- [Narrator] "Montana Ag Live" is made possible by the Montana Department of Agriculture, MSU Extension, the MSU Ag Experiment Station of the College of Agriculture, the Montana Wheat & Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery & Landscaping, the Gallatin Gardeners Club, and the Montana Federation of Garden Clubs.

(bright upbeat music) - You are watching "Montana Ag Live", originating today from the studios of KUSM on the very exciting campus of Montana State University, and coming to you over your Montana public television system.

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

Happy to be your host this evening.

We're gonna have an exciting program this evening because it's something that I wanna learn more about, and I think the audience out there would like to learn a little bit more about, why Montana grain is so highly sought of in the marketplace.

It is the envy of the world, and I can document that just on a recent experience that I will explain a little bit later on in the program.

So we got a couple experts here tonight.

I have them sitting at the table.

I will introduce 'em in a moment, but it's up to you to provide questions.

And if you're curious about Montana grain quality, here's an opportunity for you to ask those questions this evening.

And we have the experts here that will give you a very good answer.

Before we get to that, let me introduce tonight's panel.

Way to my left, Eric Belasco.

Eric is an economist, ag economist, very well versed in crops and livestock.

So if you have questions about the economic well-being of the agricultural community in the state this year, hey, call 'em in and we'll get to 'em.

Our special guest this evening, Mike Giroux.

Mike Giroux is director of the Cereal Quality Lab here on campus.

It's a great job and, I will say this, they do a wonderful job in making sure that our wheat that we produce in this state has the highest quality that is potentially possible.

Great job.

And complimenting him is Jamie Sherman.

Jamie is a barley breeder and does a lot of different things with barley, and we're gonna get into some of the uses of barley and some of the uses of wheat tonight, and why we are using those specific crops and the demand for them.

And of course Abi Saeed, Abi is our horticulturalist.

Abi, if you have questions about anything related to horticulture, plants, vegetables, trees, you phone 'em in and we'll get to as many as we can this evening.

Answering the phone tonight, Judge Bruce Lobel and Cheryl Bennett, and they're not busy.

But the phone number's not up there yet, so we get the phone number up, get those questions in.

Mike, tell us a little bit about the Cereal Quality Lab and what you do here at MSU.

- You know, a big thing for cereal quality is what actually makes up the grain.

And for us, us in Montana, the reason we're growing so much wheat and barley, about five million acres, is that it's ideally suited for this area.

For one reason, we don't have real high rainfall, which you could say is kind of a problem, our yields aren't that high.

But the reduced yield, to a certain extent, does increase the protein content of our grain.

When we talk about wheat, especially, wheat needs high protein content to make high-quality bread.

Without that, you don't get good mixing strength and you don't get high loaf volumes.

So Montana's environment is well suited for that.

So five million acres of wheat because it's adapted to our environment, primarily.

And I have a visual display, just of a map showing that, if that could be brought on the screen.

So here we look at the United States, and you can see Montana up there has a lot of hard red spring and hard red winter wheat, and durum as well.

Barley's not shown on that, it's actually on the next map.

But looking at this map, you can see in the northern part of the country we have a lot of wheat being grown, and Montana, among all these regions, perhaps has lower rainfall.

It also has excellent soil quality in North Central and Northern Montana.

And if you look at just Montana part of that map, you can kind of see it forms a triangle where wheat is grown, and that's termed the Golden Triangle because it's a great production area for wheat.

So very reliable, and I have a couple visual displays.

One is just this sheaf of wheat here, and this really could just be a single plant.

And the one big thing about wheat is that it's adaptable, it's adaptable in terms of how much rainfall we have.

So as rainfall increases, each subsequent head is called a tiller, and it can adapt if there's more resources available.

The same thing is true for barley, and Jamie's got a couple visual displays here next to me that show the same thing.

We can get multiple heads per plant.

So if you look at the yields we get in Montana for wheat, at a minimum in a year, perhaps that might be 30 bushels per acre and not much more, even in an average year.

That results in higher protein content.

So the other thing about these sheaves here is, if you've seen wheat before, you may recognize this is wheat, but can you tell what variety it is?

- I can't.

(laughs) - I wouldn't be able to either.

- No.

- I could rule some things out based on chaff color, but I couldn't tell you for sure what that variety is.

Does it matter?

Well, I was thinking about bringing some apples because I really like Cosmic Crisp apples.

I think they're delicious, and I don't like Red Delicious, which is an older variety of apple.

I don't know how many of you agree with that.

- Agree.

- Yeah, I agree.

Mushy.

- Maybe not Eric, he might be afraid to say, but- so they vary.

The same thing is true for these wheat varieties, they vary a lot.

So how do they vary?

Well, if we just make a cross between wheat varieties, we have 100s if not 1,000s of genes segregating among those progeny lines.

A nice image that Jamie Sherman has shown in presentations is kind of a funnel where she starts off with 1,000s and 1,000s of lines, and she's gonna winnow that down... Am I stealing what you're gonna say?

- No.

- To just perhaps one or two that you might release.

