- [Announcer] 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 and Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery and Landscaping, the Gallatin Gardeners Club, and The Montana Federation of Garden Clubs.

(bright music) - Good evening.

You are watching Montana Ag Live, originating today from the studios of KUSM on the very dynamic campus of Montana State University and coming to you over your local Montana PBS station.

I'm Jack Riesselman, retired professor of plant pathology.

Happy to be your host this evening.

We had an interesting guest.

Tonight, and actually a few other programs this year, I've tried to feature graduate students because they're really the backbone of a lot of the research that's done at Montana State University and also at the College of Agriculture.

And they don't get enough credit and they do have some really interesting research projects going on, and we've selected a few of those to feature.

And one of them tonight that we're gonna get to is high temperature stress and spring wheat.

You know, over the last a hundred years, the average temperature in Montana has increased about two-tenths of a centigrade every decade.

Doesn't sound like much, but over a century, that's three, three and a half degrees.

That is not good for spring wheat production.

And we'll find out why later on.

But before we get into tonight's program, I've upgraded the panel for tonight's program.

So if we could show the people in our view audience what our new panel looks like this evening.

I've hired Clifford, the big red dog, and Champ, our mascot, to join us this evening, and they're really very knowledgeable about, not a lot, but anyway.

Let me back up.

This past week, we had a groundbreaking event here in Bozeman for a new or addition to the Montana PBS studios.

And we had Clifford and Champ, our mascot here.

So with that, let me introduce the real panel tonight.

They don't look quite as good as those that we just saw, but Jason Cook, Jason is our spring wheat breeder and we're gonna talk a lot about spring wheat tonight.

It's a major crop in this state.

Chloe Hinson.

Chloe's our graduate student that's just finished up and she's working on high temperature and we're gonna learn a lot about that.

I've learned a lot.

I attended her seminar this past week and I learned a lot that I did not know in the years past.

Tim Sippel, weed ecologist.

No, weed scientist.

Anyway, if you have weed questions tonight, Tim can answer them, or call Abi Saeed.

And answering the phones tonight, Nancy Blake and Cadee Hess.

I like that name.

C-A-D-E-E.

So with that, Chloe, tell us about yourself and the project that you're working on.

- Sure.

Well, I'm originally from Maryland and I really got into plants in my undergrad.

I thought I wanted to be a doctor, but the only labs that we're hiring were plant science labs.

So my test subjects don't talk as much.

But yeah, I started looking at fruit diseases and then fruit quality and looking at graduate schools, just fell in love with Montana.

I mean, who wouldn't?

So yeah, I've been working on spring wheat, heat tolerance.

Like you said, heat stress has become, you know, more of an issue, and it's always an issue because ideally our plants typically like for some of their reproductive stages.

And it's not 60 Fahrenheit in July when a lot of these field plants are pollinating and developing.

So figuring out how the plants can become more heat tolerant and then can increase our production is really important to feeding people around the world.

I think that's one of the most important parts about plant science and agriculture in general.

I mean, we need to feed ourselves and each other and just, you know, make it easier on our farmers so.

- Well said.

You know, I learned something, which is hard anymore at my age to learn things, but when I was sitting in your seminar, I was always told and learned early in my career that temperatures above 90 degrees at pollination is what was really detrimental to spring wheat production.

But you've showed some data that high temperatures, even when the heads in the boot can affect you.

Wanna explain that a little bit?

- Yeah, so the pollination stage is super important.

You know, during heading, post heading, that is a major role in how seeds are gonna develop.

And actually another researcher in my lab, Aristea King, is looking a lot at pollen heat tolerance.

So she's trying to develop screens to look for more heat tolerant pollen.

So that's really cool research.

But my research does focus on the booting stage, so that's when the wheat head is actually developing.

And heat stress during that stage can be really detrimental on multiple parts of the wheat head.

So, you know, if we think about the rachis or the structural part, how long the wheat head can grow, it gets shorter during heat.

So it kinda speeds up its development to stop earlier because it's stressed out from the heat stress and that gives us shorter heads, which can have fewer flowers and then fewer seeds can develop.

And then also the floret part, the part where the flowers are, where the seeds are going to develop, those are also damaged by heat stress.

And so then we have seeds that don't develop as well.

Maybe they're a little more shriveled or they're definitely smaller.

So all of my research, I only applied heat stress during the booting stage and we still saw massive yield losses from that time.

So while, you know, the heading and the pollination times are also sensitive to heat, we need to think about the earlier heats that we're seeing affecting and how we can target throughout the life stage of the plant.

- Okay, thank you.

I got a question for Jason here, but before we do it, folks, you can get the phones jumping tonight because if you got weed questions, horticultural questions, anything about wheat, yep, the phone's been kinda quiet.

So I know it's a nice night out there, but don't count on it, the snow's coming tomorrow, so get those questions in now.

Jason, just what Chloe said, stay-green, you know?

Something that I've heard about for, and familiar with for the last, you know, 10, 12 years, does stay-green gene or genetics have anything to do with heat tolerance?

- Yeah, so heat, well, heat tolerance, and then you got drought as well that occurs often in Montana, so they kinda go hand in hand.

