- [Presenter] "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 Wheaton Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery & Landscaping.

And The Gallatin Gardeners Club.

(guitar music) - Good evening.

You are tuned to "Montana Ag Live".

Originating today from the studios of KUSM.

And on the very dynamic campus of Montana State University and coming to you over your Montana Public Television System.

Before I go any further, I am gonna use the immortal words of Hayden Ferguson and as he said, Happy Mother's Day to all of you out there who qualify.

And those of you who don't, well you can have a nice day anyway.

I'll never forget Hayden, Hayden was a class act and he hosted this show for about 10, 15 years.

Now let me introduce tonight's panel.

On my far left, Darrin Boss, Darrin is Associate Director of College of Agriculture.

He has some other titles too, but we shortened it up to one title.

Is that all right?

- Perfect.

Thank you.

- Okay, our special guest tonight, and I've known John Grande for several years now.

John is President of the Montana Style Growers Association.

It's a great organization.

John's a rancher from Martinsdale.

We'll tell you where Martinsdale is because a lot of people in this state probably do not know where Martinsdale is.

Beautiful area of the state.

We'll come back to John and let him talk a little bit about stock growers.

Before we do that, Eric Balesco.

Eric is our extension economist, acts as one.

He's also the Department Head over in Ag Econ and Economics.

And a special kind of special guest I bureau current.

And Bill is a retired weed scientist from Penn State University.

We're not gonna hold that against him because he came outta Colorado State University to begin with.

He's let me know that many times.

But Bill is very knowledgeable about weeds, so if you have weed questions tonight, go ahead and phone them in.

Speaking to questions.

That's what this program is based on.

You provide the question and this esteemed panel will give it their best guess or best answer I should say.

But they do a great job.

Answering the phones tonight.

Cheryl Bennett and Nancy Blake, and they're not answering the phone yet.

So get those questions in.

John, tell us a little bit about stock growers.

A lot of people don't know much about them.

- Sure.

Well thanks Jack.

It's great to be back and great to be back in studio.

The last time I was on the show was the whole virtual thing over or whatever format.

So it's good to actually be here.

Yeah, the Montana Stock Growers is the oldest livestock organization in the state.

We were actually formed in Miles City in 1884.

Here in a few short weeks in May 28th through the 30th, we'll be back in Miles City for our mid-year meeting, celebrating our hundred 140th anniversary there.

So, you know, when we were founded in 1884, we were working on animal health issues, wolves, private property rights issues, and a lot of the same issues we're still working on today.

But I don't think that's, 'cause we haven't made progress.

I think we've made a lot of progress, but there's just some issues that stick around.

- You know, I don't raise livestock, but I've always been interested in livestock.

So I joined the Stock Growers here a few years ago.

I'm gonna give your organization a ton of credit because you keep your members extremely well informed via email.

And I'm impressed.

I get an email two, three times a week, sometimes more.

And the information you provide, even with weather forecast is absolutely incredible.

So I'll pass a thank you along to stock growers.

We have a question from last week.

They knew you were coming on.

They would like to know how inflation has impacted Montana ranchers.

Has it been a positive or a negative for the stock growers?

- Well, I'm really glad they asked that question.

'cause normally when I go out, I go other places and talk about inflation.

Like I know what I'm talking about, but really I'm quoting Eric Balesco, so.

I don't tell people that I take credit.

- I wouldn't either, you know.

- So tonight.

I could just turn that over to Eric.

But it's a huge effect and it's kind of interesting in the sense that you can't pick up the paper or listen to the news every morning without hearing something about inflation.

But at the same time, we don't always really take it into account.

And we also hear lots of reports right now about having record high cattle prices.

Well, we kind of have record high nominal cattle prices.

if you adjust them for inflation they're still good, but not as good.

They haven't kept up, or another way of saying that is, where we've got a lot of money coming in, but our input costs are so incredibly high that margins aren't much better than they've been before.

But yeah, Eric could address that more specifically.

- Yeah, well no, I mean, and there's other things, I guess you mentioned input cost, I wouldn't put that in with inflation specifically, but, you know, you have bad weather in Montana and that's gonna increase the price of hay and different, you know, feed sources.

But then yeah, getting that beef product to the market has all these layers where, you know, we've seen a lot of inflation on the supply, you know, the labor supply, you know, getting product, you know, trucking, logistics, all those prices have gone up.

So yeah, the cattle prices are, but not as much as the retail prices.

- So I'm gonna follow that up now you guys can all jump in on this.

Cattle numbers are obviously down in the state.

And to restock, cattle prices are expensive.

Is that due to the drought that we've had over the last three to four years?

It came out of it a little bit last year, or is it due to inflation that the numbers are not increasing on the ranches?

- Well, I'll start, I'm really curious to hear what Darrin and John had to say too.

But you know, it's both of those things, the high prices, you know, as an economist we look at those as the economic incentives to expand.

But you know, really, if you're gonna expand the cattle business, you've gotta wait.

You know, you're looking two years down the road, how are prices gonna be looking then?

So even though prices are high now, you know, you're looking at input prices, you're looking at other things and you know, until that inventory moves, you know, prices are, you know, pretty stably, you know, they're above average right now.

And you look at the futures market and they're kind of holding steady, which, you know, the last time we saw really high prices was 2014, 2015, and they didn't stay up there for long, they dropped.

But, you know, these prices have, you know, they're not quite as high in real terms as John was mentioning, but they've stuck around and it seems like the market is anticipating them to stay just until inventory's turn.

But I'm curious to hear, John, your thoughts on inventory.

