge Organics and your organic operation.

- Yeah, so I started out farming after my dad passed away and kind of did things the way he had been doing it for about 10 years and got interested in some organic agriculture and took out some CRP and just dove kind of right in without really knowing very much and learned quite a bit.

But I ended up kind of falling in love with that kind of agriculture and farming that way and decided to convert the whole farm to organic and try different experiments every year and really love growing cover crops.

- So you got interested in organic agriculture, why?

And then I want to hear about the CRP story, how that worked.

- Yeah, that was a challenge.

Yeah, I guess we were just kinda struggling as a small family farm and you know, it was hard to pay the bills.

And so we were looking at different like niche markets to try and get ahead or get even.

And so we looked into the organic and I just kind of was having a little more fun and then seeing, you know, the return on those acres and the mitigating that risk a little bit was just really appealing and just fun learning all these different things about soil health.

And the CRP was a little challenging to get into that.

I think it was actually easier to transition already in production ground.

I struggled with alfalfa breaking that up and the grass and you know, there's still patches out there where it's, alfalfa pretty thick, so that's a challenge.

And really dry and I don't know if we had the best cover or CRP mix, you know, back when we put it in, it was in CRP for about 20 years, so.

- Okay.

- Long time.

- Alright, thanks.

We're gonna come back and ask you some more questions.

I was remiss I forgot to introduce our phone operators tonight.

We have Cheryl Bennett and Candace Lamoury who are answering our phones tonight, so please be sure to call in and keep them both busy on the phone lines.

Okay, so, well we have a question that did come in and it's actually about Kernza.

And this was a little bit related to last week's episode where we talked about malt barley.

So here at MSU, Jamie Sherman, who was on last week, has been working on Kernza beer brewing, and this caller wanted to know what is Kernza and can it be grown in Montana?

I'll let you handle that one Perry.

- Okay, so Kernza is, it's the type of perennial wheat and it's a hybrid between, well, it's got some genetic cross between intermediate wheat grass and conventional wheat.

And there's different ways to arrive at this perennial wheat.

The Kernza type was actually arrived at by starting with the perennial grass intermediate wheat and trying to inter-grass wheat genes into that to get larger seeds.

So it's essentially grass seed, but it's, you know, you want larger seeds that start to look a little bit like wheat.

So yeah, it can be grown.

We are growing some at our research farm here at Bozeman, getting some experience with it.

It was a little more challenging to establish than I've, you know, I've grown lots of different crops and lots of different perennials and this one for whatever reason was more challenging than others.

So, but we'll see how, that's why I'm excited to see how it stools this year and if you know what kind of heads and what kind of seed production we get.

- Yep, if we could really get it to yield it would be an amazing breakthrough because all our crops that we eat now, corn, rice, wheat, all of them are annual crops and it requires all this disturbance So when, if we get there, could make it in the future.

- Sounds good, right?

- Yep.

But it's still at its heart is kind of like grass seed production and so with grass seed production, you usually have one or two really good seed years and then it's grass after that.

So it's gonna have to be some hybrid forage/grain market for some time I think.

- I mean there's a fundamental physiological limitation there when a plant only makes so much sugar and it either chooses to put it in its roots and survive or make seed with it and you kind of can't do a lot of both.

Yeah, right?

- How many years do you usually get out of one seeding of the Kernza?

- So, that's a good question because it can actually live a long time, especially if our plots are an example.

It's not a very uniform plant type.

Like we've got everything that looks like grass to actual plants that looked like they had little wheat seeds on them.

And so I don't know how uniform it is, it's like more like a population, but I think that grass is gonna be there for a long time.

I'm, but so that grain harvest phase, I don't quite know how that's going to go, but if it, I used to be in grass seed production and so we usually hope to get, you know, two good seed production years and after that it gets so sortbound that it just doesn't wanna throw heads.

Then there's different ways of trying to stimulate that head development, but, so yeah, so I guess the answer is I really don't know.

I'm just trying to, you know, deduce from what I know.

- There's some kind of physical disturbance, like light tillage, sort of one of those?

- That means?

Yeah.

Rough stand renovation can do that.

- I wonder if that diversity and form is an advantage in some sense in the long term.

- Maybe.

Yeah, maybe.

- Survival or... - Yeah.

- [Tim] John, tell us about your rotations on your farm.

What crops do you grow and what kind of rotations do you have across your different fields?

- So I grow a lot of lentils.

Every couple years I do some chickpeas, barley, spring wheat, durum.

I've tried, I'm not much of an oil seed farmer.

I've tried flax mustard but never really have a good year.

And kind of the rotation then I'll do like an eight to 12 way cover crop mix in like a fallow year.

And usually that I'm doing about a quarter of the acres in that.

And I really just kind of really keep an eye out when I'm out working and see like, all right, here's an issue I'm seeing in the field, like a cover crop would help with this or this crop might help it kind of control.

So it's not a set rotation.

Like a lot of people get into a five or seven year set rotation, which I think is really a good thing management wise.

But I've been kind of jumping all over while staying in the same, you know, plant back restrictions with lentils and things and then planting out the next year's crops, what'll kind of be a good rotation there.

So it jumps around a lot, but it's kind of a management nightmare to kind of pick, but in some chaos it works out.

- [Tim] Yep, so on the screen right now we have a picture of an earthworm on there.

So do you want to tell us about how, well, what the earthworms doing here and then maybe about how you're thinking about managing your soil health?

- Yeah, so this was a cover crop mix.