And so the stay-green trait, what was found when it was first discovered, like back in the late-90s, I would say, when reeder came into Montana as the new spring wheat variety outta North Dakota, just the stay-green trait seemed to allow the plants to tolerate heat better and also those drought conditions.

So when you compare a variety like reeder and then it's offspring vita compared to other varieties, you would see that those two varieties that had the stay-green trait tended to do better comparative to the older varieties that didn't have the trait as far as yield and whatnot in those drought stress environments.

- Okay.

So we got a very intelligent panel here this evening.

What makes spring wheat so much more valuable than say winter wheat or soft white winters?

And I'll open that up to anybody else.

- The wonders of gluten.

The wonders of gluten.

That's what I would, that's what my answer would be, right?

I mean we really like spring wheat because it's high in protein and it makes things sticky.

Am I, as a weed scientist, Jack, am I wrong?

- [Jack] I don't know if I trust you.

- No, I think definitely the protein is a huge part of it.

I mean it's just hardier, it's a better bread.

In my opinion, I love to eat a good hard red bread so.

- Yeah, so spring weed's blended a lot with lower quality wheat to bring the level quality of that wheat, which is cheaper, so lower quality cheaper wheat, and then people purchase spring wheat to blend that in to improve the quality, overall quality of the flour.

So it could be used for different products.

So it helps improve other wheat types.

- This week I talked to a fair number of malt barley producers.

And we were talking, they're in the high cool elevations and they like the cool nights, right?

But does spring wheat, spring wheat needs, does it need, if you have cool temperatures, you get more sugars in barley?

Is that kind of how it works?

How do you make protein in wheat?

What's the recipe to get my protein premium?

- Good question.

- Yeah.

- That is my question.

- Yeah, well, obviously fertility.

Or, you know, fertilizer, having the right amount of nitrogen's really important.

But I do think, you know, the higher temperatures, or drier conditions does help improve that protein content generally in our spring wheat because the protein's a percent of what's in a kernel of spring wheat.

And so if the little bit less carbohydrates or starch in the kernel, the percent of protein goes up.

And so, actually our drought conditions that we have actually probably improve, well, it does improve the quality of our spring wheat.

- Yeah, less sugar, more protein.

- Yep.

- So I've always been told that if you stress a spring wheat plant at some point in the development of the grain, you're going to increase the protein level.

Is that correct?

- Right, of course, everything has its limits.

But yeah, yeah.

- Okay.

- So there's like that optimum, you know?

Yeah, point where you maximize protein content and yield, is what you're looking for.

- Does when you stress it have an effect?

- Yeah, probably later.

Later on probably has more of an effect than like real early in the growth cycle of the plant.

So yeah, probably grain feel, you know, in that period of time.

- So are spring wheat acres continuing to, I've been told they're declining slightly, are they still declining?

- Yeah, so past two years, so three years ago, I think we're around 3 million.

Then they dropped down to 2.4 million last year, and this year they're projected to be around 2 million.

And I think a lot of that's driven by the markets.

- Absolutely.

- So vast majority of spring wheat growing in Montana is exported and the US dollar is really strong right now compared to Canadian dollar and you know, Australia and so forth.

So our wheat's much more expensive than wheat coming out of those countries.

So we're at a disadvantage.

And you know, people wanting to buy our wheat compared to other sources so.

- And then there's a tariff question.

- Yeah, and that's the new question now too, so yep.

- Okay, we're not gonna get into that this evening.

That's a no-win situation.

- Yep.

- Abi, last week we had a question that I sent you home with some homework.

And that question involved how do you germinate a bur oak acorn?

Have at it.

- Yeah, yeah.

I got to do a little bit of research on this.

And so, although depending on the species of oak, this may not be applicable, but for bur oak specifically, they need this cold temperature stratification in order to germinate.

So we call that vernalization where you need these cold temperatures for a certain duration of time to reduce anything that could inhibit germination to allow those oak acorns to germinate.

And so what you need to do is you could either plant them in the fall and let it go through the natural winter cycle and germinate, or you could wait until the spring.

But you'd need to make sure you did that cold vernalization at home.

So you can do this by putting them in a moist environment.

It could be sand with a little bit of moist peat moss or coconut coyer and leave it in that cold temperature, which is about between 35 to 41 degree temperature range for about 30 to 60 days.

So it needs to go through that period before you plant it, before it will actually germinate.

And many of our plant species need that cold temperature to go through that period to germinate.

- Here's a name for that.

I don't remember what-- - Vernalization.

- Okay, thank you.

- Do you have to crack the acorn, the outer shell of the acorn so you get into that seed or?

- No, you don't need to do that.

Just soaking it in that, just imagine kind of what those acorns do in nature, they're just soaking in the moist cool environment, that will naturally break down the outer shell.

- Interesting.

So graduate students, speaking of graduate students, we screen herbicide resistance in wild oats and when they fall off the plant, they will not germinate for at least a year.

But you can get around that dormancy by taking a needle, graduate students, and poking a hole in the outside of the carry ops.

Water then makes it into the seed and then it will grow and germinate right away.

- Sounds like a fun day of work.

- Poking tiny seeds.

- Yeah.

- Yep.

- Okay, Tim, you've got some kind, I know you like to eat everything, but I don't think that's edible, is it?

- Oh, in an emergency, it could be edible, yes.