- Well, you need several things to reduce the herd and conversely to build the herd back up, you need forage, you need economic incentives.

You need cash flow, you know, where a lot of the country was in drought for quite some time that, you know, we just didn't have the feed for cattle.

So, so a lot of the country, specifically Montana, downsized the herd a lot because of drought.

But also we were in the part of the cattle cycle where cattle prices weren't very good, so you didn't have the economic incentive.

So for a variety of reasons, the cattle numbers in the country and specifically Montana, went way down.

Now we have the incentive with cattle prices.

We should be building the herd back.

We've still had some drought.

A lot of the state got great rain last week of course.

But that takes a while.

And also a lot of people are healing up.

Yeah, they're saying, well, I'm making more money now, but maybe I need to pay down some debt instead of rebuilding the herd.

Or like I say, we got good prices, which makes them more profitable.

But at the same time, as you mentioned, it makes it more expensive.

So to Eric's point, yeah, we should be rebuilding already and there is no sign of it happening yet.

And it may not for some time.

- Okay.

I'm gonna throw another one there.

What about other states?

Is Montana unique in reducing cattle numbers or how about Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, other states?

Are they dropping or are they holding higher numbers?

- Well, no, Texas and some of those others all liquidated about the same time.

They're pretty tough down there.

There's times over there that they've lost out.

So the whole, the whole cattle herd's compressing, we should be expanding.

You know, we actually saw a little bit of a blip this year.

I think we've seen some of the pairs this spring and early pair sales coming up a little bit.

So I think we want to see that trend.

It just, everybody's kind of waiting because they're trying to build some hay reserves and maybe looking at that three year period.

- I guess one last thing and it's hard to put a number on how big an issue this is, but it has at least some effect is land being just taken outta production as other people move into the state and maybe they buy ranches which they don't stock, or maybe they stock them but they're stocked less heavily in the past or just, you know, growth in the Yellowstone Valley and the Missoula Valley and the Gallatin Valley.

There's land going outta production.

You know, we still have a tremendous amount of land in production for wide open spaces, but there's less.

- No, I agree with entirely.

Change the subject a little bit.

Let's go over to Bill here.

Last week a caller called in and wanted to know how to control Hoary cress, which I found out later on it's called White Top and Hoary alyssum.

And I know you can use Escort on Hoary alyssum but what about white top?

- Well, White tops the worst of the two, I would say also called Hoary Cress although we call it White top.

It's a perennial mustard species, flowers fairly early summer, white conspicuous flowers.

Sort of a flat top to it.

Very common in pastures in hay fields.

It's tough to eliminate.

Probably most folks rely on herbicides and there's some good herbicides you can use, Metsulfuron is the one that's most commonly used.

You can, you know, basically you gotta beat back a perennial.

You wanna mow, you wanna have good grass, you wanna try to outcompete it basically.

And so you hit it with multiple things and you wanna do it when it's just starting to flower typically.

- Okay.

We're a little bit early now.

- Yeah, I'd say mid-June.

- [Jack] Mid-June.

- Yeah.

- Okay, thank you.

That answers that one here.

Here's one that I like from Bonner.

A pasture full of sedge and you're only gonna have sedge in wet areas, aren't you?

Is there any way to control that?

And then I've got another good one here that will throw.

- [Bill] Let's move on to that.

(panelists laugh) I remember an old herbicide, but I don't think you can get it anymore, so I won't mention it, but.

- Well, it depends on what kind of sedge it is.

But sedge does like moisture typically.

So if you have a wet pasture that has sedge in it, you have a bunch of other problems going on.

- Okay, thank you.

From Scobey, I've watched programs with ranchers before from Malta, Terry, Helmville.

They enjoy hearing about their operations.

John, tell us a little bit about your operation.

- Well, you mentioned we're near Martinsdale and yeah, for the people who don't know where Martinsdale is, I say it's between Twodot and Ringling.

So we're a commercial cow calf operation there in the Castle Mountains and you know, a family operation.

We were founded there in 1877, just a commercial cow calf crossbred operation.

We're fairly high elevation there.

So we don't do lot of farming.

We do raise our own hay.

And one thing I guess we do a little different than a lot of folks is, is we retain all our calves and finish them all in commercial feed lots.

And so sell everything as fed cattle rather than as calves.

And that allows us to do a lot of kind of research and development, working with a lot of folks on progeny testing, whether it's, you know, gathering a lot of phenotypes, different measurements or genotypes doing a lot of DNA.

And so that's just part of the interesting part of the stuff that I enjoy being able to learn some of that new things.

- Okay, thank you.

Speaking of calves, and this actually was over in Billings.

We were there this past week doing a program.

This question came in, why was there difficulty for heifers calving this year and their mothering skills not kicking in?

Darrin, we talked a little bit about that so you have some possible answers.

- Well, I'll take a whack at it and I would encourage you to, whoever had this question or have problems to maybe call a few neighbors come in, take a look at your operation, what's changed, what hasn't changed.

But I can tell you we bought some cattle, had quite a few number of heifers in there and we brought them month and a half, two months before calving.

And it seemed like we just messed up their whole brain.

We came in, we had trouble mothering them up.

They didn't really necessarily have trouble calving, but once they calved they didn't seem like they really wanted to take their calves.

And for the rest of the summer, every time we moved those cattle, we couldn't get them mothered back up again.

I mean it took like an exceptional amount of time.

So I guess my point is, is there's really one thing to point at, but look at things that have changed or something you've altered in your operation that Maybe affecting how these cattle are reacting.

But that's a tough question to answer.