And so how do we do that?

Well, I mentioned that one of the main things we're taking advantage of here, and that our wheat is known worldwide as being the best quality wheat, because we have higher protein content, which buyers pray for.

We also have protein strength.

And so protein strength is that extensibility, kind of making a dough ball when you mix up wheat, and if you start with a soft wheat with lower protein content, it'd be easier to pull it apart.

The harder it is to pull it apart equates to protein strength.

So we want protein strength because our end users desire protein strength, and 80% or so of our wheat is exported.

So we visit there, Montana Wheat & Barley Committee visits there, as well as does US Wheat Associates, to look at what these industries want in those countries.

It's not different from what we want in the United States for our wheat, we like big fluffy loaves of bread as well.

It's consistent with that, but we don't release any varieties unless they meet our standards.

So Jamie or I could cross two wheat varieties together, we have 1,000s of genes segregating, and then we have to screen among those lines to identify those that have good quality traits.

So I keep saying protein content over and over.

So protein content matters, and so we throw out low protein lines.

We're not gonna end up growing soft white which is known for protein content, our major product that we're aiming for is high bread quality, also noodle quality.

And in both cases, people don't like mush.

So as Jack will tell you when he tells this story, he was in Italy and he was eating pasta, and a lot of our durum is actually exported to Italy.

It could be that Jack traveled across the world to eat Montana durum.

- And I'll attest to that because we had a little cooking show, and they were making pasta out of durum, Semolina flour, and water.

And they cook it.

It's a lot chewier over there, it's really very al dente.

And I found that I like al dente, but this is almost like licorice, it's that tough.

But they finished their pasta there in the sauce, but the guy that put on the show said his favorite Semolina of flour comes from the United States.

He didn't mention Montana but it would be Montana or North Dakota, and that's where a lot of it came from.

Let's move along a little bit, I have a quick question.

Why does spring wheat have higher protein than winter wheat in general?

- It's the planting time.

So winter wheat planted in the fall has longer to grow before fall.

It flowers sooner and, to a certain extent, it beats the heat stress that comes on when spring wheat flowers.

So the advantage of that for winter wheat is that we have higher yield, but we also have a little bit lower protein content.

So if an export market is interested in the higher protein content, they may choose spring wheat, which generally has higher protein content.

- All right, let's move over to Jamie here.

And this is an email question that came in, and it's a good question.

Is there any prospect for the return to production in the marketplace of high beta-glucan barley variety?

This person goes on to say that it was beneficial in controlling cholesterol, and I think the Newmans proved that.

Are there replacement varieties available that are... - So if you'll pop the slide up that I brought.

So barley's biggest end use right now is malt barley, and it's kind of the opposite of what they want in wheat.

For good malt quality, they want low protein and high starch because that's what gets fermented in So the biggest part of the industry, most of the barley grain, ends up going to malt in the US.

So it's the other slide that I had, that's showing the distribution.

Those slides you see there is the distribution of where barley is grown.

But about 68% of barley goes into the brewing pipeline and about 22% goes to animal feed, either as a forage or as a grain, and only about 4% right now goes into human food.

And a lot of where we go with that is the Asian market, they use barley, hulless barley with high beta-glucans, as a rice additive or instead of rice because it's higher in protein and it's more nutritious.

And so we would like to get back into that market more.

And I do have a hulless variety that is waiting on the shelf, hoping that the market will build up a little bit.

- So there is a cookbook that was put out by Walton, Rosemary Newman, it's called "Good Health and Good Food", or something like that.

It talks about barley, and I think you can probably still get that either on Amazon or someplace online.

Let's get off that for a little bit.

Abi had an email question, this person was curious about seeding Kentucky bluegrass in the fall.

Is that a good time to do it?

They wanna know if it's dormant seeding or just regular seeding?

- Yeah, so that's an important distinction, and someone commented on our recording on the Montana Ag Live Facebook page in terms of the difference between fall seeding and dormant seeding.

And the difference is in the fall seeding, what you wanna do is you wanna try and get your turf grass to germinate and start to get established before the winter hits.

And at this time in Bozeman, it would probably be too late to do that right now, especially Kentucky bluegrass.

Often, Kentucky bluegrass is one of the turf varieties that takes a longer time to germinate and a longer time to establish.

So usually for cool-season turf grasses, if you're doing fall seeding, you wanna aim for about 45 to 60 days before frost to seed, and we're getting past that point now.

But dormant seeding is another great strategy, and when you do this you do this after, when temperatures are cold enough that germination wouldn't occur, right before the snow falls, and it gives your turf a head start in the spring.

It'll germinate pretty quickly, you need less water.

One of the benefits of that is that your turf gets a head start in the spring and can compete with those weeds really well, but one of the issues is that it usually only works in areas where you're going to have snow cover throughout the winter.

So if you're somewhere in Scoby where the wind is gonna blow the snow away, that wouldn't work as well.

But if you're in a place where snow will stick around, you can do dormant seeding pretty well.