It was like a, it was a really diverse mix and it did really well and, like, I had never seen an earthworm on the farm and I was kind of digging around to see the organic matter that had broke down and I found earthworms all over the place and it was just really interesting to see.

So I kind of thought I was on the right path.

And then that crop, that one we, I think in one year we about raised that organic matter percentage just under 1% and we didn't graze it or anything like we usually do.

And we left everything stand and then worked it in with a disc.

And this is the mix kinda in the end in the fall when it was kind of breaking down.

And the reason we didn't graze this one was there was no fences or water available.

So I just kind of thought, well, we'll see what happens.

And it really helped with the water holding capacity and just the pores in the soil.

So it was really fun to see that happen.

And so now I try and graze off a little less maybe than I usually did.

We try and hit about 30% left standing, but we, you know, sometimes you go a little over that and especially if the cows need feeds, so.

- I think I see some warm season crops in that cover crop mix.

When would you, when's the latest you'd seed something like that?

- I've seeded middle of June and even, I think I seeded one of the first years was the weekend before the 4th of July and we just got a really timely rain and it did really well.

But like the millet and the red clover, and, well, mainly the red clover like that won't germinate for a while.

So a lot of times I think that gets choked out.

But I like to have 'em in like first week of June, if not before.

- Yep.

- So you're up by Tiber, which is Ty Reservoir.

And when I go across the state I ask people a lot about what cover crops they're using and maybe what forage crops that they have in there.

And you actually see big differences in the cooler highs Southwest Valleys, you don't see very little C 4 grass, and Perry has failed a number of times at growing C 4 grasses in the cooler areas of Montana.

So what do you use?

- I really look at, you know, some of my soil tests and see what my carbon and nitrogen ratios are and what maybe some of the needs are, and then using a smart mix calculator online and kind of building up a mix that'll work.

But I really like sorghum stand grass, sunflowers, red clover, turnip radish, and you know, grazing corn.

I've thrown pumpkins in the mix before and try weird things, and it's just, it's really fun to watch which ones are gonna grow and which ones don't.

- [Perry] You're not exactly in a high rainfall area?

- [John] No, I think, yeah, 11 inches rainier, it's about as dry... - Are you dry land?

- Yep.

- This is all dry land.

- Yeah, all dry land.

Yep.

So you really depend on the rain.

The last four years we've been in kind of a drought and the cover crops really didn't even germinate until the fall when we got a rain at harvest.

So it was kind of a wasted, wasted seed there, but you gotta try for it, I guess.

- You mentioned chickpeas is one of your crops.

I'd like to hear something about that before the evening's out because that's a tough one to do organically, so.

- Yeah, they're really tricky.

I put flax with them that help with the Ascochyta and then just some heavier seed rates.

But I don't think I go quite as heavy as some of the conventional guys might be doing.

I go about 120 pounds an acre and they seem to do all right.

They do a little bit better with that flax as helping it compete, but you know, the harvesting is the main issue they get, you know, they're wet, I've harvested 'em after snow.

So we try and swath them down and go through, but I'm kind of tempted to use that stripper header if they're tall enough 'cause but that's pretty short.

- Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, interesting.

Alright, so we have a question Abi, and this is a follow up about cardboard for moths.

So we talked last week in the show a little bit about using cardboard around our fruit trees to catch the coddling moths as they go up.

And this color was wondering what side of the tree or where on the tree that cardboard should be placed?

- Yeah, so the best spot, so what you're doing with these, with this cardboard and when you do it, it's about late May, kind of the end of May, that's when they're traveling up to find a spot to kind of pupate.

And so what you're trying to mimic, because they'll find cracks and crevices inside the trunk of the tree to nest.

You want the corrugated part on the inside and they're gonna kind of find a spot in there in those kind of ridges and they're gonna hunker down on there.

And so putting two bands of that, especially if you have larger trees that are harder to kind of manage with insecticide applications, this can be a weight that you can really reduce your populations over time.

And then you can do another one later in the summer, another set of cardboard to catch the next set.

- So the idea is this is a trap.

- Yeah, just a trap it off.

Yeah, reducing the population.

- When would you put it on?

When would you take it off?

- Usually at the end of May and then whenever you kind of see the movement when it fills up, you can replace that and swap it off again in July or so.

- Because codling moths become a pest on apples when the fruit is formed and they're gonna crawl up on there and... - Absolutely.

- Eat their way in and lay their eggs.

- And no one likes to see those kind of, yeah, wormy apples.

- Okay, thank you Abby.

Hope we get some good apples this year in the Gallatin Valley.

So this the whole panel can maybe put their input on.

So we have a caller from Shepherd who is wondering if commercial fertilizer is better than natural for fertilizer i.e.

cow or sheep manure.

And if so, what kind of commercial fertilizer or type of manure should we be putting on our gardens?

- That's a big question.

- That is a big question.

- Commercial fertilizers generally speaking are immediately available, and inexpensive and... - They may be more uniform in their nutrient.

- They're very uniform.

Yeah.

You know, and nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, all the micronutrients, they've all got a complex story.

We could have an entire semester one class about this.

- So when we think about that, so for example, you know, some manure might have more potassium, more phosphorus and have less nitrogen in them, or compost out of our garden tends to have way more potassium, way more phosphorous but not have so much nitrogen.

If I wanted to supplement my nitrogen a little bit, 'cause that's my biggest nutrient limitation, my home garden, is chicken manure, horse Is there one that provides more nitrogen in these contexts?

- I think they're all pretty balanced nitrogen versus phosphorus ratio.

So that's the challenge is, is getting enough nitrogen on without overloading the phosphorus with a manure source.