I did bring it in.

So the last time I was on a couple of weeks ago, we got a call about creeping bellflower.

And so I went out and I dug up some creeping bellflower today, and this is the root stock on the creeping bellflower.

And so people often ask, especially around Bozeman, they're trying to manage it and they want a simple herbicide solution.

Well, this one was treated with glyphosate actually, last year, killed the top of it right there, made a new shoot that came out of the side.

So people wonder why creeping bellflower is so difficult.

It's because it has this really giant root stock.

And if you look at the other one that I brought in here, to make it even more complicated, it actually, here's the one that I dug out of the ground today.

And it not only has a big dense root stock, it shoots out these rhizomes off the sides and these long expanding plants, which makes it, even if you cut and dig some of these out, this root stock will make new shoots and start to grow.

The difficulty in managing creeping bellflower.

So I don't know of any herbicides that work super well on it.

It's kind of a mix of wearing it down maybe with a little bit of 2,4-D, and then digging some of this big root stock out so it doesn't come again, which is a rather large undertaking.

But you see it everywhere around our houses, and especially in the Gallatin Valley.

- A nasty weed.

- Yeah, it is a pretty tough one.

- Okay.

This came in too.

They know that you're a gourmet cook.

So last week we had Stephen Vantassel on talking about voles.

And this person from Broadus wants to know, do you have any good recipes for voles?

I think we got you.

- No, no, I don't, no.

I have some for Guinea pigs.

- I would say anything tastes good in a curry so I would start with the curry.

- Yeah, you know, the skinning and the, that one, it's gonna be tough work there on that one.

- Okay, I think we'll go by that one right now.

Let's go back to Chloe.

I sat through your seminar and you talked about a hormone that you worked with, I think it was called brassinosteroids.

Is that a naturally occurring hormone?

- Yeah, so brassinosteroids, kind of a long word.

We say BR.

- Okay.

- Makes it easier.

BR is synthesized in plants, or it's made in plants throughout the plant kingdom.

So pretty much every crop makes its own BR, which is what makes it a natural plant hormone.

Yeah.

- So can you increase, and I'm gonna let Jason jump in on this too, it is positive for reducing heat stress.

- Yeah, so my research showed that applying extra BR for the plants improved some certain yield components of the wheat.

So things that would contribute to increasing yield.

- Okay, so can you genetically increase BR in a spring wheat plant?

Read for it.

- Yeah, so if we can measure, measure it accurately, and you know, cross different varieties, we can look to see if there's variation for the levels of BR.

And then, you know, based off of the research Chloe did, select for the optimum levels of BR, brassinosteroids, to select for and incorporate them into the varieties to tolerate heat stress better.

- Is there any place that you can get the BR hormone other than in a naturally occurring plant?

I mean, can you artificially produce it and maybe use it as a seed treatment?

- I think people typically, like get it from the plants.

So not artificially synthesizing, but they can collect it from the plants.

And then I saw there's a hundred milliliters for a hundred dollars.

So you can definitely buy this.

I wouldn't recommend buying it.

It's kind of expensive for the amount that you would need.

- Okay.

- But yeah, you could get it.

- Well, it's interesting because the research that you did, it shows that it has a truly positive effect on the ability of spring wheat plant to increase its yield or stabilize its yield.

So it's up to Jason, that's his job to figure out how to incorporate that into your new varieties of wheat.

- Right, right.

So the best and easiest, well, the easiest way to do it, is just to look for, like I said before, variation of BR levels in spring wheat germ plasm.

And then what if we can find a line that has, you know, BR levels that are optimum, like Chloe had found, then we can use that to incorporate those alleles that are produced as the level BR that we need to tolerate heat.

- Okay.

- Yep.

- So there's hope to maintain spring wheat in Montana?

- Oh yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of tools out there still.

- Okay, I'm a little concerned that I do like good bread.

There's no doubt about that.

- Yeah.

- Moving over to Abi, this person from Bozeman would like to know how a compost accelerator works and is it worth the time and expense?

That's a good question.

- That is a good question.

So I wanna know kind of what type of compost accelerator.

Most of my experience is with passive composting, so you wouldn't really need to add anything extra to make it work.

And for the most part, for home gardeners, what you can get from a compost pile over the year is usually plenty.

If you wanna get more into like active management like that, that could help speed up that process.

But usually, I would say for a home garden setting, it's not usually necessary unless you're really looking for that result really quick.

- [Jack] Okay.

- What is a compost accelerator?

I don't even know what that is actually.

- There are certain nutrients that you can add to increase the heat, to increase the cycling of a compost, and there could be other things too.

So I'd like to know kind of what compost accelerator they're talking about.

- Okay.

- All right, question from Trout Creek.

And as far as I remember, I think this might be our first question from Trout Creek.

This person would like to know, is there any fertilizer or broadleaf herbicide that you can get in bulk and be able to apply all at once instead of applying multiple times?

So I think they're talking about one application of fertilizer and a broadleaf herbicide.

- [Jason] Like a weed and feed or something?

- Yeah, like weed and feed.

- Yeah, a weed and feed is usually Triallate or a mix of that with some nitrogen in it.

I think you can buy it in a 50 pound bag.

I don't think you can get it as big as a tote, but there is weed and feed like products that are available out there.

