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

(bright music) - You are watching "Montana Ag Live" originating tonight from the studios of KUSM on the very dynamic 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.

I wanna thank Tim.

He's sitting here on our panel for taking over last week.

I decided to go chase some pheasant in Eastern Montana and that's what we did.

We chased them.

We didn't get very many, but they're out there.

So if you get a chance, go visit Eastern Montana.

You'll love it.

It's a beautiful part of Montana.

Don't stay in your Eastern or Western zip code all the time.

Head out east and see what real Montana is all about out there.

So with that, I want to introduce the nice panel.

We've welcomed somebody back and I'll get to that in a minute, but I'll start off way on the end.

Uta McKelvy is our extension plant pathologist.

I call her Smiley.

She's always got a good smile on her face.

So.

- I'll (indistinct) my brains.

- Okay, so if you have pathology questions tonight, she can call in and Uta will get to 'em.

Mary Burrows, Mary sat where Uta did for several, several years.

She bailed out on us.

She moved to Blacksburg, Virginia.

She's director of the Ag Experiment Station for Virginia Tech.

She's back in town and we invite her to sit here tonight and tell us a little bit more about how agriculture on the Eastern seaboard differs from what it is here in Montana.

So if you have any questions concerning ag, basic ag structure, good chance to ask you tonight because Mary can answer a lot of those questions.

Tim Seipel, our weed scientist.

Tim is our crop line specialist.

He's not a weed ecologist, he's a weed scientist.

(panelists chuckling) So Tim, thank you for doing that last week.

And of course Abi Saeed.

Abi is our very knowledgeable horticultural specialist.

And if you have questions about, plants going into the winter, coming out of the winter next spring, whatever you want to find out, call it in.

And Abi will answer those questions.

And I'll remind you, this is a very boring program unless you phone in the questions and the more questions we get, the better off and more educational function we serve.

Answering the phones tonight, Nancy Blake.

And you might recognize Nina Zidack.

She sits up here quite a bit and fortunately she was here because we have a question from Fairfield that we didn't get to last week and I got the correct answer tonight.

Before we go any farther, Mary, welcome back.

Tell us how you like Virginia.

- [Mary] We love it.

- [Jack] Well that's all you have to say about it.

(panelists chuckling) - I learned on the show how to answer things briefly and succinctly.

- So how big is the Ag Experiment Station in Virginia compared to Montana?

- It's about double the size.

So here we have I think seven research centers.

I have 11 agricultural research and extension centers.

80% of my faculty and staff are on the main campus in Blacksburg.

But I get to eat oysters and they aren't rocky mountain oysters.

(panelists chuckling) One of my AREC is a seafood AREC.

I also work a lot with scientists that cattle, and poultry lots of crops, cotton, peanuts, things we don't see around here.

- Well, we'll get to some of those things and learn a little bit more about it as we go along.

You mentioned hair sheep.

We had a question when our sheep specialist was on there.

Are people trying to grow hair sheep here in Montana?

Are they adapted to Montana do you believe?

- I don't know, but our agriculture research and extension center at Southwest Virginia and Shenandoah Valley work on them, work with the animal scientists on the main campus in Blacksburg and at Shenandoah Valley, they've been, sorry, Southwest Virginia, they've been inoculating with parasites for about 15 years and they've been changing the genetic makeup of hair sheep across the eastern seaboard because they're breeding, the growers are selecting them for high performance.

- Okay.

You know, I have a perception of east coast agriculture.

I do get out of my zip code once in a while, but not every day.

I don't see Virginia as being an agricultural state.

And I look at say Nebraska, which has 90% of their land in agricultural production.

Montana's about 65, 64%.

How much of Virginia is actually an ag production?

- Yeah, we have a ton of ag, it's our number one industry in the state.

The revenue is $83.3 billion annually.

And a lot of that is value-added agriculture, which is about $43.8 billion.

Our top ag export is soybean and then we are third in the nation for tobacco and seafood production.

One of the strengths of Virginia is its diversity and one of its challenges is its diversity.

- Okay, that makes sense.

You mentioned soybeans.

I read an article in the "Wall Street Journal" just last week that China has stopped importing soybeans for the last three months and at one point they were importing over a billion bushels of soybeans as a soybean industry in Virginia dropped off because of the tariffs and- - We are hurting.