- Yeah, I like your answer though.

I think that makes good sense.

Last week we had a caller about blueberries and this is from Pablo.

In answer to a question last week, blueberries can grow in the Pablo area.

They have acidic soils.

In the Bozeman area.

If you go to a big box store, you can buy blueberries here.

I wouldn't recommend it because your soil pHs have to be below six.

So try something else.

Haskaps or raspberries, anything you want to make?

- No, actually Western Ag Research Center, our research center down in south of Missoula, I'm not allowed to say that word, sorry.

Yeah, the south of that town of the unmentionable down there in Creston actually has really good information on various haskaps, which is a native berry that's about an inch and a half long.

It's blue and it tastes a little bit like it, but I think it has a better flavor and I like blueberries.

So haskaps a really good option.

There's a lot of good research happening in the Bitterroot down there.

So take a look at our Western Ag Research Center for data.

- Thank you.

Got a couple questions here that I want the answers too because I don't know, but one of them is, what percentage of our beef is exported and what country is leading in cattle exports?

- [Darrin] I'm looking at the economist.

- You know, Jack, I can't answer that as far as the what percentage.

I can say most of the, well we export beef to an awful lot of different countries.

Korea, Japan, China, Canada and Mexico are the biggest ones.

We also import beef from a number of countries being primarily Australia, Mexico, Canada, and everything.

But the amount of beef we import is usually somewhere around 11% of our supply.

And that's primarily, almost entirely 90% lean trim.

Whereas we export by adding value to the cuts that we don't use as much here.

Sometimes it's our top end middle meats, but it's also things like short ribs to Korea selling livers to places like Egypt and Russia.

Well not Russia so much anymore, but you know, the parts of the beef carcass that the US consumer doesn't eat as much, we can add a lot of value to that in some of our export markets.

- John, can you explain trim?

You were talking about 90% trim.

Can you explain that to the general public out there?

- Well of course when you harvest the carcass, there's a lot of basically fat trim that comes off it, you know, in this country as opposed to a lot of other countries, we're all grain fed so our cattle tend to have more of that fat trim.

So in order to take that fat trim off and make it into a usable product, we blend it with a lot more lean trim to make hamburger that's 85, 90% lean.

And of course we need to get that lean trim then either from like cull cows and cull bulls or by importing it from countries that don't grain finish like we do.

- Okay, thank you.

Good answer.

I learned something, I'm gonna go back and comment.

You mentioned exporting liver.

I happen to be old fashioned, no comments guys.

But one of my favorite meals, even as a kid was liver and onions with maybe a little bacon thrown in with it.

- [Darrin] Everything's better with bacon.

- Yeah, everything's better with bacon.

You can't find liver in most stores anymore.

It's really difficult to find calves liver or beef liver for that matter in stores.

Will all of that going overseas?

Or why don't we?

Obviously it doesn't sell, that's probably why.

But.

- I think that's largely the case just because there isn't that much demand for it.

So the, you know, your major grocery chains, you know, that's being exported rather than going to the major grocery chains.

The thing that we have that's a little bit positive is the small scale processors, which, you know, the packing sector in Montana is very, very small, but it's more than double the capacity we had a couple years ago.

So if you can, you find these small local processors that are only, you know, the folks in Big Timber and Amsterdam and places that are only harvesting maybe 10, 20, 50 head a week, but they'll probably be able to help you out.

- Absolutely.

Good point.

I can go out to Amsterdam and get some calf liver or beef liver out there, which I like by the way.

Call from Judith Gap and I think we've had one or two from Judith Gap before, and this is another one and I throwing Bill some tough ones.

This person has Field bindweed in his garden bed.

He wants to control it.

What would you suggest?

- I think I got that question the last time I was here.

(panelists laugh) Field bindweed is probably the worst possible weed you could have.

Not just in a garden bed, but particularly in cropland as well, 'cause it's just a really aggressive perennial, pretty tolerant of herbicides.

And one of the problems you have is if you till, if you chop up the root fragments, you'll spread it all over the place.

And so at least if it's in a smaller area and you, you know, really it, there's a saying we used to say, ho ho ho, you wanna keep cutting the tops off of it basically.

And you eventually starve out the root system.

If you have an opportunity to put down black plastic for a season in different areas, that can have a major impact.

But it's just one of those that you just don't let it go to seed.

It has white flowers, don't let it set seed.

That's how it's gonna get started.

So just, you know, it's kinda like throw everything you have at it.

- You know, you were at Colorado State for a while, I think Morning Glory, another name for it is the native flower or the state flower in Colorado.

- Yeah, Field bindweed is a really common weed in the State of Colorado.

We're lucky in Montana that it's not quite as bad as Colorado - [John] Does drive an irrigation.

- Yeah.

- Okay, from Helena, this person would like to know where are most of Montana's calves shipped to?

John, you probably have a pretty good thought there.

- Well, a lot of them do leave the state of course to the major feeding areas.

There's more cattle being fed in Montana all the time.

The big markets are Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Colorado, some will go west.

You'll get cattle going out into Washington and Idaho.

Some all the way to Minnesota and maybe some all the way to Texas.

But like I say kind of, that Nebraska, Iowa, Colorado, Kansas will catch a big chunk of them.

- I've always been told Montana calves command a premium relative to calves that are raised in the Midwest, is that still true?

- It largely true.

The basic things that are gonna set the price are the quality of the calves and then of course freight.

So if you're shipping them to Nebraska, it's hard to compete with the freight difference of Nebraska calves that are already right there.