And yeah, people are even starting to put down some of these old pelleted herbicides like Triallate or Fargo.

They're starting to use drones to put some of these things down now and spreading it.

So there are commercially available products that have the mix.

And if they're just doing it in their lawn, I think a weed and feed is fine.

And if they need it for another forage or something like that, they can gimme a call.

But they do make some products that are out there like that.

- You mentioned Fargo.

- Yep.

- [Jack] Is that still readily available?

- Yes, and you wanna know, so Fargo is a herbicide that had a lot of history, especially in malt barley production in north-central, north, around the Fairfield area let's say.

And most of the wild oak became resistant to Fargo and it really went outta style.

And the interesting, and it went outta use 'cause it was no longer functional.

But now, as they've stopped using it for a number of years and they went to using different herbicides, they figured out that there was a fitness penalty to the wild oat.

So it wasn't that.

Resistance wasn't maintained in the gene pool.

So it started to peter away and now they've gone back to using Fargo again in some situations in malt barley.

- You know, I've been around here since '79.

We were using Fargo back in the 70's.

- [Tim] Yep.

- And you know, a good old type herbicide sometimes has different generational uses.

That's kind of interesting.

- Yeah, it's interesting.

- When you think about it.

Comment from Great falls.

By the way, folks, if you have comments, I will screen them.

Yeah, but not terribly.

But we do have a comment from Great Falls, and this is relating to last week's program.

The caller says they were able to get rid of gophers, I assume they're referring to ground squirrels, by using juicy fruit gum in their burls.

Now, historically, that is, I dunno if it's facts or fiction, he says it's fact.

You seem to know a little bit about all this kind of stuff.

What do you think?

I love to make you think.

- I have no idea.

I would like to hear from the call.

I have no idea.

I mean, yep, I have no idea.

- We got him, okay.

Good question from Malta.

This person's a spring weed grower, and he would like to know how your research in the future may help him as a spring wheat producer?

It's a good question.

- Yeah, I think that's a great question.

It's one I definitely try to think about in any research I'm doing.

Like how could this be implemented?

How is this actually applicable?

I think the main thing is that we need to understand more about how spring wheat works already so that we can continue to improve it.

Because we can breed and we can not understand what's going on and that works really well.

But if we have more knowledge about how spring wheat grows, how it can respond to heat stress or any other type of stress, then we can do really targeted breeding and sort of improve more quickly and more accurately.

I mean, the breeding program has so many lines, so many lines.

If we knew at stage one when there's 2,000 lines going that, you know, these 10% aren't gonna work well because they don't have good brassinosteroid synthesis or something like that, then we can throw those out early, we can save ourselves some work, and just make the breeding program better.

So some of that takes a lot of effort, like from my research to getting it, you know, effectual like that, we need to do more research.

But that's why research is so great because we can look at everything and we can grow our knowledge base and hopefully make the end product better over time.

- I have a question.

Is there a quick test to determine the level of BR in a plant?

- Quick, no.

Not really.

There's definitely a lot of research about how you can do that.

So it's possible.

But I wouldn't say it's like, you know, you dip the plant in and then you immediately know how much.

The problem also is that there's different forms of BR.

There's three in wheat so you'd have to test each of those.

And then based on what tissue you're testing, whether it's the leaves or the head, there's gonna be different levels throughout the plant so.

- And so just going off Chloe's answer here, so with the stay-green trait, we don't really know what the biology is, that is, you know, allows that stay-green trait to help improve tolerance to drought and heat stress.

So work from grad students like Chloe kind of, you know, focusing on specific hormones or other pathways will help us understand better what's actually causing these plants to stay-green longer.

That could have to do with senescence.

A lot of people speculate stay-green traits due to root architecture, but roots are really hard to work with and measure.

So work like what Chloe's doing, it really helps us out in that regard.

- I was very impressed with her seminar the other day.

- She did a great job.

- It was nicely done.

- [Jason] Yep.

- I wanna go back in spring wheat history a little bit, and I've been told that most varieties of wheat, winter and spring, have a determined period in which they grow and produce the grain.

I can go back to 1983 where we had a wet, extended summer.

I don't think you were here yet at that time.

- [Jason] Nope, wasn't here then.

- But the spring wheat varieties never matured.

So are most spring wheat varieties, if given prolonged cool wet conditions, will they continue to grow or will they eventually, soon as, and produce grain?

- So most of the varieties that come out of our breeding program are photoperiod sensitive.

And so that means when the day length gets a certain, you know, you get a certain amount of daylight that tells the plants it's time to flower.

And so a lot of our varieties now have that trait.

So I wasn't around or doing this in 1983, so I'm not sure of the actual exact conditions then or what the varieties were grown.

So if they're insensitive, maybe?

You know, maybe they would have a prolonged growth habit.

But yeah, so.

- I know we had to windrow spring wheat that year into September because it just wouldn't mature.

- So I have a follow up question.

It was actually a question that someone asked me this week.

They put in some winter wheat seed really late last year and it either didn't come up or just barely started to come up and they were wondering how much, maybe it didn't even germinate till a few weeks ago and it made it through the winter, how much cold does a winter wheat plant need before it will vernalize?

So maybe if it didn't come up till spring, is it still gonna make heads and grow?