So in 2023 our exports were $1.4 billion.

The Port of Virginia is set up for exporting soybean divert to China and our growers have had $0 in sales to China.

- Alternative to soybeans, what could you grow?

- Oh, we can grow anything.

(panelists chuckling) - Now, chickpeas?

- They're not well adapted.

Some of those arid crops don't do very well, but anything that needs water.

- Okay, you got that switch away from Mary a little bit.

This question comes in from Bozeman.

It's a very good question.

This person wants to know what to do with all the leaves that are falling off the trees.

I'm gonna follow that up.

They're not falling off very fast for sure.

There's still a lot of green on a lot of trees.

Why is that and what do you do with the leaves?

- Yeah, so we've had a pretty kind of warm and stable fall.

So I think those trees are gonna slowly over the next couple of weeks start to senescence and those leaves are gonna change color, when those leaves fall in your yard, I think of them as like a really great untapped resource.

You can use those as mulch oftentimes.

So if you're thinking about overwintering your strawberry beds or any of your perennial beds, you can take up all those leaves and pile them onto your landscape beds and have you have this free resource of mulch.

Make sure they're not diseased leaves that you're reintroducing back into your landscape.

You can compost them.

Or another thing you can do is you can mow them right onto your turf.

So if you put your mower on the highest setting and you go and do a couple repeat mowing applications, it shreds them really finely and over the course of the winter they'll slowly decompose, they'll add those nutrients back into the soil.

So don't get rid of that resource.

Use that in your landscape if you can.

- Okay, so let's say I've got a maple tree and I have an (indistinct), and I keep mowing and chopping it up.

It's not a good idea, is it?

- No, no, not anything that has a disease issue.

You should definitely bag those up and and get rid of those.

But if they're healthy leaves use them.

- So is there a, so I have a lot of aspen trees and there's no such thing as a non-diseased aspen tree, right?

Should I just be getting rid of those?

Should I, where should I take them if I don't want to just throw 'em in the dump, can I take 'em to the city compost?

Places like that if I don't want to put 'em in my own compost?

- Yeah, the city compost is really great.

A lot of our actively managed compost that are larger scale, they have those temperatures that are gonna get above 140 degrees Fahrenheit, which will kill any of those pathogens which are home compost systems rarely get to those temperatures.

So any sort of commercial composting facility can handle those.

- Okay.

- Okay.

Thank you.

Getting back to last week, Tim didn't get to this one.

- I'm sorry.

- It's a question from Fairfield that caller has plant a store-bought potatoes and they don't grow, he's read that store-bought potatoes are treated to prevent sprouting.

Is that true?

It is true.

There's annex sprout agents that they use.

The bad thing about that is you should never plant potatoes unless you buy certified-seed potatoes.

We have a 70, $80 billion or million dollar potato industry in this state and every time you plant a potato that isn't certified, you run the risk of introducing some disease in here.

So bad, bad thing to do.

But yes, there are anti-sprout agents.

(chuckles) Mary, this is a email question that came in into Tyler, our assistant producer.

He wants to know about the wine industry in Virginia.

So obviously they know that you now own a winery too.

- Yes, we do.

(Jack chucking) Yeah, it's a thriving industry in Virginia.

We're known for a lot of our wines, especially like the Charlottesville area.

It's also a thriving tourist destination for wine.

We do, we just purchased a small winery near Blacksburg and we had our first harvest this season and we did really good.

We had all of our friends over harvesting.

So if they're interested in harvesting next year, gimme a call.

(Jack chuckling) - [Tim] Is it, are they white wines?

Red wines?

- We have a mix.

So we have a lot of the varieties that were developed by the Cornell and Minnesota programs and then we're gonna add four more acres.

So I'm currently asking some of our faculty to gimme some suggestions about what to plant.

- So how big, how many acres of grapes in the state of Virginia, roughly?

- Oh gosh, I don't know that off the top of my head.

- Okay, I know Montana has less than a hundred and we probably, I think have about a dozen producing wineries in the state.

And that was a question I came in from Miles City, so.

- Yeah, we have a wine trail, we've got an oyster trail, we've probably got a craft beer trail.