- One suggestion I would have with that is, if you're gonna do any fall seeding or dormant seeding, get rid of all the grassy weeds ahead of time with glyphosate, and then proceed to do your fall seeding.

- Absolutely.

And another thing too is mow your turf lower than you normally would to give that seed a better soil contact.

- I'm a firm believer in the fall of mowing very short because when the leaves fall and the wind blows, they leave and you don't have to rake 'em.

I learned that in the Midwest years ago.

Eric, I'm not letting you off the hook here.

From Bozeman, this caller wants to know why wheat prices are so low, and they are pretty low.

- They are low.

They've been coming down for a few years, and in economics we look for, we talk a lot about kind of the long-run price, and wheat's kind of right there where really people aren't making a whole lot of money.

Prices have been coming down because production is pretty good globally.

Even in the US, production's pretty solid this year, but they've just been kind of coming down.

You look at the long-range projections, they're at five and a half right now per bushel and next year they're a little bit higher, but I would say most projections looking out are that that's kind of where they're gonna be, unless there's- the main reasons we see big spikes in wheat prices are usually because of production disturbances in other countries, so if you see production losses due to drought in a competitor, Australia, Russia, Ukraine, any of those areas, we could see prices go back up again.

- So I'll ask the question, and it hasn't come in, but are other countries taking over some of our wheat market because of our tariff situation right now?

- That's a good question.

So, as Mike mentioned, a lot of our wheat gets exported.

It goes west, and if you looked at that map, they're all kind of along the high line, that rail line that heads out to Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, those ports.

So our main, it does make its way to Italy, but I'd say our primary clients are in the Asia Pacific region; Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, those are kind of where we're playing.

And so, geographically, you look and you see it's pretty easy for us in Montana to get it there but it's a lot easier for Australia, is one that's really close.

So it's a very competitive market.

I don't think we've lost market share so far, but it's a competitive market so any advantage we can have over our competitors is helpful.

- Okay.

Question came in from Butte, and this person was interested in the use of Semolina flour in Italy, and they wanna know how much of the Semolina flour in Europe is supplied by our northern states, Montana and North Dakota?

Any idea?

- It's certainly not the majority.

- Okay.

- It's the majority of our durum heading to Europe.

As Eric mentioned, for spring and winter that's Asia but for durum it is Europe.

I don't know the proportion.

I think it's low though, actually.

- All right.

Abi, this person from Butte wants to know- Butte's busy tonight, by the way.

This person wants to know the best time to cut peonies back for the season.

- I mean, you can start cutting them back.

So there's kind of two strategies, one of my favorite things is to leave the material up over winter, and that helps the snow kind of stick to it, it keeps it insulated, and it also provides habitat for beneficials like beneficial insects, bees, things like that.

So I'm a bigger fan of not cutting it back until the springtime, but a lot of people can do kind of a fall cutback and the plants are perfectly healthy, but I think leaving the stalks on in the winter can help insulate the plant a little bit better.

- Okay, thank you.

Mike, from Big Sandy, this person is interested in new traits that might be incorporated into new varieties.

Have you been working on any new traits?

- Boy, actually quite a few.

And I have a visual display for that.

So this, for example, is a white wheat, and you can tell by the color it's whiter in appearance.

The reason you would want this as a consumer is that if you eat whole wheat bread, white wheat actually tastes a little bit better.

And the next one I have here is a red wheat, happens to be the variety Ray, and you can see it's quite red in color.

So I think it may be while Jack and his was in Italy, he had a glass or two of wine and probably a little white and perhaps some red as well.

- Quite a bit, actually.

- Good for you.

- Yeah.

- And so that same kind of taste difference that you can detect there, that is, the white tastes a little bit sweeter, is present between these wheats.

And so things like that, whether it's taste... And another trait that this wheat has is actually it has no PPO.

No PPO is something that was funded by the Wheat & Barley Committee, and there's no activity of that.

And the activity of that matters when you get a dough wet that you get off colors, and especially if you have a whole wheat product.

You'd want no PPO.

These value-added traits, though, are things that have to really be demanded by the end markets, because Montana, as shown on the map, we're not showing small subdivisions.

We're basically saying that it's all hard red spring and hard red winter, and we know it all has good quality.

But for the advanced traits like something like this, an end user might have to contract acreage to get ahold of that.

Other things that people work on in Montana, and I have as well, is herbicide tolerance.

We'll probably have herbicide-tolerant as well as sawfly resistance in the form of solid-stemmed durums.

- Okay.

Barley question.

This person from Fairfield, and this will go to both Jamie and Eric, wants to know how malt barley contract prices are arrived at.

Do you guys have any clue on that?

I know it's always a big issue in the Fairfield area where we grow a lot of malt barley.

- Well, the companies set the contract price.

- I've been told there's a formula that they base it on spring wheat or something like- - So my guess is you could use a wheat price as kind of an anchor for the barley contract, and then adjust for some basis off of that.

My understanding of the barley contracts is they're a bit longer term, so it's not just one year it's usually multi-years, because it is these breweries that are looking for consistent volumes over time.