- Yeah, so I mean, the winter wheat breeding program, you know, like the early populations in their program, a lot of times they'll get planted later and they won't even emerge out of the soil.

In Bozeman, they're generally always vernalized, and so they will break that vegetative stage and start be able to flower.

We see that in Arizona, too, where it doesn't really get below freezing but there's enough cold down there for winter wheat to vernalize so you can have a counter seasonal breeding nursery down there and then bring the seed back up here.

- I didn't know that.

That's interesting.

I always thought it had to freeze, but it doesn't freeze that much down there.

- And then Dr. Sue Mondal, she's working with some new speed breeding methods that involve increasing how quickly winter wheat is vernalized.

And so there's tricks to that that you can increase how, or speed up the process of vernalization so it can get it through the growth cycles.

- Okay.

- Growth cycle faster.

- Interesting.

And thank you guys.

I have a couple questions here.

I'm gonna make one more comment.

We got from Great Falls.

And this caller's dad has used the gumball trick to get rid of gophers for decades, and it's truly effective.

I am gonna call Stephen Vantassel this week and our rodent vertebrate control specialist in Lewistown and see what flavor of gum works best.

We'll get that homework question and answer it next week.

- Tell them to start chewing.

- Yeah.

- Well, that brings back another way to control ants.

You know, we used to have an entomologist at zoo who would always say you fed ants yeast with a little bit of sugar, and of course the yeast would expand and blow up the ants.

- [Chloe] Oh my God.

- And theoretically, that works.

So enough of that.

Billings, what is a good herbicide to use on hemlock that won't kill the native grasses or trees and bushes?

I assume they mean poison hemlock.

- Yeah, I am not a hundred percent sure what they used for it.

I think the 2,4-D dicambas, I know people sometimes use the like Grazon stuff.

You have to be really careful.

And you just really wanna spot spray those rosettes too, sometimes I think.

And then I do know that chlorsulfuron, the rangeland version of Glean, which is Garlon, if I'm remembering correctly right now, also works pretty well.

And you know, people, this is a common thing that comes up that people have to deal with with managing water hemlock.

You wanna spray those rosettes now before they really start growing and start, and maybe just after they start to elongate.

That's when you really gotta get after them.

You don't want to weed whack any of that poison hemlock and spray any of that stuff into your face 'cause it's pretty toxic.

The most toxic spot on the water hemlock is if you take it out of the ground, you'll cut it open, don't do this.

But if you cut it open, there's these pods in there and that's where the most poisonous portion of the water hemlock is.

- [Jack] And it is pretty common in the state.

- Yeah, it is.

Yep, waterways lots.

Yep, I worked with Wibaux last year too, getting rid of sum in a city park.

- Okay, from Great Falls.

Interesting question.

This person would like to know if Chloe is using artificial intelligence in your research?

- That's a great question.

I haven't used it personally.

Maybe just asking ChatGPT to put my references in order.

But no, I know there's a lot of interest in it, and especially when we have like really big data sets, it could be very helpful for analyzing the data.

I'm not so sure about some of this generative stuff, but it's good for editing papers once you've written them, looking for different wording things.

So I know some people in our department are definitely trying it out in a safe and supervised way, I think for sure.

- [Jack] Good answer.

- I use it to write skeleton code.

I'll tell ChatGPT that I wanna make something like do a complicated statistical analysis and it will make the code for me.

And it won't always work but I can, it saves me a lot of time of space bar, parentheses, parentheses, space bar, plus, minus, and setting up all the codes.

So there's a shortcut into an analysis that's useful.

That's one of the first things.

- I didn't realize it was being used as much as that.

So yeah, that's excellent.

Good answer.

From Bozeman.

I'll throw this to Jason.

Is a switch to growing shorter wheat related to the increase in gluten intolerance?

That's an interesting concept.

I don't think-- - Yeah, I haven't heard of a relationship there to shorter wheat and gluten intolerance, yeah.

- So why do we grow shorter wheats?

- Generally, we grow those in, you know, high production environments under irrigation where you have a lot of nitrogen.

And so you want a shorter wheat so it doesn't lodge and some farmers wanna reduce the amount of straw in their fields too.

So residue management's another part of it.

- But I can go back before you were here again, where there were certain varieties of wheat that were 18 inches tall?

Wally Johnson was a breeder.

He had brown chief and I don't remember the other one.

It started with a T, Togiak, and those varieties when planted here in the Gallant Valley, they were so low to the ground that they developed serious scab issues, which made the crop unsalable.

So there is a relationship with diseases that are moved from the ground up to the plant if they're too short.

- [Jason] Yep.

- So I just, I can go back to when we had tall varieties of wheat, which did lodge.

- [Jason] Yeah, yep, they did lodge.

- But we did not have some of the foliar disease problems on them because that came from the residue.

- Like, yeah, foliars have like-- - Exactly.

- Yep.

They'll affect the heads more.

- From Helena, when grazing horses on natural grass, when should the horses be taken off for health wise?

Anybody?

Nobody has.

That, we'll find out and answer next week.

Write that down so I don't forget.

- All right.

- Okay, Tim.

Leafy spurge.

How effective is propane torch on leafy spurge, Russian thistle, sagebrush, et cetera, et cetera?