But generally as reputation feeder cattle, you bet Montana the cattle are known as some of the best and they do command the premium.

We're working on ways to see how we can make them command more of a premium.

But they do already.

- And so you mentioned the premium, and you guys can all jump in on this, the focus of stock growers right now, one of their main focuses is on profitability.

And I mean you've got seminars, sessions all over the state on how to increase the profitability of ranchers.

Tell us a little bit about how that program's going.

And we even let the economists jump in afterwards.

- Well, yeah, just a little.

It's going fantastic and as I always say in a sense this is nothing new in that we've been focusing on how to make our ranchers more profitable for the last 140 years.

But it is new in the focus that we wanna say we wanna look at a couple key areas of what producers need to be profitable and we want to get out in the country and hear directly from them.

So we've been traveling around the state over the last couple months.

Well we will have 15 meetings as of our last one is Ronan tomorrow night.

And then we'll kinda wrap up and reevaluate, see what we've learned.

But we've focused on just a few specific areas.

Starting with taxation where we focus primarily on the national estate tax.

But also on the state property tax and any other tax issues.

But those are the two big ones.

We're looking at labor and labor shortages is a huge problem in agriculture.

Like it is for basically everyone.

We're looking at barriers to entry, you know, why is it so hard for new people to get involved in ranching and are there things we can do to reduce those barriers to entry?

We're looking at government programs and are the government programs valuable?

Are there programs that are helpful to people, but do they need work and improvement?

And then kind of the last thing that ties right in a lot with barriers to entry is mentorship and what can existing producers do to work with younger new producers to help them get established and going.

So those are the key areas and like I say, we will have 15 different meetings.

We've heard lots of great ideas, we've had great turnout at all these meetings from stock grower members and a lot of people who are not stock grower members.

So it's really been fun to get out and listen to what's on people's minds.

- [Jack] Sounds good.

- Well and just to add, I mean, you know, agriculture's not known for its big margins so you know, you gotta find ways either to reduce your cost or to find your value in the markets when you can.

So it's great.

I think these programs, you know, finding new ways kind of to meet the challenges of whether it's, you know, like you mentioned the labor issue that that's a huge one and or transportation freight, you know, you talked about that a little while ago.

But yeah, if we wanna keep our ranches, you know, healthy in the State of Montana, you know, Not to focus a 100% on profits, but they need to be profitable to, you know, pass it along to the next generation.

- You know, you mentioned a labor issue and I was visiting with a friend of mine out at Glendive.

And he was telling me in that area of the state, Dawson County, Eastern Montana, they're hiring a lot of South Africans, to come over and work for the production year.

Is that working out?

Do you guys have any input on that program or how that's working?

- I can jump in 'cause up on the high line we see a lot of those, the H2B's coming through and there's a lot of operations that are using them and they're very effective.

They jump in and get their crops seeded quicker.

If they have a cattle operation, they can stay for extra months 'cause they can stay through the winter months versus having to go back.

So it's definitely an option to get the job done.

So it seems like it's successful where people are putting in time.

- We have people that say they just couldn't hardly ranch without it.

The H2A program is, that's where they get so much of their labor and it's been fairly successful with, you know, you see a lot of South Africans, but they're from Mexico and a lot of other countries as well.

The problems are, it is a complicated government program and to some degree that's good.

I mean we should be protecting these immigrants and their labor.

But it gets so hard and just all the hoops you gotta jump through to get someone.

When we were in Stevensville a week or so ago, there was one fellow at our meeting there that said well I've got an H2A guy that I had lined up to come in February to help me with calving and I'm leaving tonight to go pick him up 'cause he just got his visa finally approved.

So obviously he is done calving, he still can use the labor, but there's just a lot of wrinkles in the bureaucracy if you will.

- It makes sense to me.

Well that answers some of the questions I've had about it.

Bill, this question came in via Facebook, and what has the research shown on controlling Medusahead, which I'm not familiar and Ventenata grass in grazing systems.

Any idea all about that one?

- So I have a little bit of experience with the Ventenata.

I have not run into Medusahead.

It's not terribly common in Montana, whereas Ventenata is on the rise.

Medusahead is, so they also call it wild rye.

So it's not really wild rye, but it kind of looks like, has big long awns on it.

And it's mostly a California, Oregon, Utah.

Ventenata has been around for a number of years and it's just increasing its spread.

Both of these are sort of similar to Cheatgrass.

They're winter annual grasses that come up in the fall.

They can be problems in grazing, but they can also be problems in our wheat, winter wheat.

- Okay.

- And there is one new herbicide that I know has been mentioned on this show before.

It's called Rejuvr, indaziflam.

It's changing the game on some of these annual grasses and it's used in permanent grass pasture.

It can be grazed.

I suspect it's probably pretty effective on Medusahead as well.

Other than that it's, you know, it's the things that we talk about for everything.

Make sure you're using good fertility and you're getting a good grass crop.

Make sure you're taking care of it, you know, and help it compete against those.

- Let's be true, we're out there scouting it 'cause Ventenata is terrible grass for grazing.

The cattle don't seem to like it.

And I was gonna ask Bill, why does it accumulate so much silica?

Because that's one of the reasons the cattle just really turn away and I had a question from a grad student the other day and I couldn't answer - It's got scrawny little stems and leaves and it's just not very nutritious I'm not sure why it accumulates silica.

The good thing about really those two grasses and also cheatgrasses since they're annuals and those grass seeds don't last as long as some of our broadleaf weed seeds do.

So, you know, mowing actually can be pretty effective in the right situation.

If you can keep it from setting seed for three or four years, you can really drive that seed bank down and have a major impact.