We got a lot of different things going on in Virginia.

- Okay, sounds good.

- So, as a former plant pathologist, You must be pretty excited about it.

Vineyard.

- I am.

- What are you most excited about?

- Well, when I naively started doing this, I thought well I'm gonna put a spore trap in and then we're gonna like plan this and we just spray.

(laughs) (Uta laughing) we just had so much water this year, we were spraying every week.

- So is that's for fungal diseases like powdery mildew?

- And insects.

So we, this fall found our first spotted lantern flies with this invasive species that is coming down from Pennsylvania.

And I anticipate in the next two, three years that'll be a major pest of wine grapes and other fruits and trees in our area.

- Okay, I haven't sampled the wine you brought me, (Mary chuckling) but I will believe me, I don't let those things go to waste.

- Uta, this person has what he thinks is white-rot on crabapple, this is an email.

Have you heard of that before?

- Are you calling from- - I have, in fact, we actually had a sample in the diagnostic lab this week, which I brought along here for everybody to see.

So like these fungal structures that you can see here on the stem are the white-rot fungus and our mycologist and our department actually identified it to species.

So I can tell you that it's Coriolopsis gallica.

And so what's really, depending on your angle, right, but what's kind of interesting about this white-rot fungus that it can actually break down lignin, which is the material that makes tree cells really strong, right.

Makes them woody.

And so that's why this fungus can be a concern to trees.

So normally these kind of fungi can break down dead trees, but in this case it can actually be a pathogen that can, depending on where it sits on a tree, harm it.

So if, I guess this looks more like a trunk situation, so if the white-rot fungus is sitting on the trunk, you know, eventually it'll cause a decline of the tree.

If you were to find something like that on a branch, the best thing to do would be trimming out that branch and getting rid of it immediately.

So, but you know, one thing to consider is that most of the time these kind of fungi enter through wounds.

So anything that you can do to protect your tree from injury or you know when you prune, be careful about how, that you prune properly, will prevent any kind of risk from these white-rot fungi.

And I was wondering, Abi, if you wanted to elaborate on the proper, like pruning 101?

- Yeah, I think one of the common mistakes that we make is we either cut too close to the trunk.

So if we have a pruning cut that goes too close and you're cutting into that part of the tree that's going to produce that nice little callous tissue around it to heal it, if you cut into that, it stays a wound much longer and you have much likely, higher likelihood of disease issues impacting it.

Or when we leave like stubby sections, like a few inches too long.

So you should be making a cut that's right at the branch collar and if you're interested, we have some great guides through MSU but it should be right at the end of that branch collar and that gives that tree a really good chance to heal.

And then another important thing is you don't wanna cover that with any sort of wound dressing or tree paint or anything like that because that can trap moisture, it can trap pathogens and it can delay the natural healing of trees.

- Okay, mentioning crabapples.

When I was out in Eastern Montana last week, I visited with a good friend of mine, Ray and Chris Basho, and they have an old homestead that has some crabapples and they think they're the finest crabapples ever.

So we're doing taste test, so everybody tastes them, we'd like to know what the variety is, but we don't know.

I asked they taste more like an apple than they do a crabapple.

- Wow.

- It's pretty amazing.

- Yeah.

- So.

They're gonna probably destroy this old homestead that has this variety that's been there forever.

How could they maintain that variety?

- So one of the best things to do if you want to maintain a variety of apple, especially if you don't know what exactly it is, which determining the variety can be very tricky.

It can be very difficult to find the exact species 'cause there are thousands of varieties of apples in the US alone.

And so if you're not sure, what you can do in the spring is take some scion wood from the tree that's going to be removed, the tree that you really like, and you can graft it into a hardy root stock.

So we use like a hardy dwarf root stocks here.

You can reach out to your local garden center or nursery and ask them what type of root stocks they have available and you can graft it right onto there and you might wanna do a few.

'cause sometimes grafts aren't always successful.

So doing like maybe eight or 10 to see which ones look the best or the healthiest and you can plant those directly into the ground in the spring.

- Do you buy the root stocks just from a catalog or?

- You can buy root stocks from catalogs or local nurseries and garden centers, yeah.

And they'll probably have the best ones that are hardiest in your landscape.