- Well, for leafy spurge, let's start with leafy spurge, and this is a propane torch.

It's not gonna be effective at all because if we talk about roots, which I talked about earlier, and we'll use our creeping bellflower, leafy spurge roots go 30 to 40 feet down in the ground.

If you take a propane torch and burn off the top right here, it's just gonna grow back from below the root surface, so it's pretty much ineffective.

- Well, it stimulate rapid growth because that do plants-- - Yep, it may even actually, depending on soil moisture and conditions, make it make a bunch more chutes below ground and make the problem even worse.

Russian thistle with the propane torch.

If you are out there and those Russian thistles are about this big and spindly and you hit them with the propane torch and don't set anything else on fire, you'll kill those because they're annual plants with just little small tap roots.

And I don't remember what the other species was.

What's the another?

- Sagebrush.

- Sagebrush.

- Sagebrush.

Sagebrush is absolutely sensitive to fire.

If you burn a field, it will kill all the sagebrush in that field.

Silver sage is a different species.

Artemisia cana, not tridentata, and it regerminates from below ground.

So if you're in Eastern Montana and you have silver sage and you burn the pasture, silver sage will grow back.

The sagebrush won't.

- So this has come up several years ago.

How many species of sagebrush do we actually have in Montana?

- There are nine species of sagebrusher in the species Artemesia.

So the genus is Artemesia, which is Artemis is the god of the hunt, the Greek god of hunting, right?

And so we have nine different species in Montana, yep.

All the way from black sagebrush Artemesia nova in the hottest and dry spots to Artemesia Cana that kinda likes the coolies and the swells.

- I like the common names more.

I can remember those and pronounce them in most cases.

Good question here.

And this came from Great Falls email, for both Chloe and Jason to chew on.

Are some spring wheat varieties more tolerant to heat stress than others and why?

Is it due to the hormone?

- I would say probably not entirely due to the hormone, but for sure, some are gonna be more heat tolerant than others, especially if we think about like wild wheat varieties.

There's a lot of research into how we can breed our current, you know, spring wheat back with wilder varieties that are more tolerant to whatever they're gonna get thrown at them.

So there's definitely a lot of variety in wheat contributing to heat tolerance.

I'm not sure we know a hundred percent why in a lot of the cases.

Certainly I think having a smaller plant that, you know, you're not losing as much water to evaporation, if you have more leaves, you're gonna lose more water that'll make it more sensitive to heat that increases evaporation in the plant.

That's one thing I can think of.

Maybe a deeper root system, again, relating to the water.

If you're getting at more water with a deeper root that might help the plant deal with heat stress better.

I don't know.

- So I'm gonna throw it to Jason.

I love to put people on the spot.

- [Jason] Sure.

- In your breeding program, do you look specifically at spring wheat heat tolerance as whether or not, or is it just yield and quality that you look at?

- Well, we look at the performance of well, it's not usually just heat but heat and drought stress.

And so we're constantly, you know, testing our varieties in those conditions across the state and then identifying the ones that perform best under those conditions.

So you know, we talked about reeder, which is an older North Dakota line that came in, had that heat and drought stress resistance.

After that was Vita, and that was the number one variety in Montana like 10, 11 years.

Then recently a new variety, Dagmar, which was Luther's last, Dr. Talbert's last release.

It seems to have pretty good heat and drought tolerance.

So it's pretty much, you know, in order for spring wheat to do well in Montana, it needs to have some level of, you know, stress tolerance to heat and drought.

- So has Dagmar replaced Vita as a number one variety in the state?

- Yep, first time this past year, it replaced Vita.

I think it was 22% of the Montana spring wheat acres last year and Vita was at 14 and half or so.

And then we have some newer varieties coming on as well that specifically empty Carlson, which seems to have pretty good drought and heat tolerance as well.

So we got a few varieties out there.

You know, you look at the overall average across all environments, they're pretty same.

Similar, but they definitely have their own niches.

So people just need to try them out and then see what works best for them in their environment and under their management program.

- Do they all have the same stems for dealing, the same stem solidness for dealing with sawfly?

How do we deal with sawfly within spring week?

- Yeah, so the solid stem trait's been the primary means of resisting sawfly.

Dagmar, its solid stem score is around 18, 19 on a five to 25 scale.

So it's decent and seems to resist sawfly pretty good.

And then we have another one, Carlson, it's solid stem score is pretty high but it seems to be more susceptible to sawfly so there's definitely variation to resistant or resisting sawfly, you know, despite what the solid stem scores are in the varieties.

So a lot of our stuff has some level of solid stems.

- So when I was gainfully employed, which has been several years ago, one of the things I knew or was told that in using solid stem characteristics in spring wheat, you had a yield hit.

Is that still the case today?

- You know, I think we're getting better, especially in Montana spring wheat.

Like some of our top yielding varieties, you know, their solid stem scores are 17, It varies a little bit from year to year.

So we're definitely making gains as far as that negative correlation with solid stems and yield potential.

And so I think with, you know, continuing our breeding efforts, we'll continue to improve on that.

- Okay, thank you.

From Darby, this caller has a raised bed in a greenhouse that she plants garlic in.

She plants in September and harvests in July.

Instead of having three months of dormancy, is there a cover crop she could plant first to aid the garlic?