- Okay, John, on your operation, do you have any major weed problems that you're fighting all the time?

- Well, our biggest one is still of course Spotted knapweed deal, that came in on the railroad years ago.

Well it's been over 40 years since we had a railroad.

(panelists laugh) So that says a little something that's still the big one that we deal with.

But then there are some of these other things we haven't found Ventenata yet, but there's Cheatgrass, you know, there's your basic Hounds tongue and so yeah, there's always some issues.

- I think the Ventenata in the south central part of the state and up in the northwest is where it's really sort of taken off.

I know Jane has a couple of students that are working on it and I think they're working over in the Billings area.

- Okay, thank you.

Darrin from Opheim.

They'd like to, and you're now in administration so you can answer this question.

Is MSU involved with drought management?

He heard we were talking about drought earlier and they wanna know what programs MSU is doing.

- Yeah, you know, the past several years there's been the drought management task force throughout extension Department of Ag.

There's a lot of players involved with it.

I mean although we had this storm go through central and North Montana, we're only two days away from a drought in Montana at any given time, right?

And looking at the local snow pack, I can understand maybe while people in Opheim are worried about it.

'Cause there's not gonna be a lot of water coming outta the mountains except for when we get this runoff.

So if you wanna look at the Montana droughts, go to Montana extension and drought resources or drought management, there's a little bit about wildfire and drought to help them.

It's always a tough time when John and I are talking about losing animals or having to cull or drop animals 'cause we don't have the forage or we can't afford the forage and it really is a tough pencil when we have to look at, if I buy the $300 hay or do I sell cows and these are my genetics that we've built for our 40 or 50 years on the ranch.

So we understand it's a tough time and there's really good resource there for that, they put together.

- Yeah, I remember talking to John Patterson a couple years ago when, hay prices were pushing 250 bucks a ton.

He said, you can't afford to feed cattle hay at that price.

You know, I've got a nasty question coming up for John, but I'm gonna hold that for a second.

And let you just compose yourself.

- Little fidgety.

(panelists laugh) - Get ready.

- Bill, why don't you tell us this green stuff you brought in here?

- Yeah, so I brought two weeds in.

If you live in the Bozeman area, these are homeowner, mostly homeowner weeds, although one of them could be something else.

So this is called Creeping Bellflower.

It's a perennial, It's I would say 75% of the yards in Bozeman has this and it's just a nasty little perennial, but it has really pretty flowers.

- [Greg] Yeah.

- So it'll bolt and send up a seed stalk and have blue flowers midsummer.

And it looks quite different by that time.

And so right now this is what it's looking like here in the month of May.

And it just as the name says Creeping Bellflower, it just creeps along and takes over.

And it's quite tolerant of herbicides.

It tolerates mowing.

If it's in your lawn, which it often is, if you mow it certainly won't flower and set seed.

But it's one just to be aware of.

And if you don't have it and you see it, you wanna go after it.

And I dig it up in my yard all the time, kinda like using a dandelion digger.

This is called Bulbous bluegrass.

And this is a really interesting grass.

And it's been coming on the last, I would say five years in particular in a number of areas in Montana.

And it's a perennial just like the Bellflower, but it produces these, they call them bubbles and they're not seeds.

They're actually like, sort of like an onion bulb.

And it's quite common and moves into people's yards.

Again, flower beds.

I had a issue with this.

I redid my yard last year and I brought in some topsoil that was contaminated with this.

And the good news is that I have a fairly small yard is that if you, and it flowers earlier than everything else.

So this is what it's looking like right now.

And all your other grass is still, some of it is starting to flower.

But if you have a, you know, a rye grass or a fescue lawn, then it's way behind this.

And you can go along and you can pull these out by hand.

And I basically eradicated it in my yard.

- Okay.

Thank you.

I have a question here from Missoula, and they've heard about bird flu and cattle.

They would like to know, is that affecting the ranching industry?

- You want me to start or do you wanna take that?

- Why don't you take a start and I'll follow in.

- Yes and no.

The bird flu of course came into some lactating dairy cows, which is an important distinction in about based on the strain, it must have come from migratory water foul that transfer into the cattle occurred in about December.

So it's been found in dairies, in nine states, which is, excuse me, it's made the market a little nervous.

So it has affected particularly the futures market.

As far as affecting the cattle industry large scale?

No, it has not for a couple of reasons.

Number one, as I said, it is found in lactating dairy cows.

So far they have not found it in beef cattle.

They have not found it in dry dairy cows or bulls or young cattle.

And it's in the milk, but it's killed by pasteurization.

So pasteurized milk is safe for anyone to drink.

They have looked at beef and like beef cuts and hamburger from these cattle.

They have not found the virus.

If it was in the meat cooking it would kill it, but they haven't even found it in any meat yet.

So it's had some effect on the market just in terms of nervousness.

But as far as it actually being a real issue at this point, I guess I would say it hasn't been, other than, you know, those dairies that have it's been an economic problem for them, go on Darrin.

- Well and there is some regulations being happening on transferring cattle across state lines.

So the CDC has a really good webpage out there.

If somebody's concerned and wants to go to that, I think John hit one of the most important parts.

We're not seeing it in the milk, although we maybe it's not viable in the milk, right?

And pasteurized milk and we're not seeing it in the tissue.

So it's really important.

So the thing about it is, Montana's not a concentrated animal area for the most part.

We have some, but not like down in panhandle of Texas where we first picked it up.

And we're not seeing it in those feedlots right next to those dairies or nearby though.

So that's a really good thing for the beef industry.