So, and I think it's important to have a compost of manure if you wanna get some timely nutrient release.

Otherwise it's gonna do all that bid on, you know, while it's sitting on your land, so.

- Yep.

And, but then you also have to be very careful from where your manure comes from.

You just can't take any horse manure or cow manure because they may have eaten forage that was treated with certain herbicides, which then passes through, comes out into the manure and causes major herbicide injury in garden.

- That's absolutely a concern.

I would be extremely hesitant to use any locally sourced manure unless you really know where it's coming from and where all the feed for those animals is coming from and you trust that person that they know what they're doing.

- Yeah.

- And if you're not sure, you can do a little bioassay too.

You can use some peas or something like that and implant it and see if it shows those symptoms of herbicide injury.

So if you're not sure where it's coming from and you kind of wanna see, that could be a way to... - You know, as far as products you might buy in a garden center that come in a bag, if there's any appreciable nutrient content, they oftentimes will have a number just like a fertilizer bag.

So I think of the common chicken manure product that's available that's 3, 2, 2.

3% nitrogen, 2% phosphorus, 2% potassium, you know, and fertilizers come in various blends too.

So if you want to get particular about it, you should do a soil test and respond with the particular nutrients.

And it would be easier to go wrong being haphazard with chemical fertilizers for sure.

You could apply way too much really easily.

- Yeah.

Burn things right up.

- I think generally speaking in moderate doses manure or composted (indistinct) other than the herbicide issues, you could add this much or this much and you're not gonna, you might waste a little bit of money, but you're not gonna hurt anything probably.

But nitrogen is often the limiting factor.

- [Tim] Yeah.

- I've looked at spreading manure from feedlot and then chicken litter.

And that's been my hesitation is just what is that animal eating that's gonna be left behind?

So I've been taking my time on it, but... - [Mac] Well, on your scale, how many truckloads would you need?

- And I found some local places, but the trucking is definitely the, and how many tons per acre that need to go on is really, you know, you'd have to pick, right, this field this year and move throughout and it's kind of a... - [Tim] But John, you were saying you were using some compost teas.

Describe that.

Tell us what a compost tea is and how you kind of go about putting this down.

- So the stuff that I'm using is a compost that is sifted that comes from South Dakota Soil Works LLC.

And basically instead of spreading all that large tonnage out over every acre, we're extracting the biology using a extractor.

And basically we're pumping oxygen in to extract the biology from the compost and then getting a really concentrated extract out of it.

And that is going down right in the drill in the furrow.

And this picture of that extractor that I have, and it just bubbles for about 20 minutes and it'll bring water in and out at the same rate.

So you just kind of punch in, you know, how you're gonna do it and then you put the pounds in and then I fill that blue tank in the back and go out and it's a little more shelf stable, I guess, than a tea, so it gives you a little bit of time to go.

You probably have two days to get it on, but if it sits in your tank, you have to bubble it 'cause it still has some silt and it can kind of cause, you know, little tubes to plug.

But it's a really efficient way to do it.

This year we're mixing, I'm doing humic and compost together.

A producer up by me, Corey Hawks said it's a little easier to get it out on the ground, so he kind of told me the ratio he's using and so we're gonna try and put it down right through the air system on the drill.

And so I think that'll be a little less labor intensive and less things to go wrong.

- Interesting.

Thanks.

Perry or anyone, humic acid.

I hear a lot about humic acid, but I don't really know how it fits into our, how we understand soil and soil biology.

- Soil biology is a complicated thing.

Soil organic matter is a complicated thing.

Humic acid is supposed to be a particular fraction of soil organic matter.

I'm not a soil expert, right?

This is where we need Clain Jones or somebody on the show.

Well, Mac, you teach some of this stuff.

- [Mac] A little bit.

- Yeah, I know.

It is complicated stuff.

- Humic acid isn't just one thing.

There's a whole bunch of different ones and they're fairly stable.

- And the soil carbon world is actually learning that, you know, the way you get humic acid is not maybe as representative as but for its function in the soil.

So there's a lot of exploration going on right now relative to soil, carbon soil, organic matter, soil biology, various biological additives, so.

- Probably an important component of, you know, to use a colloquial term, kind of the glue that holds the soil structure together.

Not actively participating rapidly in nutrient cycling, but, you know, maybe creating structure and habitat for other organisms to do.

- Helping to build the sponge, right?

- Yep.

Exactly.

- Great.

Thanks.

Okay, so we have some call, we have some questions that have come in for you Abi.

We have an Anaconda caller who would like to know how much water should they put on their lawn, should it be watered all at once, once a week or spread out through the week?

- Awesome.

Great question.

So lawns, traditionally, most of our common cool season grasses for turf grass lawns, usually around this time of year in the spring and the fall usually require about one to one and a half inches of water per week.

And the best way to water your lawn in terms of kind of the spread is to have deep but infrequent watering.

So you wanna do it maybe twice a week, not more than that.

Because when you do that, you're encouraging that moisture to go down deeper into the soil and that encourages the root system of the turf grass to go down deeper.

It makes it more resilient to drought and things like that.

So in springtime you're aiming for one to one and a half inches and that's including precipitation.

So keep track of the precipitation.

And then in those hot summer months, that's when you might need to up it to about two inches.

But one inch around now, once or twice a week usually.

- So I don't know about Anaconda, but I've been reading you in the newspaper, Bozeman, you know, but our closed basin and our looming water shortage and potential watering restrictions on grass, how is that going to factor into this?

- It can, so that is a good point.