- I can't think of, yeah, I can't think of how that might work.

So I will say probably not.

- I would agree with you there.

Question from Missoula, and we don't have an entomologist on here, but I happen to know the answer to this one.

This person wants to know, is Diazinon still available for purchase in Montana?

The answer is no.

It's never been unregistered.

It was never re-registered.

So if there's some Diazinon and storage someplace, it's still legal to buy, but nobody's producing it currently today.

And that's too bad because it was a great insecticide.

It could be used in lawn and garden situations.

Antioxidants.

This person is somewhat interested in what Chloe says about hormones in the plant.

Is there anything to do with antioxidants.

And you know, we're supposed to be eating antioxidants all the time.

Do plants have antioxidants?

This person from Scobey would like to know that answer.

- Yeah, definitely.

So antioxidants are things that fight oxidation, and oxidation is really a process that occurs during stress typically.

So my research showed that the hormone I'm using BR increased antioxidants in plants and plants have their own natural antioxidants.

There's things like vitamins.

Like vitamin B6 is an antioxidant in and there's lots of other small molecules and also proteins that act as antioxidants that try to reverse that damage oxidation occurs or creates.

So plants have antioxidants and that's why we eat plants to increase our antioxidants actually.

- Is there a lot of variation in antioxidants in plants?

- Yeah, there's a lot between species within the plant.

- There's some herbicides that function by creating a reactive oxygen species.

And the antioxidants in the plants are what come in to try to stop the plant from being killed by the herbicide.

- Yeah.

- Fascinating, yeah.

Gee, you know, I'm learning something again.

Okay, from Bozeman.

This is interesting.

Her young rhubarb plants are being eaten by a critter.

Abi, any idea what it is and how they can protect them?

And I thought rhubarb leaves were toxic to most days.

- Hmm, they are toxic, but a lot of critters, I mean it depends on the level of toxicity and how much they eat.

I've seen bunnies eat rhubarb too.

In terms of how to combat it, anything that you're growing, having some sort of a fencing that will protect it because a lot of critters that will eat these plants, it's hard to keep them away without a physical barrier.

So I would say getting some chicken wire type fencing.

It could be bunnies.

It could be deer that are eating it.

But having some sort of fencing can help prevent that.

- To me, I think it'd be pretty bitter and sour.

- [Abi] Yeah, yeah, I would think so.

- I've seen some people put baskets on top of their rhubarb to keep it from maybe getting too red or too green.

Is that to prevent it from bolting?

- I think to slow down bolting.

- Oh, okay.

- From sunlight.

- I don't know if it works.

- Yeah, I don't know either.

- But on that note we have a couple more comments which I will go ahead and read.

Is it true if you put baking soda with cornmeal and a small container in a hole, it will kill mice before they can burp?

- [Tim] That's another one to ask you.

- I've got a list of them here for Stephen.

There's no doubt about it.

But the other one that came in last week, I made a suggestion that fried cottontail was pretty good.

This person from Billings wants to know are there are other ways to fish cottontail other than frying because they're not supposed to eat fried food.

Houston pepper.

- Yeah, delicious.

- It is delicious with ginger snap gravy.

And I tell you what, I may just give that to our newsletter and I have a recipe for it.

If you don't like cottontail and use beef and make it sour broth.

Okay.

Tim?

- Yep.

- Dandelions.

Is it time to control them or are they better controlled in the fall?

- Yeah, that's a good question.

I even have some dandelions right here in my salad pile.

So here's the, I dug out this dandelion today out of a lawn that was actually fairly compacted.

You can see the dandelion is not super upright.

That's the taproot that's coming off that dandelion.

If you put some weed and feed on your lawn this year, yeah, you're probably gonna beat these dandelions back and you're not gonna see it when it gets hot.

Dandelions are like spring wheat.

They don't like a lot of heat stress and you'll see them start to disappear out of the yard once it gets warm in the season.

This was a dandelion that was managed last year.

And you can see the main taproot was actually down here, these two.

And what happens was after that, they started to regrow and they made 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 shoots that really came off.

This time of year, all the nutrients are going in this root and coming up.

So if you spray it with the herbicide, you kill the top, this root system's still gonna be there and it's probably gonna branch like this next year down lower and then just come back up.

Can you suppress them this time of year?

Yes, but in general, the fall is a much better time to manage dandelions.

- [Jack] Just before it freezes.

- Just before it freezes.

And that's because this green plant material and all the nutrients here are going down into that root system and that's what makes it more effective.

- What about the manual control since the soils are soft, getting your dandelion fork and popping them out this time of year?

- Yep, I use my hori-hori knife.

And yep, that's how I was cutting these out.

It's a great way to do it.

But you may definitely, you know, they'll go away for the season and you won't see them, but likely they'll be back again next year.

Like a good weed.

- From Bozeman.

Caller heard that there's a bread that is made completely from spring wheat.

As a consumer, what would this bread be called and where could they find it?

That's an interesting question.

I don't know if there's a name for just spring wheat bread.

Is there?

- No, not that I'm familiar with.

I mean there's different types of spring wheat that, you know, we do grow hard red spring wheat, but then there's soft white spring wheats, and some in between too.