Heads up, pick up birds, pick up things around your operations, don't them stay around.

Just do a little bit more tidiness, but go to that webpage, it's a really good webpage.

- Okay, thank you.

Now for the question I promised.

- I thought that was the one.

(panelists laughs) - This came from Ronan and the person says, there's a perception that beef prices are high.

How can the stock growers help to reduce this perception?

And I'll let John and the economist jump in on this one.

- Well, yeah, I'll turn that over to Erica.

The perception that beef prices are high, beef prices are high.

I mean, hard to argue with that perception.

They are high from a producer standpoint, of course we like that.

We look at the inelasticity of demand, you know, we need that there because as we talked about already, our costs have all gone up.

So in order to keep any kind of margin, we need to sell our product for more.

But at the same time, yeah I recognize that they're high to consumers and so that's, you know, that's not a false perception.

But I don't know Eric.

- No, I mean, you plot out, if you're an economist, you plot out.

- [Darrin] Here's the graph.

- Yeah.

- So I told you it was coming.

- Here comes to graph.

Prices over the last 100 years.

If you take out inflation, it's just a flat line.

And you know, and it's because the cattle industry it's a competitive market.

And so anytime you see prices go up a little bit, you know, you see them you see kind of the pressure to kind of come back down.

You know, in our other markets we see prices moving down over time just because, you know, of productivity advances have been so much faster.

But, you know, because we see pretty flat prices anytime input costs go up, you know, it's a real challenge.

You know, like we said earlier, you know, those margins are never huge.

And so even when you get into times when prices are a little bit above normal, you know, it's a good time maybe to pay off the debt and just, you know, don't look too far into the future because there's always that sort of, you know, magnetic pull back to the long run price.

- I would comment quickly that, and this doesn't help the person that asked the question, but over time, over the last 50 years, when you look at the entire beef supply chain from the retailer to the cow calf guy, you know, if you look at the end cost of the meat in the grocery store, who gets the biggest share of that?

And over the last 50 years you, a lot of people think the packing plant is getting that.

And over the last 50 years their share has actually gone down very slightly.

But mostly the cow calf share has gone down and the retailer share has gone up.

- Yep.

Okay.

- Especially after COVID.

I mean we saw, I mean that's been a long run trend, but COVID just expanded those margins quite a bit.

I mean you see it like jobs around town.

Wages are a lot higher than they were, you know, three, four years ago.

- Big change there, no doubt about it.

From Malta, this person says they've been short of hay for the last three dry years.

I think last year might a little bit better.

We've had some moisture, they would like suggestions for maybe some annual forages.

Darrin, I know you've worked on that a little bit.

- Yeah I have.

And depending on where you were on the highline, some people got some breaks and some people didn't.

It was really fluky.

So depending on where that person was in they could still be battling some drought.

You know, this past recent storm is gonna set us up I think really well on the highline and where that band of storms came through.

I would encourage people to look at some warm season grasses like a millet, maybe a sorghum Sudan grass, understanding that it's gonna take a long time and generate a lot of biomass.

But we're gonna have to either get it put up in hay in that September, August, September time period.

And it's always difficult and at least in our country 'cause it gets cool and we have a lot of dews..

But there is options.

I know we did a research project for a lot of years and we took a, for a cover crop and we're looking at it as a forage source for cattle.

Not so much for the... We wanna look at the soil parameters.

We were really about how we use it as a dual purpose to feed the cows and help the soil health.

And even if we planted these cool seasoned blends, a barley, a pea, a safflower, maybe a radish, we had far better ruck with turnups, you know those blends.

Even if we planted those late on the highline where we would normally start planting our warm seasons, they produce some amazing amount of biomass because they're just ready to go.

They jump outta the soil and they tend to do really well.

So there's some options for some people out there.

Go to your seed dealer and whatever you can get your hands on right now.

- You know, outta curiosity, you mentioned Sudan grass.

Aren't there issues with poisoning on a Sudan grass?

- Yep, the Sudan grass has what they...

It's a prussic acid situation they have.

And I consider that more of a management thing than a nitrate problem, which is just if you have nitrates, you've got nitrates, right?

Prussic acid is management.

We tell people not to graze it till it's 16 or 24 inches tall, not to freeze it after a major event.

Whether that be a hard frost or we hay it and get that regrowth 'cause that prussic acid gets dissipated for two weeks.

I tell people to stay off at least three weeks after a hard frost just to be safe.

But it's a management thing.

We can manage it.

But people in Montana are very cautious.

So I understand that why that has not been near as used forage as somewhere down south and some of those other areas.

But it's a really available and we produce some tremendous biomass and all we had to do is get a little bit of rain in July and August, in most of our areas and it does amazing.

- [Bill] Is nitrates a problem if it gets dry?

- Oh yeah, any plants will accumulate a nitrate in the right scenario, we've seen, believe it or not, we've seen nitrates in alfalfa.

And so in the past couple years in this drought, we've had some explosive, what I call explosive nitrates.

They're that high.

I mean when they call me up and they say we have 3% nitrates and then we say just go ahead and burn the stack.

- [Bill] I hear a lot of it with barley hays.

- Well there's a ranking, you know, on the different, those cereals tend to accumulate more, oats tend to accumulate the most than the weeds than the barleys.

And so kind of transcending.

We don't necessarily say that oats are bad, but they do accumulate nitrates.

The other ones in cover crops are brassicas.

Brassicas will just suck it in like just in the weed, a lot of brassicas are weed too.

But they tend to really accumulate it.

- Yeah.

Speaking of weeds.