And the dwarf ones are best, so you can reach those trees.

'cause trees you know, can get to a hundred feet or taller.

- You know, I think that apple, that crabapple would make some great grappa, which is apple brandy, which I think if you could distill it legally, which you can't but- - Well it's good 'cause it's ripe and tart, which is great.

'cause a lot of the apples you get in the stores these days are really sweet.

- [Jack] Yeah, no, I think they're really good.

- Delicious.

- Abi, does MSU extension have any resources on grafting?

- We do have a few, I believe.

And I would probably start at the Western Ag Research Center website to see what they have and if you can't find it, reach out to your local extension agent because they can connect you to a lot of those great science-based resources.

- Okay, thank you.

Billings.

This is our from Billings.

Yeah.

Caller would like Mary to comment on the differences in funding partners between Virginia and Montana for both public and private sources.

And there's a follow up question.

Do they have commodity groups like we have here in Virginia?

- Yeah, I think the funding matrix is pretty similar at both land grant institutions.

We have combinations of public and private partnerships.

In the College of Agriculture, most of our funding comes from USDA, but we also partner with NSF, NIH and other, many other federal agencies.

We do have commodity organizations for poultry, for swine, for beef, cotton, soybean, cereals.

Yeah, but the difference there is we have a lot of commodity organizations, (chuckles) whereas here I kind of knew everybody.

- Okay, so - Thank you.

every year we get one or two callers that want to know if we could ever have a poultry specialist on this program.

And of course Montana is not a big poultry state, so we don't have a poultry specialist.

However, in Blacksburg at Virginia Tech, there's a poultry specialist by the name of Mike Persia.

- Persia, yep.

- Okay.

Do you think we could borrow Mike for a zoom call sometime?

- You'd be welcome to.

He's an expert not only in poultry nutrition but also in diseases including avian influenza.

I just had the opportunity last week to go to a turkey processing facility and visit some local growers and talk about biosecurity and wild birds and it was fascinating.

- So if I call him and say that you recommended, - You bet.

- we'll try to get him on next spring on zoom call.

- And then he'll ask me, you know, what I give him back.

(panelists laughing) But no, it's fine.

I support his research and - Okay.

- he was our researcher of the month, a few months ago.

- I read a little bit about him.

He sounds really like a great guy and I think he'd probably enjoy doing it.

- He would.

- He'd have to put up with the rest of us.

(Mary chuckling) But, you think he probably do that?

- I think he'd love it if you flew him here so we could go hunting with you.

- We could probably arrange that too.

(Mary laughing) Alright, let's move on to Helena.

Caller has a 20-year-old Hawthorn tree which has one inch strips of bark peeling away.

His neighbors braided the tree with tree wound and recommended wrapping the bark with cellophane for the winter.

Good ideal or bad idea?

- I wouldn't recommend any sort of wound dressing like that or wrapping with cellophane.

What I do is let it be and try and see how the tree recovers, pieces of the bark may fall off.

Sometimes that's a natural process, but wrapping with with anything could hinder that process.

- There are quite a few rust hawthorns too, right?

- Yeah.

- So some of the bark could be peeling because maybe of a fungal rust or something.

They'd be interesting to know if this was a native hawthorn or one of the horticultural hawthorns that are out there.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- I think pictures could be helpful too.

'cause sometimes I've seen deer rubs kind of create this little shredded appearance too on the bark, so.

- So in some parts of the world they paint trees white to prevent sunburn or overheating.

Do we recommend that?

Do people ever do that in Montana to prevent sunburn?

- They do, yeah, they do.

It's like a 50% like latex whitewash paint and you can definitely use that, especially for trees that have a diameter that's too big for you to have a tree wrap.

But yeah, you certainly can do that here and I've seen orchards do that.

- Okay, a comment and I've always said, folks, if you have comments, I screen them and if they're pretty decent, we will air 'em.

But this one came from Billings and the caller comments, there are a large number of hair sheep in the Billings area.

Public auction yards and Billings has a large number of hair sheep going through the sale ring.

And hair sheep have their own category of sale.

I didn't know that.

So we do have 'em in the state.

Speaking of which, we had a color last week from Ravalli that sent in a picture of what they believe is a banana slug.