- I think it depends on whether they have the barley they need, and the contracts have been somewhat inconsistent lately and they've actually been cutting contracts, because of the loss of people drinking alcohol they've needed less barley, and so they've contracted less barley, and when they contract less they probably pay less as well.

- On that note, beer consumption in the US has gone down.

- It has.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Where does most of our malt barley end up?

- Most of the malt barley ends up in the US in beer.

- Okay, but do we export some of it also?

- Oh, some, but not a lot.

Not a lot, we use most of it.

- Okay.

- Because the contracts are within the US with companies in the US.

So, for example, Malt Europe has a malt plant in Great Falls.

They contract, they malt it there, so they're trying to reduce their pipeline too.

They want to get barley locally, and it's the same with Anheuser-Busch and Molson Coors.

Now, occasionally some will go over, like if we have a good year and Canada has a poor year then maybe some would go over or vice versa.

Some is contracted down in New Mexico right now because of the new big brewery down there, Heineken has a big brewery I know of, and they contract some primarily because it's a little bit hard to grow barley in Mexico.

So there's some opportunity there, but most of it is used in the US.

- All right, thank you.

Switching over to Cottonwoods from Winnett.

We don't get a lot of calls from Winnett, but thank you for calling in.

This caller has a six-foot cottonwood tree, which has three leading stalks, two of which are the same length.

Should they save those, or should they get rid of those?

- So cottonwood naturally grows pretty well and can produce those multiple stalks, but if it's about six feet and it's pretty young, right now it's a good time to shape the tree into what you want too.

So this would be a good time to choose kind of the leading stalk if you wanted to have that central leader.

The younger the tree the easier it is to do that, and the better it'll recover its shape.

- Okay, great answer.

Thank you.

Eric, interesting call from Billings.

This caller wants to know how to determine what the market price of grazing cattle is.

Is there a website to help determine grazing costs?

- The market price for renting land, is that- - I think that's what they're talking about.

- Yeah.

So we do have a tool, actually, that we're in the process of rebuilding that looks at different rates that are given.

The USDA does release a lot of this information, and so we're working to get that kind of county-level information.

But, really, there is kind of a formula, just like with any other real estate, it's how much forage is growing on that land.

And that can be reflected usually in the area, you're gonna see similar rental rates for grazing.

So we do have a tool, I can't talk about it too much now because I don't think it's been out but, hopefully, next year we'll have our grazing tool out there.

- Okay, thank you.

And I have a follow-up one for you.

A caller is from Darby, farms 400 acres of grass hay.

They want to know why have prices gone down and costs have gone up.

Do you think that prices for grass hay will go up at some time?

And grass hay is basically horse hay in many cases.

- Yeah, so the input costs have gone up, which is, I mean, for wheat producers I think they'd probably say the same story, where a lot of the chemical inputs have become more expensive.

Land has become more expensive, labor has become more expensive, capital's become- so kind of across the board or even if you're looking to utilize an operating loan to maybe invest, the interest rates are pretty high so the cost of that capital expense is also pretty high.

So I wouldn't say it's specific to them, it's really something that agriculture has kind of felt across the board in the last year, is rising input costs.

- So on that note, looking around this valley, and I've been here a lot of years, we used to have a lot more wheat and barley in the valley.

Now we grow, I would say, more alfalfa, and of course corn too but I think alfalfa has replaced a lot of our wheat and grain here in the valley.

Is that because it's more profitable to grow alfalfa than it is our cereal grains?

I like to put you on the spot.

- Yeah, it depends.

I'm gonna give the famous economist answer, it depends.

I mean, we've seen in the recent past hay prices have been very lucrative.

We've also seen years when hay prices are not that strong at all.

It really depends on- so for wheat it's a global market, we're selling overseas, for hay we're looking at domestic.

So if you're experiencing a drought, chances are the price is gonna be pretty high in your market, it's also gonna be a lot harder to grow hay that year.

But if you happen to be in the fortunate position where you're in a region that's experiencing drought but you know you have pretty good growing conditions, then you could receive that higher price.

- Can I jump in there?

- Sure.

- I think it's for agronomic reasons too.

So we've got irrigation in the valley, and so people- and the alfalfa hay is high value and so it's worth putting water on it, but then they do rotate out every two or three years, and then they'll usually put in a cereal crop.

And the corn has come in a lot more and they're silaging that a lot, so I think it's for agronomic reasons as well.

- But what fascinates me is cattle numbers, as you've explained, whether you've been on many times, are down, but yet alfalfa production is up, which to me would suggest alfalfa prices would go down.

Am I wrong?

- Sure.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

So that's the demand side, would be saying with the cattle on the demand side of that equation, but then it's the supply side as well.

So how much availability of hay is there?

Yeah, and actually last year our cattle numbers flattened out, so they're not dropping still but the demand side hasn't really changed very much, but really it's mostly supply driven.

- All right, thank you.

Mike, I'd like to throw one to you that you don't expect.

- Okay.