This person has clover in their yard, they spot sprayed it many times and totally sprayed the yard a couple times, they still have clover.

- Maybe they should switch the yard to clover.

(panelists laugh) - [Greg] Some people are doing that.

- Yeah, I know.

- That's the recommendation.

(Eric laughs) - You know, it's good for the honeybees, that's for sure.

So it's probably what's called white clover and which is a perennial clover.

It tolerates mowing just like your lawn does.

And it's quite persistent.

There are effective herbicides for it.

I don't know if you use like a 24D type product, that doesn't work.

And so it all has to be.

- [Greg] Banvel.

- Yeah, Dicamba would be the product of choice.

- Yeah, and that works pretty well, I can attest to that.

- Yeah.

And that doesn't hurt your grass, so.

- The other part of that question is they wanna know when they should dethatch the lawn.

And the answer to that is never.

The best thing to do is aerate it.

And if you core aerate it a couple times, you will get rid of your thatch and improve the lawn.

Detaching is not a good practice in lawns.

Okay, moving along here, an economist question.

Land prices have gone up a lot and John you can jump in on this too.

How's that affecting the ranching operations around the state?

- Yeah, well, and John touched on it earlier today of, you know, trying to keep, you know, those cattle numbers up when you have high land values, you know, that demand is coming from people who wanna purchase that land and a lot of times convert it out of...

They might keep it in some production, but maybe not as productive as it as it used to be.

And so, yeah, it puts a force on, you know, the agriculture in the state to kind of move it maybe out of agriculture and maybe into more like a recreation or other elements.

The one thing I think of, you know, with our graduation this last weekend is there's a lot of students who graduate and they want to get into ranching, but then they look at just, you know, the barriers to getting to that point and land values has a huge barrier to them getting a business started.

John, what do you?

- I don't know that I can add much to that.

That's exactly right.

But this is not an answer to the question, but more of an offshoot of it.

Another one of the things that comes into play as more of this land is going outta production is we look at on a tax base, a lot of this land that's taxed is agricultural property.

And our definition of ag land for tax purposes was set I don't even know how long ago and it right now, if we sell one calf, you qualify as ag land.

So that's one thing right now the governor has a task force, we have a representative on that looking at that.

Do we need to at least change the definition of what ag land is for property tax purposes so that as this land is going out of production at least it's taxed at a recreational rate or whatever that might be.

How we resolve that, I don't know, but there's people looking into it.

- Yeah.

- Okay, Jack, I would like to say, I don't wanna discourage these young producers from trying to get in, right?

Talk to older producers, get some mentorships.

I've been a part of some really successful things with some college students that says, my neighbor doesn't have an heir, I'm gonna go there and I'm gonna run their operations for 15 years.

I'm gonna own it as if I was their heir.

I just gotta provide for their operation.

Look for those opportunities.

I mean we used to say you had to have one of the big three, machinery, cattle or land right?

To get back in.

And there's programs, there's government programs, there's local banks that are trying to drive these younger producers into the thing.

So don't be afraid of stepping in there.

You just gotta do your research and look and see what opportunities are out there for those young producers, don't give up.

- That's exactly right.

- [Eric] Yeah, that's a good point.

- Very good point.

I told you I had one good zinger for you.

- [Eric] That was it right?

No, no, (laughs) this question came in from Superior.

- Okay.

- And they wanna know what the economics of goat production are and cattle beef production.

(panelists laugh) I know who probably sent that in.

Like there's a county agent out there that specializes, - Heck if I know.

(panelists laugh) - It's one 800 Brent Rader.

(panelists laugh) Brent Rader, he's their small ruminant specialist.

- Yeah.

- I understand that goats are a little more tolerant of the toxins that are in white tops so.

- Oh, good to know.

- Yeah.

- They will clean up a lot of weeds.

- Yeah.

- They are not hay preference.

- No, there's some businesses that are out there.

People are renting goats for, again, I think down in Colorado, probably for.

- Well, they got a lot of weeds down there, you know, that.

- So bindweed goats would be a good solution for the bindweed.

- Okay, enough bad mouthing Colorado for the moment.

(panelists laugh) From Knox, and this call is asking how Montana ranchers are protecting their land from outsiders buying up ranch line and subdividing it, so that it is no longer a functional ranch.

And following that up.

Are conservation easement's a good solution?

It's a tough question.

- Well I'd be curious to hear, but I just, you know, add on the easement side.

Yeah, I mean if you're looking to, you know, keep land in agriculture, easements are kind of the one, you know, path forward.

They are one of other paths forward to keep that in, you know, some kind of production going forward - Specific to the conservation easements.

Yeah, there's real pros and cons there and kind of don't get into that too much because, you know, when you sell a conservation easement, you are selling a portion of your property rights, you're not selling the surface property, you're not selling your water rights, but you're selling development rights.

So there's no free lunch is the economist thing.

You are giving up something.

Having said that, they have been a very valuable tool for a lot of people in estate planning, generational transfer, a lot of different things, so.

But above and beyond the conservation easements, it comes back to what we've been talking about.

The best way to protect the land is to be profitable in your operation.

- That's true.

- So that you're not having to sell it.

And some of the things have done, I mean you've talked to Lon Rokoff and Dave Manix and there's a lot of folks out there doing some extraordinary things and protecting their ranches just as a part of normal doing business and conservation easements might be a part of that.