We talked about this ahead of time and I don't believe the banana slug has been reported in Montana.

So it is a big slug, we're not sure it's banana slug, but if you'd send a sample in, (faintly speaks) diagnostic clinic or your local contact extension agent, we'd appreciate it because we'd like to find out what that creature is.

It's something we haven't seen before.

Uta, interesting question.

And Mary, you can jump in too because I'm sure it affects you.

With winter wheat prices so low, does it pay to treat your seed that you're seeding or even plant your winter wheat this year?

- Well I hope you've planted it this year.

I don't know if now is a good time for (faintly speaks).

- [Jack] Well it'd be a little late.

Yeah.

- So the question is, is it worth keeping the seed and then using it later on instead of selling it?

- Yeah.

- Well, it's something to consider.

I'd say as everything else, it depends, right?

Like on the quality of the crop where you harvested it from, there's certain diseases that can sit in the grain.

Actually I brought a sample.

I mean this would be a sample of wheat that you didn't wanna plant.

This has a lot of, I dunno how close we can get in, but this is wheat seed with ergot in it, which is a fungal disease.

And so I would not recommend planting this anymore.

- Oh on.

- Okay.

Yeah.

Cool.

So whatever these black larger shapes are are sclerotia from that ergot fungus.

And that would be a way to carry the disease forward and spread it in newer fields so that I probably would not, well I would clean it before I would consider replanting it, but so not everything is as screaming obvious as this one here, right?

So things I would recommend as doing a germ test, things like that to make sure the seed is viable.

And I think regardless of the seed source, the seed treatments is always a good idea if it's within your farming practices, within the realm of your farming practices.

- Mary, you grew some south white winter wheat in Virginia.

Is that a viable industry?

I know how hard winter wheat prices and even our spring wheat prices are way down.

What's the Virginia wheat situation?

- Yeah, we have a variety of wheats, mostly soft red winter wheat.

Our wheat breeder provides varieties across the eastern seaboard and up into the lower Midwest, their wheat acres are down.

A lot of that is because they've been in cover crops and that's working really well for our growers.

And we can grow two crops a year.

A lot of times it's a wheat soybean rotation and the wheat is, you know, it isn't worth anything right now.

So we're definitely looking at diversifying crops and we've hired some faculty that their job is cropping systems in different areas around the state to try to test things just like you do here.

- Okay.

Our wheat, I'm plugging Montana over Virginia.

(panelists laughing) This is wheat and it's Montana wheat and it's the highest quality wheat produced anywhere in the United States.

Not picking on Virginia, but your wheat quality isn't worth making bread out of, basically.

(panelists chuckling) Well anyway, that's.

- So really think, yeah.

(Jack and Mary chuckling) - You grow a lot of other great things, but wheat, eh, I don't know.

Tobacco.

- Yeah.

- You brought us some tobacco and that industry is what's made Virginia, Virginia.

Really back in the 16 hundreds, you still grow a lot of tobacco?

- We do.

- Do you export it or is it used in the US?

- We, I looked it up, we exported $18 million of tobacco.

A lot of it is actually imported.

So if you look in a cigarette, there's different colors of tobacco.

Some of that is flue-cured, some of it is Burley tobacco, which is air dried, some of it is foreign.

We import it and they blend it into different cigarette blends for different purposes.

And I don't know a lot about that, but they mit-blend it and so it's, you know, the customer appreciates it and then they're trying to also do value add for their industry for extracting nicotine from the, and then putting in different products and they're doing all kinds of technology development in that way.

- So it is been a long time since I've been in North Carolina or Virginia that is cured tobacco?

- Yep.

- And the other is?

- This is freshly harvested tobacco, so they literally harvested leaf by leaf based on when it's ready and what the quality is and yeah, this has been air or dry cured.

And if you run around Virginia and North Carolina this time of year, you'll see these tobacco barns and they've hung these in those barns and they do a smoldering fire at the base and then you just see them steaming, so- - You can smell it too.

- Yes, you can.

- Yeah, it is pretty impressive.

- But it's very much a part of the culture of the state.

- So the tobacco industry started way back in the 1600s and there was a variety, rolfe, R-O-L-F-E that was the original tobacco line.

I'm told that it's still used in the development of new lines.