- From Fort Benton, this caller wants to know how important protein content is when wheat is used in brewing soy sauce.

And if you look at soy sauce, a large portion of it is actually wheat.

Can you answer that question?

- I would say probably not as important, certainly as for bread.

And the things I've mentioned for bread is that it must be high protein strength.

That certainly is not true for soy sauce, where it's a fermented product and protein strength is not a part of that.

It would require higher starch, and so I would say if I was making soy sauce I would not rely upon Montana wheat for that, I'd probably choose a cheaper wheat.

- Okay.

- Perhaps one from Kansas.

- Oh, of course.

(laughs) - The number one wheat state.

Yeah, it's cheaper wheat 'cause it has lower protein content than ours does.

- So on that note, I do know 10, 11% in Kansas winter wheat.

Is our winter wheat protein generally higher here in the northern Great Plains than it would be in Kansas or Texas or Oklahoma?

- Yes, yes.

- Significant difference?

- A percent or two at least.

- Okay.

- And so our normal cutoff would be a percent or two higher than theirs.

And the farmers are aiming for that, and it's not an exaggeration to say we have the finest wheat produced in the US.

- I agree.

You know, we've promoted that for years, and the marketplace tells us that too, so good point.

Abi, from Belgrade.

Yeah, I like this one.

Caller has lots of purslane in her garden and in the lawn, and I'm surprised it'd be in the lawn.

Is there anything that can be used to eradicate it?

And I tell you what, my garden just is a carpet of purslane anymore.

- Yeah.

So if Tim was here he'd talk about all the recipes that you can use purslane in.

It is pretty tasty, you can eat it, and I have to give that shout-out to Tim.

In terms of kind of... Purslane can be fairly easy to pull out of the garden, and so one of the things is to have competitive vegetation around it, or it's just gonna keep coming back.

So you can use a herbicide to try and get rid of it, but as long as there's any sort of area for it to take over, it's going to keep doing that.

So maybe try and shift what you're planting there.

You can use some wood chip mulch if it's an area where you don't want to plant anything, but it's fairly easy to keep at bay.

And if you can't beat it, eat it, as Tim says.

(everyone laughing) - Well, I can't eat as much as is in my garden, I'll guarantee you that.

And this year, for whatever reason, I had a little bit for several years.

This year ended up with a carpet of purslane, and it is competitive enough that it has reduced my pepper size and tomatoes, so I don't like it.

So I'm gonna fallow next year and use a lot of glyphosate.

- Yeah, you certainly can.

Yeah.

- So that's my plan.

Interesting question here.

This person wants to know, are we still growing six-row barley or is everything that's grown in the state two-row barley?

And you might- yeah.

- We'll go back to the barley examples.

So this is a six-row that has awns on it.

And all that means is that as you go around the head there are six seeds, and that's kind of like wheat, we expect there to be six seeds going around.

But with the other sort of barley is two-row.

Now, this is a little bit confusing 'cause this doesn't have awns, but if you look at it you can see that there's only two seeds at any point going up the head.

And so that's the difference between the two.

And so just looking at 'em, you'd go, "Oh, well, we should get a lot more seeds, we should have a lot more yield off this six-row than we do off this two-row, so why the heck are we growing the two-row?"

Well, the two-row has been pushed by the malting industry because the seed size is more uniform, and the malting process requires that the seeds germinate all at the same time, and that is greatly impacted by seed size.

So they want more uniform seeds so they'll germinate at the same time, and you don't get that with the six-row.

The seeds that are in the middle are bigger than the seeds, the lateral seeds, they're smaller.

So those smaller seeds are gonna go faster and then they will have gone too far in the malting process.

So that's why there's the focus on two-row, but what we are looking at is moving- so this variety, I didn't mention, doesn't have awns, and that is particular for forage; it's a cereal forage.

And so cattle will like to eat it because it doesn't have the pokey awns on it.

But what we're thinking now is that our next forage that we're gonna release is gonna be a six-row, because it would have the advantage of So there's not a real agronomic reason for going with the two-row, it's the malting industry.

- Malting, yeah.

Just satisfy my curiosity.

If I were growing a six-row and a two-row, both good quality barley varieties, what would the yield difference be with a six-row over the... - I don't know for sure, I mean, it is a little bit higher, though.

But I can't tell.

- 20%, 15?

- Something like that, maybe.

- Okay.

Well, I'm always kind of curious about why these varieties... - But, I mean, the seed size does impact it too.

- Yes, I realize that.

Okay.

I don't know if you can handle this, but I think you can.

From Helena.

Caller feels like there have been fewer ladybugs this year.

Is there a reason for that?

- So I've heard kind of anecdotal information about fewer or more of one type of insect or another.

So depending on our lady beetles, our native lady beetles usually overwinter under vegetation or tree trunks, leaf litter, things like that.

So if we've had a particularly harsh winter, which we have had past year, it can potentially contribute to the fact that we might have fewer lady beetles now that you might be seeing.

And it could be kind of a regional difference, so you may have seen that in Helena whereas maybe in a place like Corvallis you may have had more lady beetles than normal.