So yeah, generally, the spring wheat we grow is probably, for bread, has two strong gluten, usually is used for like bagels and maybe pizza crust and things like that.

- So how do you test the, not nutritional, but the taste test for new varieties of wheat?

The quality, the taste quality, how do you go about determining that?

- Honestly, we really don't, haven't done any of taste testing.

The biggest thing we do is measure the gluten strength, you know, the quality, quality of the protein in the spring wheat is the main thing we do - [Tim] Is that stretch?

- Yeah.

Yeah, stretch.

- [Tim] So you make a dough and you stretch it?

- Yeah, yeah.

And just the mixing tolerance and all those different, water absorption, that's another big one, that's indicative of high quality protein.

But yeah, a lot of the taste comes like people put a bunch of sugar and stuff in their bread.

So a lot of times then that's probably, you know, a big influencer in taste.

- I can remember years ago where you always had these little loaves of bread that were baked in a wheat quality lab and they'd give them away afterwards to whoever to take them home.

- [Chloe] We can still smell them.

- Are you kidding?

- We don't get them anymore.

- They don't give them away anymore.

- Too bad because it really is good.

And there was variation in the taste.

There's no doubt about it.

- Yeah, I'm sure there is.

- Okay, we're getting downtime.

I do have a few more questions here I'd like to get at.

From Missoula.

Tim, this caller is naturalizing her property and has a lot of smooth brome.

What native grass species can she seed to combat the smooth brome?

I would get rid of the smooth brome first.

- Yeah, I would get rid of the smooth brome first.

That's gonna be probably a better, better way.

And I would get rid of the smooth brome first, there's a number of different things you could do.

And then what would you probably plant as a typical native species that's somewhat similar?

I would say probably Western wheat grass is one of them.

And then maybe in the future or within that mix, you might put a little bit of green needle grass in there.

It has a really nice green leaf shape.

It's pretty comfortable.

Those would be my two choices for replacing a native saw in there or a native rice ominous grass.

- Okay.

- But it'll be tough to get rid of that smooth brome actually.

That'll take a little work.

- Well, if it's actively growing right now, which it should be.

Roundup should take it out pretty good, shouldn't it?

- Yeah, it should.

Yeah, it'll at least get you down to maybe only 20, 30% of it left.

- Okay.

- Yep.

- Good answer.

Thank you.

So Abi, question here.

Can your panel recommend a perennial flower that are deer resistant?

It's not tulip so.

- Yeah, so there are quite a few.

We have minimizing deer damage in residential areas, Mont guide, where we have a large list of flowers, trees, and shrubs that we think are deer resistant.

But like I usually say, deer don't read these publications.

So for any recommendations, you take them with a grain of salt.

But oftentimes, it's flowers that might have prickly foliage, might have really strong aromas.

So things in the mint family are often maybe repellent, things that are toxic, things like irises, those can often be resistant to deer.

So my irises, for example, are never bothered by deer.

- Okay, Chloe from Great Falls.

This person would like to know, if you were to continue research right now, what would you be looking at?

- Yeah, I'd love to test this hormone with drought tolerance because we don't malt water in Eastern Montana.

So in my research, I only looked at heat tolerance and seeing what the effects could be with heat and drought, could be really interesting.

And then also I'd like to look at different varieties, what kind of BR they have, how much BR, and then get some field trials going.

Because most of my research was in the greenhouse and we know that can't always be 100% informative.

So putting some field trials in would be really interesting.

- Okay, good answer.

Quick question here for Abi.

How far from an irrigation line should they plant a bear root apple?

And that's from Bozeman.

- Yeah, so I would say, make sure you know where that irrigation line is, but trees will grow significantly and their root systems will extend two to three times the full grown size of the canopy.

And so I would say as far enough away as you possibly can because you don't want those tree roots damaging that irrigation line.

- How would it damage an irrigation line?

- So they can grow in between it, and if there are any sort of cracks or crevices or sometimes they can physically grow around it and grow to the point where they can cause kind of more damage.

So I've seen even root systems start to grow inside irrigation lines too, if there's any sort of opening for them too.

- Okay, quick question, which we don't have an economist here, so I'll throw it to Jason.

This person says with a decrease in spring wheat acres, do you see an increase in the price?

- No, well, that's why the spring wheat is 'cause the price is down.

And so until things change.

Also input costs are up.

So that's the other side of it too.

So there's other options like barley, Durham, pulses that people are looking at.

If they can get a contract for a good price, the farmers will go for that instead of planting spring wheat.

- I'm seeing a lot more interest in alfalfa and standpoint in the state.

So that's another reason is because the price of spring wheat.

Folks, we're coming down to the very end.

I wanna thank the panel, and especially our graduate student, Chloe.

You did a great job.

It's nice to get a refreshing young scientist to talk to the audience like that.

Next week, we're gonna talk about labor issues here in Montana, especially in agriculture.

Diane Charlton will be our guest.

So with that, folks, thanks for joining us tonight.

Good night.

Have a good week.

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

(bright music) - [Announcer] Montana Ag Live is made possible by: The Montana Department of Agriculture, MSU Extension, The MSU Ag Experiment Station of the College Agriculture, the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery and Landscaping, the Gallatin Gardeners Club, and The Montana Federation of Garden Clubs.

(bright music)