Do you know anything about it?

- Probably we have a tobacco agronomist that the Southern Piedmont erect that does a fabulous job with the industry and he does a lot of the agronomy and it's kind of fascinating 'cause they started as plants plugs into a greenhouse and then it's transplanted into the field and they're always calling him with all their problems, so.

- Hmm.

- It's a fun crowd.

It's not seeded, your planting starts or plugs into the field.

- Yes.

- Oh, interesting.

I didn't know that.

- Yeah, it's so labor intensive.

It's really amazing.

- Wow, so is that becoming, is that production becoming more mechanized or are they, is precision ag gonna play a role in this in the future or?

- We would hope so.

But all the robots I've seen for a lot of these tasks are pretty slow still.

So that you need a combination of cameras that can sense, you know, the quality plus the speed and so we're not quite there yet.

- Yep, yeah, I toured a couple of precision ag places recently and I was impressed.

No, not impressed by the slow speed of the equipment and how much you could cover.

It'll be a while before we get a lot of this stuff.

- Yeah, even harvesting grapes, like when you harvest a bunch, you like wanna cut out the bad parts and robots really can't do that yet.

- Yep.

- Okay, so I have a comment from Ballantine.

They caller comments on the apple.

Abi, she says, or he says it looks like a Kerr, K-E-R-R.

They believe it can be grafted onto a semi-dwarf rootstock.

It is usually used for pollination as a So that could be a Kerr apple.

Your job is to do a little homework.

Okay.

- All right.

- All right.

Tim from Whitehall, I like this question.

(Tim chuckling) This caller wants to know, does Kochia have any redeeming qualities?

- Yeah, that was a good, great question.

So Kochia is definitely the most problematic broadleaf weed in Montana's cropping systems.

Today, the wind was really sailing.

We had some chinooks blowing around, I'm sure there was some kochia tumbling.

It's the big tumbleweed you really see this time of year and it's rolling and tumbling and dispersing all its seeds.

Does it have any redeeming qualities?

It has amazing drought tolerance, actually.

Colorado State has sequenced the whole genome of Kochia and are interested in looking to understand how its drought tolerance works.

It can germinate at with less moisture than it takes to activate herbicides in the soil.

So we have to give it credit for its drought tolerance.

It also is a pretty good forage in some situations.

And I know a lot of people bail it in in places in Montana or it's in the triticale that's you're bailing up or things like that.

So it is not poisonous, cattle can eat it, but it can have very high nitrates in it.

So you have to be really careful about that.

So it's not poisonous, cows will eat it.

That will be its redeeming qualities.

Well yeah.

So it does have a few redeeming qualities.

There is a forage Kochia that people have planted in the world out there, believe it or not.

And I know they've tried it in Montana and it grows well.

It's just hard to get over the weedies of it, I think, and in all our situations.

- Okay, thank you.

Following up on your earlier question, this caller from Volborg wants to know if ergot and grass hay can be detrimental to livestock.

First of all, I think that's the first call we've ever had from Volborg.

- Okay.

Wow.

- Do you know where Volborg is?

- Yeah.

- Yeah, it's out towards Broadus, right?

- It's south.

It is in Custer County, yeah.

South of Miles City.

Yeah.

Good job Tim.

- Yeah, Tim's been around.

(panelists laughing) - All right.

You know, what do you think?

- Yes.

So there is a risk of ergot for livestock health, when they're consuming it, it can contain or it contains alkaloids that can mess with the blood circulation, blood flow.

And so it can lead to abortions and gangrene and other issues like that.

And so humans shouldn't eat it either.

That was a question, right?

- Yeah.

- So and so, yes, like, I talked about ergot in the context of small grains, but yes, we often find it in our grasses as well.

Often those are actually the source of infection from where the disease spreads into our crops, those grassy ditches that are surrounding our crops.

So mowing the grasses can be a great way before they're flowering and heading can be a great way of reducing the risk of ergot spreading into our... - So, cut your grass early- - Grazing before your grassy pasture has gone to like, you know, seed would be a good way to reduce - Cheatgrass.

cheatgrass in Montana can sometimes have huge outbreaks of ergot in it, almost that it really stops the seed production of Cheatgrass in some years.

- I've seen that.