Another thing that's really grown, and I don't know exactly what time, but a lot of the, what you might call the, I hate to even use words, but conservation or environmental community, people that ranchers used to consider the enemy, have now been people we can work very closely with, you know, the World Wildlife Foundation, World Wildlife Fund, Pheasants Forever, Trout Unlimited, a lot of these folks want to work with ranches to help them on environmental projects to keep that open space.

So there's some new tools of partners to work with that we haven't always had.

- I gotta throw a plug in for DU on that because they've, Northeast north central part of the state.

There's been a lot of programs with ranchers, by the way.

There's a good program coming up with the Ranchers Stewardship Alliance outta Malta, talking about moving into the next generational and how you might approach that.

They've got a whole series working on that right now.

So anybody's interested in that, get a hold of the Rancher Stewardship Alliance and that's in Malta.

Connie French would be a good contact there, so.

- [Darrin] Anna Merriman.

- Yeah, exactly.

Interesting question, I didn't know this person from Dylan, says there is a quota on foreign ag workers.

If we need so many, why is there such a quota?

Is that true?

Is there a quota on bringing, anybody have an idea?

- I don't know, but I mean it seems like you, you'd wanna have some kind of limit on workers that come in just to, you know, support the domestic labor supply.

Although, you know, it sounds like in agriculture it's a pretty important ingredient.

- I guess I also don't know what the quota is, if there is one, but unfortunately, it's just it's visas, it's immigration.

And so the H2As, the H2Bs, the asylees, all those other things get tied in with the issue going on at our southern border.

That politically it's a hard thing when people are talking about let's control the border, let's have fewer of these people coming in, but yet at the same time, we need more people coming in legally under these specific visa programs.

It just really gets bogged down in the politics.

- Yeah, I can believe that.

We touched on this early in the program, but we had a follow up caller from Fairfield and they would like, again to know why the cattle numbers keep going down.

Are there less cattle being growing?

I don't think that's recruse, but you might stress, again, why the cattle numbers continually - I mean, cattle numbers have been dropping since the mid '70's.

So there's a long run trend.

I mean, the last few years has been accelerated and I think, you know, if you look at this long run trend line, here I am with a graph again.

- [John] I was gonna do the same thing.

It's been going down, you know, for a multitude of reasons.

But you know, the last couple years when you have two consecutive droughts in a row, you know, you're gonna see numbers drop.

And, you know, we had the question earlier about, well, you know, is Montana or other states similar and yeah, Darrin mentioned Texas, you know, wherever you have drought, you're gonna see lower cattle numbers.

And so hopefully they come back.

But still, you know, we have a lot of things that are pushing those cattle numbers down over time.

- And part of that, the one thing we haven't mentioned is productivity.

Because as cattle numbers go down, beef production has not gone down.

Even as recently as two years ago, we had record beef production while the cow numbers were going way down.

- So we're producing a lot more beef per cow.

We're producing it more efficiently.

We're producing them with less feed and less of a carbon footprint.

- Yep.

- And yeah, to Eric's graph every time we have a cattle cycle, you know, the numbers go up and they go down and then they go back up to a level never as high as the previous peak.

So every time we go down, we never get back to the previous peak.

But we're more efficient so we produce more beef.

- So when I was in Billings last week, a figure was thrown out.

What it costs a producer or a rancher like you, to buy say a cow calf unit.

How expensive are they?

I think people might be kinda shocked at what it would cost to buy a replacement cow right now.

- Well, it's all over the board and Eric might know, but I mean a lot of these right now, you know, like cow calf pairs right now might be $3,000 or more.

Last fall, a lot of breed heifers, just 2-year-old breed heifers were selling in the 25 to $2,700 range, which was actually a little cheaper than some people thought they might be.

So, but yeah, it's extremely expensive to rebuild.

- Yeah, quick question, I know we won't be able to answer this, but try to give a short answer.

- [Eric] Cool.

- What are you looking at?

(panelists laugh) - Caller from Laurel would like to know, how farm and ranch operations are affected by federal estate tax.

It takes a lot of planning.

Might be the way to answer that.

- Goodness.

Federal estate tax.

Yeah, I mean especially when it comes time for, you know, transferring that estate.

I mean I think we have Dr. Marsha Goetting who does a great job out in the state talking about making a plan for.

- We've had Marsha on the program many times.

She has a numerous amount of guides out there that discuss ways to manage that particular problem.

Quick question for Bill, and then we're gonna probably have to wrap it up here.

Grass and asparagus, how can they get rid of it?

- They don't say what kind of grass, just?

- [Greg] No, it's probably quackgrass.

If I were guessing.

- Yeah, you know, obviously they probably tried to pull it.

If it's quackgrass, it's a perennial and then has deep runners and rhizomes and so you just gotta be persistent.

You know, I would, mulch the asparagus if you're not already doing that with straw.

Works really well, quackgrass is gonna be a problem with that still though.

But that's pretty good for annual weeds.

I'm not familiar with, you know, if there's herbicides available in asparagus.

- I think placoderm is one of them.

- Is it labeled for asparagus?

- I think it is on asparagus, but I don't know if you can get it in small quantities.

- Well you can, placoderm would work well.

- Okay.

You guys we're getting down, field days quick.

You got 10 seconds to promote field days.

- Yeah thank you Darryl for field days.

Each one of the research centers have a field day each year where they run from 50 to 300 people in the field days.

I would encourage anybody that is either related to agriculture, wants to know about agriculture stop in in any of the field days, you can go to montana.edu search field days and it'll pop right up.

- Okay, we'll be outta here in about 10 seconds folks.

Next week, Rachel Satori, who is extension nutrition education program specialist.

Thank everybody.

Thank you John, for coming down tonight.

Goodnight.

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