So it can vary.

- Does it make a difference how many aphids are around?

- It certainly could, but this has been a banner aphid year from most places that I've heard, there have been a lot of aphid-related issues.

But, again, those kind of overwintering temperatures can impact, and a lot of our pests rebound much faster than the ones higher up in the food chain.

- So I threw a nasty question to her about yield differences, how many aphids can a ladybug devour on a given day?

- So it's usually the larvae that are eating them, and several 100 in a day.

- Oh, pretty voracious.

- So the larvae can eat 100s, they're voracious predators.

Yeah, absolutely.

- Okay.

I didn't catch you with that one, you had an answer.

Okay.

Mike, this person from Belgrade would like to know what makes semolina flour more desirable than other flours in producing pasta.

- It's pretty much what they're selected for.

So to go back for these seeds, so this is a hard red winter, has dark red seeds, and this is a Semolina durum type.

And maybe hard to tell in this package but it has yellower seeds, they're not red.

And this all gets after consumer preferences.

People prefer yellow pasta.

I'm not sure where that came from, but if you have a red durum, nobody wants it.

It really must be yellow in appearance with no red genes at all.

So could you make pasta from Ray, this variety Ray?

You totally could.

Would it look like normal pasta?

No, it'd be darker in appearance, it'd have more bran flecks, so the bran flecks would stand out.

So it's really about selecting for what people's expectations are in the variety.

For hard red spring and hard red winter, you could select for yellow endosperm.

And typically the breeders only cross genotypes that don't carry that trait.

In durum we only cross parents that carry it, so it's all fixed for yellow endosperm.

So it's pretty much about preference and maintaining traditions.

- Okay.

So, again, I came up with a question listening to you.

Most of the pasta that we buy in the United States is dried pasta or processed pasta.

Is fresh pasta more desirable than dried pasta?

- Well, as- - Or frozen pasta?

- As you know, the cost difference is substantial.

So my son, when he lived at home, would want us to buy these $6 packages of fresh pasta.

I admit it's delicious, but that same amount of pasta to cook from a dry form instead of $6 might be 20 cents, 15 cents.

So huge difference because we have great transportability of Semolina and of dried pasta.

And really it's primarily that, it is a great flavor to eat from fresh pasta but, practically, economically not as easy.

So most restaurants would be serving not fresh pasta, unless you're at a very high end or on a trip to Italy, perhaps, they'd be using dry pasta.

- Okay, interesting.

I thought maybe as I watched this cook make pasta that it would be more flavorful, but honestly I got pasta out while I was over there.

(everyone laughing) - The other thing that's unique about pasta compared to many other food products is that for durum, like you said earlier, it's pretty much just two ingredients.

It should be 100% durum Semolina to give the right color, protein strength and noodle bite, and water.

That's it, there is no hiding anything in durum.

You could, I'm not saying people would, but for wheat, for bread, a lot of times the innate flavor of the bread is somewhat covered up.

So if I eat cinnamon raisin toast for breakfast, what do I taste?

I think I can taste the wheat protein, but it's also a little overwhelmed by other If you eat just buttered noodles, like all kids like, buttered noodles.

No, I like buttered noodles.

But anyway, there's nothing there.

There's a little butter, but then it is just durum, semolina, and water.

You're tasting the wheat.

And for all of us that grew up on wheat, I imagine we like the taste of wheat.

- Boy, tell me about it.

I do, and bread especially.

- Oh, hot bread.

Perfect.

- And actually in Italy they'd throw so much bread on the table, and olive oil and vinegar.

I mean, now that I can tolerate, but after a while the pasta got a little bit old.

But that's my own opinion, I do like a little bit of it.

Eric, from Bozeman, this person has indicated that wheat prices are low.

He called in earlier.

He'd also like to know how wheat producers could manage the risk of growing wheat.

Any suggestions there?

- Yeah, well I mean all agriculture production deals with risk in many different ways.

If you're growing wheat, I mean, there's price risk.

So when you're putting seed in the ground, how do you know what this is gonna be worth?

You don't really know, so there's a lot of different ways you could contract.

You could set up a contract with an a grain elevator well in advance.

That locks you into the price.

Maybe you could do that for next year and you could lock in on $6, but maybe you get to next year and maybe prices go up and you kind of miss that on that market.

There are futures and options contracts you could potentially use to try to hedge some of that risk.

We talked about barley earlier, there's not really an exchange for barley but wheat has a pretty big exchange that you could use.

So a lot of barley contracts use the wheat 'cause there is so much correlation between the two.

But that's just one side of it, there's the whole yield side, which if you're in agriculture you don't know how much of this you're gonna grow in a given year, what the weather's going to be.

And I'd say the primary way that farmers manage that risk is through crop insurance.

So they'll start a crop insurance policy, that will kind of manage if you have lower than normal yields, then you can collect an indemnity on those low yields in that year.

So to kind of stabilize at least the revenue side, just the last part of that is the cost, the cost side of the equation, which there's, we've seen the last few years, there's a lot of uncertainty relative to cost.