- Yeah.

So I do you maybe cutting that cheatgrass before it really starts to express the ergot.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

So thank you.

We have a bunch of (indistinct) questions.

Our critter Ritter was on a couple weeks ago.

- Gotta wait until it, - Steve Vantassel, Montana Department of Agriculture has a bunch of boltons, people wanna know how to control it.

They wanna know if they put enough cats out in the yard, if that'll work.

(panelists chuckling) Steve Vantassel can answer those questions and he's up in Lewistown, so don't be afraid to get ahold of him and he'll give you a lot of great advice.

This person has a 20-year-old grape, now, we had a 20-year-old hawthorn, now we have a 20-year-old grape, a known type for Manus that has never produced grapes.

He prunes it each fall.

He grows lots of leaves and blossoms in the spring.

He has lots of bees but the blossoms dry up and never produce grapes.

Why?

- There are a few reasons, like if you're getting blossoms and they're drying up without producing any grapes, I often think of stress being one of the main ones.

So if there is some sort of a nutrient issue or a temperature issue that could be going on that's impacting it, that could make the plant abort the flowers and focus its energy on trying to survive.

I would say for something like that, it could require a little bit of troubleshooting.

So maybe reaching out to your county extension agent and getting a soil test, seeing what those base levels look like.

And potentially if you could get to the bottom of what type of grape that is, that could probably help you narrow down what these issues could be.

But definitely look into a few of the external factors that could be impacting stress.

- Okay.

- Any other thoughts?

- Thank you.

Mary, yeah, and just probably start while you were here, but Montana has a new value added initiative in the College of Agriculture.

As I see it, Virginia is way ahead of Montana in adding value to some of their crops.

Any advice on what we should do here?

- Try things, I guess, see what works.

'cause the markets are always changing.

Even our producers, you know, The Whole Foods want something and so then they'll produce it or you know, they have really good ties with the industry and the consumer base and I think that's key.

- You know, I've always been impressed with the Virginia ham and to me that is a really a value added product, especially at the price you have to pay for a Virginia smoked ham.

- Next time, I'll have to bring you a ham.

- Oh, I'll take one.

(panelists laughing) - But they auction 'em off at like events.

- Oh, no kidding.

- Yeah.

- I might even bid on one if I knew about it.

(panelists laughing) It might even be cheaper than buying them in a catalog.

But they, Virginia has done well with adding value.

And actually we had another question here or a comment from Ravalli Valley County Stevensville.

And this person says her sister sends her Virginia apples at Thanksgiving every year and they're delicious.

She doesn't know what variety they are, but she'd never heard of Virginia apples.

Is it a big industry in Virginia?

- Oh, it's a huge industry.

Yeah.

They've been suffering a bit lately, but also we're moving into the cider industry talking about value added, cider, hard ciders are very, very popular, especially with younger people in the state.

So when you license a winery, I happen to know this, you can get licensed for multiple different types of beverages.

So when we license our winery, we'll get licensed for wine, beer, cider, and mead and then we can offer all of those at the point of sale.

- Okay, interesting.

They've done a good job of Virginia, but it, you have a little more diversity to work with.

- And hard cider is a lot cheaper to make than wine.

- Is it really?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

You know, there is some hard cider industry here in the state and Pete Faye, who used to be on this panel for years, experimented with making some cider and it was, it was okay.

(panelists laughing) - You just gotta get the right yeast and yeah, you're, you're good to go.

- Yeah, I'm kidding.

It was actually pretty good.

- Okay, good.

- From Billings, this person had a willow tree die and when it was cut down it was hollow and there were large white grubs inside the tree.

Is that what killed the tree?

- It's very unlikely that those white grubs killed the tree.

When you have a really large tree that's decaying, a lot of other organisms will live and feed on the decaying wood in there.

And that could be like beetle larvae, it could be larvae of a lot of other insects.

So chances are that those insects were opportunistically using that decaying wood as their source of food.

There are a lot of nutrient cyclers that are helping break down, you know, plant parts and stuff.

It's likely that they're just using that and something else probably killed that willow.

- Okay.

Thank you.

This Butte caller has hired someone to trim trees, both pine and a deciduous tree.

And that's a leafy tree.

They were supposed to come a month ago.