A lot of our turf grasses that we use in lawns, some of them are more kind of water intensive than others in Kentucky bluegrass is an example of that.

It needs almost double the amount of water as some of these other turf grasses and fine fescues, like creeping red fescue and chewing fescues require less than that.

So if people are concerned about that, I'm thinking like if people wanna transition their lawn over to something that's going to require less water, that's an important consideration.

Other things to do would be reducing your overall area of lawn that you have.

But that can be a major consideration because there is, you know, we are going to be restricted in water in general.

We're not able to keep up with just the population and being able to meet those water needs.

So we need to think creatively in terms of landscaping that doesn't require very much additional irrigation.

- I'm gonna fess up to being a terrible steward of my lawn, but... - Me too.

- Me too.

- I don't usually water it.

- Yeah, me neither.

- And it looks presentable.

I mow it, I have fertilized it not three times a year, but it usually doesn't seem to me in here in Bozeman and cooler climate.

And we have fairly heavy soils, you know, usually well into June, if not July, before it starts to slow down.

And I welcome not mowing.

- Exactly.

- For a while.

- And then it, and and then it turns brown and it doesn't die.

- No.

- It's just, you know, and then it comes back in the fall.

It doesn't require water unless you want it to be green and keep mowing, right?

- Yeah.

- And then you know, if you want it to be healthy, you should probably fertilize it too.

And that's a... - Yeah.

Taking care of your lawn, it's a lot of work.

- Keep the lawnmowers busy.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- John, we have a question that came in and they were wondering about what do you, do you do regenerative agriculture, what do you think of regenerative agriculture?

And are you involved in these regenerative agriculture markets that are out there?

- Yes, so I do, I think, you know, regenerative agriculture is anything that is making, focusing on soil health and practices that are building soil health.

I do have a regenerative organic certification that I have had for two years now and the only contract I've had with it is for Patagonia provisions.

We're doing a pasta line this year, so I'm gonna be drawing some durum from them.

And it's usually a couple percent on top of an organic price is kind of what their, the premium should be for that.

I have mixed feelings about it, you know, not being a USDA label and you know, I think that that is, maybe the customer doesn't trust in that label as much.

- Are there particular practices that they require of you to earn that?

- Yeah, the one that I have has, like animal welfare is a big one.

Employee wellbeing and then, you know, minimal, minimal tillage.

So I usually, I do one pre-pass tillage with a Kelly Diamond.

They call it a harrow, but it's more of a disc, but, so I think we have a video of that, but, so it's just really low disturbance, low tillage and there's, yeah, here's that.

It goes, it's quite an interesting piece of equipment and in dry it'll actually pull weeds out if it's to try to get the discs into the ground, but... And really low maintenance machine and really a time effective piece of equipment.

But, so that's one of the lower, like things you have to do is low tillage and cover cropping and there's quite a few things that they want you to check off, but...

So it was kind of fun and it was neat learning all that.

But I don't know, I'd like there to be USDA label for something like that or just, you know, help bring organic, more focused on these regenerative practices.

- And maybe you and Perry, you guys could speak to that.

So, or the USDA organic label is defined by a set of practices inspections that go, how does that differ from these regenerative certifications that we have out there?

- So regenerative still requires a certification of some sort, so you're still dealing with an inspector, but the flexibility seems quite significant with regenerative ag compared to organic.

It's not such a rigid set of rules that you operate with and it does consider your particular context and your farm, you know, particular management challenges that you have on your particular farm.

Those, you know, here you're allowed to address those in ways that you might not be allowed to in an organic.

But yours is more complicated 'cause you're dealing with both, right?

This is over top of the organic certification.

- Yeah.

So to even to get considered for this, you have to have the USDA organic certification and then that's kind of where it all starts.

And it's different, there's no real time, you know, you don't have to be doing it for the 36 months like you would on the organic.

So I think they're still kind of learning what they want, but the reason I chose, there's other certifiers out there that'll certify convention ground is regenerative too.

So it's kind of interesting to watch all these things kinda shape up and see where they're gonna go.

- Yeah, it's separate streams and some of the farmers I've talked about or talked with on the conventional side, they don't really seem that excited about the premiums so much as learning more about their system and how to be more self-reliant with their own soil and to reduce costs and be more profitable that way.

- And that's the, you know, the interesting thing I think is that, you know, organic producers and these practices can be used on either, you know, operation and they save you a lot of money and you know, once you start learning the benefits of all these things and what they're actually doing, it's, you know, they're a lot more beneficial than just like choking out weeds, you know.

- Okay, Mac, I got a question for you.

The caller from Fort Benton is wondering if using ducks or even a fox, I don't know what, it can be an alternative to control snails and grasshoppers.

- I think ducks would probably eat snails and grasshoppers.

Ducks might also eat your baby cabbage plants.

I've heard of people who can, I'm assuming this is a garden.

- [Tim] Yeah, probably.

- Yeah.

I'm not aware of folks deploying ducks intentionally for insect management.

- In Asian rice they do.

But it's in rice paddies where the ducks can eat some of the insects but probably the ducks don't eat as much of your garden.

- Yeah, chickens, in my experience, when the chickens have gotten into the garden, it has not gone well with regards to the vegetables or the tomatoes anyways.

Chickens like tomatoes.

- Yep.

Okay.

We have a follow up question.

Caller from Brady was wondering if you work manure into the soil, lay it on the soil or leave it or on top?

They're concerned that there will be soil loss if they turn it under.

What should they do?