So yeah.

- Yeah.

We still don't have a farm bill.

- Yes.

- And we've cut a lot of things federally, the government has.

Is there any potential of the insurance, subsidized crop insurance being cut?

- Yeah, so you're talking about the fourth element of risk is the political risk, but- (laughs) - Okay.

- I would say on that end, I mean, there are definitely things that are being negotiated in the farm bill.

I don't think getting rid of crop insurance is one of those, I think there's a lot of talk about what to do with the nutrition programs.

There's a lot of talk about what to do with some of the conservation programs, and then also some of the price safety net kind of disaster aid programs as well.

So those three I'd say is where most of the conversation is.

I think crop insurance seems to be a pretty bipartisan, have pretty bipartisan support in Congress.

- Okay.

Thank you.

I almost forgot the salad that you have in front of us here.

Those don't look healthy.

You want to tell us what's going on there Abi?

- Yeah, so these are both plants that are exhibiting symptoms of chlorosis.

And so chlorosis is most often recognized as a nutrient deficiency.

And what you usually see early in the year is that the veins are dark green and then the rest of the leaf surface is lighter green.

and then as the season goes on it gets into a yellowish color.

So this is a red oak and this is nine bark.

And to kind of compare, this is what a healthy red oak growing right next to this first one looks like.

And although chlorosis is often due to a nutrient deficiency, most likely iron deficiency, it can be a lot of other factors.

So one of the issues is that our soils are more alkaline, and when your soil pH is higher than 7.5 to 7.8, if it's higher than that, then even though there may be iron in the soil it's becomes less available to the plants.

So there are plants that are less resistant to lower iron and higher pH in soils, and oaks can be one of them.

Maples are another example.

Other things that can impact chlorosis are things like drought, poor root systems, damage to the root systems, competitive vegetation.

So if you have grass all the way up to the trunk of the tree.

So for something like this, I would say step one would be to make sure that your tree is otherwise healthy.

Step two would be to contact your local extension agent and get a soil test to look at your soil pH, rule out that there is any iron, that there may or may not be any iron issues.

And then you can use chelated iron products, and these products make the iron more available to the root system of those trees.

And that can help in the spring as the new kind of growing season occurs.

- I might mention that my raspberries - My raspberries also end up showing these symptoms pretty- - Very prone to iron problems.

- Regularly.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- Okay, question from Malta.

I like this one.

For Jamie, and this person says, "I know barley is used in making my favorite beverage," which is probably beer.

"How else is it used in the food industry here in the US?"

- So it is just eaten as a cereal.

So you can take a hulless barley and cook it, just like you would oatmeal, essentially.

It doesn't flake as well as oats do, for several reasons, and so it's not used so much as a flaked product.

When barley is malted, then some of that does go into the food industry as malt to add flavor.

So if you read your labels, your bread labels or your cookie labels, a lot of times you'll see malted barley on those labels, and that's used as a flavor.

Now, it's a small proportion of the product compared to the wheat that is in there, but it's added as flavor.

- Does malted milkshakes actually have malt?

- It does.

So malted milkshakes, and I should have brought you some Whoppers.

So Whoppers- - Yeah, I like Whoppers.

- ... are chocolate-covered balls of malt.

- Yeah, and they're delicious.

- And if you ever go to a malt plant, it's so cool 'cause they'll let you actually take some of the malt and eat it, and it tastes just like that.

It's sweet, all on its own.

- One of my favorite uses of barley is beef barley soup with leftover prime rib.

I mean, it's probably not healthy but it sure tastes good.

- Well, beef- but the barley would be good for you.

- Yes, I know that.

- And... But there's even a better way to eat it, because probably the barley's been pearled.

- It has.

- And when it's pearled it takes off the seed coat, which is where a lot of your fiber is, and so you just get the endosperm that way.

But if you buy a holless product, which just looks like a seed, it would look just like the seeds that Mike has been showing us, and you cook those, then that will have higher nutritional value.

- And one of my favorite foods is this Pakistani dish called Haleem, and it's also pearled barley but I'm thinking of trying- - It with a hulless?

- Yeah, with a hulless variety to see how to- - Well, let me know and I'll give you some hulless barley.

- Absolutely.

Yeah, I'd love to try it out.

But it's basically like a lentil and barley porridge, and it's really delicious.

- Oh, that sounds delicious.

- Mm-hmm, I'll bring you some.

- Okay, I'd love it.

- Okay, enough cooking for now.

(everyone laughing) We're gonna go back to Eric.

This person is concerned about the price of fertilizer with the tariffs.

Will they continue to use fertilizer?

And the answer to that is probably yes, but is it gonna be more expensive?

We get most of our fertilizer from other countries.

- Yeah, I mean, especially Canada's been a real big shock in the last year.

Will it keep going up?

I don't know.

I mean, I think there could be if it gets too expensive to import it from Canada.

Building fertilizer supply chains in the US, it takes a lot of investment and a lot of time.