And I'm not, they're calling from Brady, so they could be dry land wheat, they could be an irrigated, we don't really have much in there but John, what do you do with manure or inorganic situations?

Do we try to work manure in?

Do we... - I would.

If I was planning to do it, I would top dress it and then I would work it in just to help beat up how everything would break down.

But you could leave it on top and let break down slowly.

Just might take a little more time.

- I think you'd lose at least half your nitrogen if you don't work it in.

- So if you didn't work it in basically that nitrogen that's in there becomes, goes out into the atmosphere, blows away?

Is that what... - You're in a pretty windy place too.

The manure itself blow away if it's not... (all laughing) - It might.

- And mind you, that would be true of urea as well too, right?

Any fertilizer source where most of the nitrogen is an ammonium form, especially on our higher pH soils if it's on the surface and doesn't get a lot of water all at once.

It's likely to volatilize and blow away and come down on somebody else's farm.

- Yeah, we even have to watch when we do tillage with that wind to, some days you just can't get anything done 'cause all your topsoil would be gone, so.

- Yeah.

Okay.

Abi maybe a question from you caller from Amanda Kanda has a female dog that urinates on the lawn and it probably leaves dead spots or highly fertilized spots in the lawn at least sometimes.

What can they do to keep the grass alive?

- That's a really tough question.

I mean, there are few strategies just because just the high nitrogen content of the urine can turn those grassy patches into like the yellowish brown sections.

But a few strategies to reduce that could be to make sure that your dog, like if you have sections of your landscape to make sure that she's not going to the same spot over and over again.

But other than diluting, so once they urinate, watering your lawn and diluting that can help kind of reduce how much, you know, browning occurs of your lawn.

But there aren't too many great strategies outside of, because it's gonna keep happening as they're gonna keep urinating on the lawn.

- And so those dead spots are occurring because basically there's the ni... - You're burning them.

- It's burning it.

If it's burning the roots, it's burning everything with that high nitrogen.

- And diluting it with some water.

Like if you see the spot you can just take a little hose out and just water it down.

It will reduce that potentially and kind of limit the amount.

But that's a difficult, there isn't a nice solution for that.

- So the best, I have dogs, right?

And so every spring I've got these brown patches from the female dogs.

The male, that doesn't seem to be an issue.

And I don't know why that is, maybe it's just a different pattern, but how do I reclaim those patches?

It seems like by the end of the summer they're green again, but it takes a long time for those patches.

And I mean, so is it really just about watering?

- I mean yeah, just diluting that because as long as that high nitrogen content is there, it's kind of burnt it and your grass will slowly recover and just spread into that and fill in those areas.

You can encourage that by overeating.

But any kind of grass that is gonna be exposed to that large concentration of urine is gonna get brown.

- That'd be an interesting one to pull a soil core and have it analyzed and see what's there.

But I imagine it's just high salinity from all, you know, everything, all the salts, right?

- But then I end up with these bright green circles all over the place by the end of the summer, right?

- [Abi] Yeah, they're filling in.

- Actually if you look at our lawn right now, you can see we're probably nitrogen limited because it's really short.

But then where the dog is urinated it's quite a bit taller in spots.

Okay, Abi, another caller, caller had out lilac removed from the lawn.

They're putting in a building in that area and are wondering if the leftover roots will continue to sucker and become a problem.

- I mean it depends on how much of the lilac you removed.

If you remove the good amount and you dug it out, lilac, I haven't seen to be something that will really prolifically sucker around if you've removed the majority of it.

If you're putting a building in, like depending on the kind, I mean, I wouldn't worry too much about that if you've removed the majority of that root system.

- Yeah, I would think so.

Lilacs don't, yeah, they're not as bad.

- They're not like aspens and things like that that are just gonna pop up all over the place.

- Push the sidewalk up.

- Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

- Don't seem to be stuff.

- And if you are interested in trees, this is a perfect opportunity.

We have our Gardening in Montana spring workshop that's coming up in May 18th.

And so we're gonna have a focus on trees for this workshop.

And so if you are interested in, we have a variety of cool topics including, you know, container gardening and trees, tree issues, tree recommendations for Montana, beekeeping, planting design.

So if you are interested, it's on May 18th, it's gonna be at Museum of the Rockies, it's $20 that includes lunch and the QR code should be scannable or you can go to bit.ly/monte- I think the, yeah, MSU 2024 gardening.

And if you can't get a hold of that, please send me an email and I'll send you a link.

But we have that coming up in a couple of weeks.

- Great.

Thanks, it'll be great.

I bet everyone will learn a lot.

Okay, we had a follow up question for John and Perry and you guys mentioned stripper headers.

Caller wants to know what is the stripper header?

Do you use it in regenerative agriculture and what kind of are the advantages of a stripper header?

- Yeah, I, so a stripper header is kind of a, it's got all these blades with these fingers that rip the head of the wheat, kind of strips it off the stem and it goes into the combine just the head.

So you're really only thrashing the head of it.

And so you're lot better on your machine.

You're not burning as much fuel and you're leaving like a large amount of the stem there to catch snow, to shade the ground and just provide cover.

And you can, since you're not thrashing the whole stem, you can go a lot faster.

And it's just, they have a lot of benefits in regenerative agriculture and they're really fun to use and there's not much to 'em, so.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, no, I was actually surprised to hear that you were using 'em in organic agriculture.

'Cause they're a big deal in no-till systems.

I think this is actually gonna be the next big game changer for no-till systems because it's changing on the microclimate of what's going on on the landscape in a very profound way by reducing evaporation, reducing wind speed, you know, increasing water use efficiency.

So we've been doing a study at the post farm where we just, we're not quite a stripper header, but we harvest our wheat pretty tall.

So we got tall versus short stubble.

And we have, over the last six years, we've got 16 comparisons where we can grow, compare the yields in tall stubble versus short stubble.

The yield has never been higher in short stubble.

And five of those 16 cases, it was higher in the tall stubble, presumably because of higher water use efficiency.

And in those five years that average 13% higher yield.

Well if it cost me less they harvest it, right, and I get more yield.

I mean this is, this is like, hmm, why wouldn't I do that?

- There's a grower up by us, he has a YouTube channel and stuff, Corey Falcon and he did a little video where the wind was howling like 70 miles an hour and he got down in the stubble and you could hear 'em talking and you couldn't hear the wind.

And so it was, yeah, they're really great for erosion and things like that.

- Does it make it hard to go back in and plant, right?

You have this really tall stubble that's out there and do you need different, do you need a different kind of drill?

Would would a hoe drill work or do you need a real disc drill?

- That's a good question.

Yeah.

The way that I'm doing it right now, I have a disc drill, but you still get like some things caught up in the opener there.

But really I'm doing that tillage pass with that disc before, so it's chopping everything pretty good.

And then you don't have any problems.

So I think if you were gonna be in tillage or organic, Odrill would be fine, but you might have find yourself dragging some bunches of stock eventually.

But this drill's pretty nice to cut through things.

- I think in no-till systems, that is the catch, right?

You probably do need a disc drill.

And so that's, you know, if you don't already have one, that's a pretty major purchase to go along with the stripper header.

So you get all the winds, but you're gonna have to change your seating method a little bit.

- And those disc drills are a lot of maintenance - Can be, can be.

- Yeah.

Another thing about the stripper header is they're quite a bit heavier than a regular header.

So you kind of, if anybody's thinking about buying one, they should be aware of the weight that their combine can handle.

So mine's a, I think 26 or 32 foot and you know, I've known guys that bought the big 36 or 40 footers and it's a lot for their combines, so.

- Thanks.

So we had a great question.

So Abi to you, we have a caller from, well we have two caller.

First a question from Missoula is wondering if she can use soil that's been dug up by ground squirrels in her garden.

Maybe Mac or Abi, you guys could answer that and then we'll come back and we'll talk to them about the next question.

- I mean if it was a, if it was like a perennial bed or something like that, I wouldn't worry too much.

But if it was a veggie garden, I might be concerned about potential disease issues.

But I would say I'm not too sure depending on the context, if I would use it in any kind of garden where you're growing food.

- Yeah, I might just throw it in the compost pile and dig it out a couple years later when it comes out.

- It is good to have had gophers, right?

(Mac laughing) - Yeah.

- Okay, Abi, a follow up.

Florence Kohler has wild roses that have taken over their lawn.

They want to know if there is an easier way to control them or if they have to take the hard way and dig them out themselves.

- That's gonna be hard.

I mean you can use herbicides, you can use, you know, a broadleaf herbicide potentially to try and manage it.

But for kind of woody plants, it's difficult.

You're gonna need to remove that, the woody material physically anyways.

So I would say you might need to use a combination of those two strategies to get a hold of that.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

- Yeah, I mean I think digging all those wild rows roots out, that's a battle that's not gonna be easily won or if it's even possible.

If you really want to get rid of 'em, herbicides probably the only way I'd really know how to get rid of them fully in that context.

And there are some broadleaf herbicides that people use on their lawns that would probably get the wild roses pretty, pretty well.

- So a few years ago when I was in Big Sandy that came across somebody who had this mutant type of wild rose that apparently came out of the Bear Palm Mountains and it has an orange blossom on it.

You know, usually roses are pink or yellow, but this has, it is orange and it's beautiful.

And so I have that in my yard and for one week, ah, it's fun to look at (all laughing) but it is spreading everywhere.

And so I'm constantly mowing, you know, chopping off stem.

- So does consistent mowing not keep it?

- Yeah, it does.

It slows it down pretty good, so.

- You know, I think so that's another, and you're a weeds person like having a healthy lawn.

Is or any crop isn't, you know, job number one in weed competition.

- [Tim] Yep.

- Mowing and... - [Abi] Yeah.

- Maybe letting your lawn being in a little higher too, getting that grass really dense in there.

But that, yeah, rose will always, yeah.

- When I want get rid of it, I dig it up and I give it to friends.

(all laughing) - I'll take some.

- There you go.

Yeah.

Alright, we have a caller, I don't know if we can answer this, maybe we will refer him to Stephen Vantassel.

Caller from Ronan is wondering how to get rid of voles in their pasture land.

- I think that's a Stephen Vantassel.

- Stephen Vantassel question.

He's Montana Department of Agriculture, the vertebrate control specialist.

You can find him on the internet and if you can't find him, reach out to us and we'll get you in contact with him.

I was just talking to him last week.

So we had a question that came in that's maybe a mix of garden and a crop.

And that is, can we grow cow peas, black eyed peas, or also sometimes called purple hull peas in Montana?

- Well we're gonna find out.

So Zach Miller actually over at the Western Ag Research Center over by Missoula has been playing with various early maturing lines of cow peas and actually gotten seed yield of several of them.

And so we've got a research project underway.

I've actually grown seed now twice at, you know, here at the post farmers.

It's a pretty cold environment, right?

So if I can do it here, you can do it probably just about anywhere in Montana.

I thought we were just being so incredibly innovative with this, you know, really drought, hearty, warm season cow pea.