I don't quite know if there's that much time in the situation here.

but I would say in the next year or two there's probably gonna be higher prices in that market.

- I will give a shout-out to my friends at Ag Depot here in Bozeman, that I did get a bank loan before I went to buy their lawn fertilizer this fall.

(everyone laughing) The bag fertilizer has definitely jumped a lot.

- And the interest rate probably wasn't great either.

- No, probably not.

Good point.

From Hamilton.

Mike, you can grab this one.

The caller is wondering what percentage of wheat and barley crop in Montana is growing organically.

I don't know if we have any data on that or not, but... - That sounds kind of like an Eric question.

- Oh, does it?

- I don't know the answer but, certainly, Montana is a good place to grow organic wheat because of our low humidity conditions.

We have less pests and it becomes much more possible in Montana than it does in some other states.

So I don't know the proportion, I know it has higher dollar value 'cause there are some challenges in regard to weed control and, of course, fertilizer, fertility of the soil.

I don't know the answer.

- You know- - ... for how much.

- Yeah, it's- - It's relatively low but relatively high dollar value.

- I think it's low, but I've also heard that, nationally, Montana's pretty high in terms of organic production and wheat.

And so it just depends on if consumers are willing to pay extra for that type of product, then I'm sure there'll be some farmers in Montana, especially the ones who are more prime to grow an organic type of product.

- We do have several producers in the state that are really into organic production.

It's not easy, it takes a lot of work and a lot of cropping, systems management, to be able to maintain the crop with all the weed pressure that we have.

I do know that Wheat Montana, for a period of time, was growing quite a bit of organic wheat, and it's very, very profitable in the California market.

So there's potential but, boy, it is- and you gotta get it certified for three years without any pesticides or fertilizer.

- Yeah, yeah.

You gotta take it out and you're not getting that organic premium yet.

You've gotta fight through that.

But once you get to the other end, then perhaps you could find your market.

I mean, we talked a lot about conventional wheat and kinda the established supple chains that you see there.

And on the organic side, or with any kind of smaller market, you've gotta carve out that supply chain.

- Okay.

From Helena, Mike and Jamie, this person wants to know, "It's expensive to do all the research that you guys do.

Who supports a lot of this research?"

- Boy, we have 58 years at the Montana Wheat & Barley Committee, and I would say that's hugely important.

And then, of course, we have the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station and the general support of the public to continue these programs.

We have five major breeding programs at Montana State, four in cereals and one in pulses, and I would say we receive good financial, moral, all kinds of support from the Wheat & Barley Committee.

- Yeah.

Jamie, do you get anything?

- Same, same.

The Wheat & Barley, we wouldn't have the breeding programs without the Wheat and Barley Committee.

But other people are interested too, we've been getting some industry support.

So the American Malting Barley Association gives us money, there's some brewers that give us money.

So there is some industry support as well.

- And on that note, you run the brewing lab here, and I had a caller from Phillipsburg would like to know, "Are you offering a major in brewing?"

- We're not yet, but we are offering a new course next spring, an Introduction to Malting and Brewing Science.

And it's the first course that we hope we will build a whole program off of.

- How many students can you handle?

And I might go back to school.

(everyone laughing) - So we found a classroom that'll hold 150 people.

- Wow.

- And so we'll see if we fill it or not.

- [Jack] Oh, that's great.

Tell us a little bit more about your brewing lab.

- So our lab can both malt barley and then also brew it, and it's a small system, five-gallon systems.

We have, I think, 10 fermenters, so we can ferment 10 types of beer at a time.

And we're starting to work on it and we're developing some research projects around it, one of which is to try to develop the idea of terroir for Montana.

Can we develop specific flavors to Montana that kind of go along with the wine flavors that people market with?

- When do you have tasting tests?

(everyone laughing) - We are developing a sensory panel.

- Okay.

- So if you would like to volunteer- - Oh, of course.

- It does require some training.

You have to do some training, you have to be very committed.

- Okay.

(everyone laughing) I'll think about it.

(everyone laughing) With that, Abi, quickly, we're about out of time.

Preparing trees for winter, any suggestions?

- Yeah, and we can talk more about this next week but a few things to keep in mind.

Late in the fall, make sure that they're getting plenty of water before the ground freezes.

Wrap any dark-barked and thin-barked, especially younger trees and shrubs, wrap their bark to protect from any sort of bark-related injuries and also vertibrate pests And then we can talk a little more next week too.

- Okay, especially thin-barked trees like maple and so forth.

- Yes, absolutely.

- Okay.

Next week, folks, we've got a little bit of new industry potential and we're gonna look at the forest economics.

Sam Scott from the University of Montana will be here.

I hope you join us next week.

I want to thank the panel this evening, I learned a lot.

I think you guys provided a lot of information.

I do appreciate that.

So, folks, join us again next week, "Forest Economics with the University of Montana: Forest Economist".

Goodnight, and have a good week.

(bright upbeat music) - [Narrator] For more information and resources, visit montanapbs.org/aglive.

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

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