And then I'm looking through the crop statistics for Montana when they came out in February and somebody in Sheridan County grew a whole quarter section of cow peas last year.

And so I actually, you know how small Montana is, I was able to actually find out who the grower was and called him up and we had a good visit and now he's growing 400 acres this year.

'Cause the first time it worked so well and he made, you know, made some good money from it.

So yeah, maybe it's more possible than - The the word cow peas, you think you feed 'em to cows, but that's the same species as a black eyed peas.

- Yeah, so his was black eyed pea.

So there's so many different bean types, but specifically the black eyed pea has pretty high value.

- Pretty high value food product there.

- Yeah, it is a high value food box.

- That's a warm season.

- Cow peas, black eyed peas and Purple Hut peas are not true beans to the genus Phaseolus, which is a bean from Central America.

Cow peas, black Eyed Peas, and those are actually an African legume that were originally domesticated in - [John] They're not peas either.

- And they're not pea's either.

And they're not peas either.

Yeah, so we don't have great names for them so yeah, But was it, so is the growing time needed, is it less than say a dry bean in Montana?

You know, we produce some dry beans.

- Yeah, it's similar to dry beans, right?

So very, very high heat requirements.

I don't think we even start to get any emergence until the soil's at least 60 degrees and then you worry about frost, right?

Because it's the growing points above ground.

So we've been fortunate, we had a little bit of frost last spring and it burned them up pretty good.

But you, two or three weeks later they grad, you know, they grew out of it and we've dodged some fall frosts and so we'll see.

We're gonna keep playing with them.

Yeah.

- I've grown them in a cover crop mix before.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

And I had Joseph from Timeless Seeds who was originally from Kenya and he was like, is that a cow pea in that cover crop mix?

I'm like, yeah.

And he got really excited so that was really fun.

- Imagine it's something that some breeding work would help with.

I know the dry beans have a weird interaction between photo period and nighttime temperatures that can control their flowering and you know, the days to flowering that are listed in variety descriptions or just all over the place in a place where it gets cold at night.

- One of the, just what, not to belabor cow pea here, but one of the reasons we're interested in them is they're pretty unique for producing an extra floral nectar.

So a nectar long before it flowers.

- And the extra fluoro nectaries can, the parasitoid wasp that attacks the wheat stem softly needs those extra floral nectaries to live or to get more nutrition out of it.

So that could be one of the advantages.

Yeah.

Okay, we have a couple questions.

Perry, these are all coming to you.

So first we have a caller from Shelby Huwan, is wondering how to dig up and transplant wild roses?

The second one comes from Perry from Mar Bora Sydney, Australia.

And that one is after your orange rose, after your orange roses bloom, what do you do with the rose hips and are they orange too?

- That's a great, I'll answer the last one first.

It doesn't produce any rose hips and I don't know why.

So it just blooms and you know, everything dries up and, yeah.

So it's not like a, you know, our conventional wild rose where you get that nice red berry.

Don't get anything like that.

So that's a great question.

So, well you probably have a better answer for what time of year to, you know, usually I try to go later in the fall when things are cool and yeah.

- Yeah, yeah.

Fall is one of the best times to transplant anything.

So yeah, I would dig it up usually, you know, probably at the end of September or so and find a new spot to put it, but... - [Perry] Could you do it this time of year?

Could you do it right now?

- You can, yeah.

You can definitely, if the soil is workable right now, you definitely can.

And also spring and fall are usually the most popular times to transplant, - So I used to grow tea roses and like they would die all the time.

- This is not the best safe for tea roses, no.

- This wild rose is, it's a hardy thing.

- Yeah.

Okay.

So we had a Bozeman caller who is wondering if free mulch that the city of Bozeman provides is safe to use not knowing if they had any sorts of disease issues or not.

And if so, where should they use it?

Garden trees, etc?

- Yeah, so if you're getting mulch from any kind of arborist or tree company or anything like that, it's usually safe to use.

They have some really good practices in place and there's very few diseases that can be transmitted through the wood chips that are that small in size.

And so, you know, they're usually not going to be mulching diseased trees and probably distributing that.

So if it's just, you know, wood chips like that it be safe to use and, yeah.

Absolutely.

- Okay, great.

So John, quickly someone was asking, you're a member of the Montana Organic Association and are there gonna be any MOA field days this summer and where should they maybe think about looking for those?

- Yeah, so we should, we're getting kind of the ball rolling.

I think we've got a meeting Tuesday on farm tours, but we should have a few in the, like we have a few tentatively planned maybe Bob Quinn's Institute and I've heard Darryl Licila might have one and we're looking for some other suggestions as well.

But those will be throughout the summer.

And what we're looking, I think we're gonna try and have six field days, so you can just check out the website and then the conference will be in early December and that's a really good event to network and meet people.

And you know, if you're interested in organic, it's a really fun community to come hang out and visit with everybody.

- [Perry] And good food.

- And good food, yeah.

- They do.

Montana Organic Association holds the prize for the best food of most meetings across the state every year.

So Abi, we're talking about tubers here.

We have a few minutes left.

What do you have here in front of us?

- Yeah, so these are sunchokes or Jerusalem artichokes, they're in the Sunflower family, Helianthus tuberosus.

And Mac and I and Tim were talking about this earlier, but this is a sunflower like plant.

So it's a really great pollinator plant.

But these tubers are edible, raw and cooked and one of the unique things is that their main carbohydrate source is inulin, not starch like potatoes.

I haven't tried them raw but I've had them cooked in like curries and stuff like that and they're pretty good.

And Max had experience growing them on the horticulture farm.

But I'm gonna experiment with this this year and see what happens.

- [Mac] So it's a perennial sunflower.

- Yeah, it's a perennial sunflower.

- Make great big tall flowers and then they go dormant over the winter and then this time of year you could dig one up and those looks like the roots are just starting to grow again.

But you could take that and clean it... - Absolutely.

- And cook it and eat it.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- I heard they give you gas.

(Abi laughing) Now what doesn't.

(all laughing) - [Tim] That's okay.

- But yeah, this is gonna be my experiment for this year.

- Yep.

Great.

So, okay, we have a couple more callers and a few more minutes here.

So Helena caller knows that people around town have chickens in small areas that are typically fed food scraps.

They would like to know if this will cause problems with the soil later on by feeding food scraps?

I don't... - I don't see... - Yeah, I don't think so.

I think it's all well digested by the chicken and comes out the other side.

- You've didn't feed any food scraps to chickens in my yard for many years.

- [Tim] Yep.

I've never had any.

- We have a pretty good garden there.

- Yep.

John, do you have any livestock on your operation?

- We have a few layer hens, but a lot of the animals that we integrate on the cover crops and the acres are leased to, I have rancher neighbors on each side of me so kind of just leased to them and then they can kind of deal with all the cattle, and we kinda have a time we like to put 'em in and so it works out pretty well for everybody.

We've had some feed value tests on those cover crops that came back pretty high.

I think they were 159 or something and so they were, they were pretty excited about that and their calves were a little fatter at shipping than they'd had been on average, so.

So it works out really well.

- Great.

- What kind of arrangement do you have with them?

- It we just... - is it just trading chores back and forth or is there actually money changing hands Up there?

- It's like a regular lease.

You know, I've heard people say you can get quite a bit more money out of a cover crop lease, but we also lease pasture to 'em so we just kinda keep it similar right there because it benefits my soil and benefits them.

And if everybody can kind of work together and have that, you know, that whole relationship working together, then it's really helpful for everybody.

- Great, thanks.

So we have a Billings caller.

Caller from Billings growing grapes.

Her day lilies have spread into her grape growing area.

What should she do?

- I mean, I would say dig them up and put them where you want them to be for the day lilies, if you wanna keep 'em, yeah.

Now is a really good time to divide your, you know, perennials and things like that.

So now is a good time to dig up your daily lilies, find a new spot to put them in, that's what I would do.

- Maybe plant some Jerusalem artichokes.

And some choke in there with the day lilies and see what's more competitive.

- Those are tough daily lilies.

'Cause I don't think you'd ever get day lilies going on my grapes.

- Yeah, no, that's probably much warmer in billings.

So, oh, we have another follow up question from Australia, are there any edible herbs that are good pollinator plants?

- Yes, there's a lot of edible herbs that are good pollinator plants.

Mint, anything in the mint family is an excellent pollinator plant.

Basil, you know, things like that.

Yeah, lots of herbs are really good pollinator plants.

- Okay, so... - Cilantro and dill both is and they flowers are fast.

- I can't think that isn't a good pollinator plant to be honest.

I'm trying to think of one in, yeah.

- Yep.

Okay, so we have a question.

Missoula caller who has a pasture that's filled with whitetop and they want to know how to control it using an organic method.

- That I don't know if I have an answer for.

That's not a weed that I see very often.

- Yeah, so whitetop is a perennial weed, super dense root rhizome.

It'll keep re germinating out of that underground rhizome over and over.

I'm not sure there's a super easy way to control it.

Have something, be super competitive, dig out those stands when you can and try to weaken those rhizomes I think is probably two of the best things that you could do to... You may have to do brute force precision ag and go around and work those areas with the whitetop.

- You say it was in pasture?

- Yeah, it was in pasture.

- Would mowing help at all or would that spread?

- So Tim's done some of that research.

- Yeah, I think mowing... - But maybe not with whitetop specifically.

- Yeah, not specifically with whitetop.

Mowing I think would be hard because it just will encourage it to make more and more underground rhizomes over and over and will eventually spread that patch.

- [Mac] Is it harmful to livestock?

- I think it is toxic to livestock.

It is a little bit of a toxic mustard kind of to livestock.

Not super acutely toxic, but I think it can be quite toxic if there's long exposure to it.

Yeah, I would probably the organic way, it would probably be steel in the field or shovel under your foot and dig those rhizomes out.

Put some soil in there, get some new grass growing on top of it.

But it'll be a long, long thing to put together.

- And that's an expensive proposition and it can be aa tilt, a erosion risk as well.

So that's not a easy.

- But if it was patch sized, there's probably things you could do to mitigate the erosion risk, right?

- Yep.

So we're down last 45 seconds of the show.

We could keep talking about whitetop for hours and hours, but I wanted to take thank John for coming on tonight and being part of the show and telling us more about the organic systems of Montana and to the rest of the panelists for joining us tonight.

In the last 30 seconds, anybody have anything to add in terms of what to do in our gardening season as it approaches.

- Too early to start planting?

- No, it's not too early to start planting, but it's too early to start planting the warm season plants.

- Arugula and radishes.

That's what I've planted.

- [Mac] It doesn't matter when you plant your peas, as long as you plant 'em in April.

- There you go.

Thanks everyone for joining us tonight and we'll see you again next week.

Thanks.

(guitar music) - [Narrator 2] For more information and resources, visit Montanapbs.org/AgLive (guitar music) - 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 and Landscaping, and the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

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