They're wondering if it isn't done by the end of this week, we'll be too late, no.

- No, there is usually not an issue with trimming, especially evergreen trees.

You can trim those at any time of year.

And then same as deciduous trees, fall can be a really good time to trim them, especially because once those trees are dormant, a lot of those pathogens also are dormant that are around in the landscape, so it reduces the likelihood of disease issues.

So yeah, fall is a good time to trim your trees.

- Okay, thank you.

Caller from Hall, Montana.

Anybody know where Hall is?

That's the first caller we've ever had from Hall.

And thank you.

I mean we're getting inundated with small community calls.

I don't know where it is either.

They wanna know Uta, is smut in corn harmful to humans?

- No, it's that, I mean, guess to some people delicacy anyway.

I've never actually tried, but yeah, so it's not harmful.

It looks odd, like cannot look or it could look unattractive to some, but in Mexico right, that's where it's actually sought after as a delicacy.

- And it's actually pretty tasty.

- Yeah.

What does it taste like?

- It tastes like mushrooms, so it tastes like it has that umami flavor and you saute it and butter and salt and pretty, pretty good.

- Good.

- Yeah.

- But not too, don't pick it too late.

- Yeah.

(panelists chuckling) You want- - You want that kind of dry dusty.

- Honestly, outta curiosity, when I was in Mexico one time, I purchased a can of corn smut and I opened it and it wasn't very exciting to eat.

It was a little disgusting so I didn't eat it.

And I do love mushrooms, but I think fresh corn smut, but you got it.

As Mary said, you gotta get it really early.

- When they're like, they're still firm at that point.

And like silvery light gray.

Once they start popping up, you're delayed, right.

(chuckles) - I wouldn't wanna eat it.

- You wouldn't not?

- Not when it's old.

- Tim, this is a good question because it's that time of year.

This person wonders if it's too late this week to spray dandelions in their yard and it comes from Belgrade.

- No, I think the weather forecast next week is gonna be in the upper fifties.

I think it's by the middle end of the week, it's supposed to be in the '50s, '60s and sunny in the middle of the day.

I think it's warm.

I think you could still spray dandelions in your yard.

It's not, the nighttime temperatures are around freezing but not much below freezing.

I think it's probably a good time.

And actually you get much better efficacy spraying dandelions in the fall than you do in the springtime.

So it's probably still okay.

- Yeah.

2,4-D deal almost fertilizes dandelions in the spring.

- Yep, very much so.

- Yep.

Comment from somebody by Drummond, they say Hall is near Drummond.

- Oh yeah, exactly.

- Yeah, I've seen the sign on the interstate, so.

- I knew I'd seen Hall before.

- So Tim and Mary, first of all, this caller is from Sydney.

They're curious about the status of Palmer amaranth and for Mary, do you have issues with Palmer amaranth in Virginia?

- That's good question.

Not that I know of.

- So Palmer amaranth, I think we found it four times in the state of Montana this summer, but we had some really great people on the ground.

Extension worked like it was supposed to.

We had a producer who just happened to be riding around in the field, brought the plant into the Hill County agent.

We found it, got it out of the field before it made any seed.

We had bird feeder contamination.

There was bird feed.

Bird feed recalls in Washington, in Oregon this year, related to contamination in bird seed sold at the store.

We're still very much in the early detection, rapid response phase of getting on top of Palmer amaranth.

And we've done pretty good, knock on wood, so far.

Yes, I did talk to a couple, I talked to a producer who called me from Kansas a couple of weeks ago and he was asking about, pulse crop weed management and he said, oh man, you just really never want palmer amaranth.

He said, it is such a horrible weed.

He said, it's just, it's so difficult to deal with.

Nothing really works on it.

And so yeah, we deal with it does, I'm not sure, I don't know much about Virginia weather.

- It's not a crisis.

- Yeah, - It's not a crisis I think you guys have.

But in soybeans actually, you know, they did make new soybean varieties.

So they made roundup ready soybeans in 1996 or '97.

It came onto the market.

Waterhemp, it's the sister species of Palmer amaranth and both of them are basically not touched by glyphosate Roundup anymore.

And so then they made these new varieties where you could spray 2,4-D and Dicamba on the soybeans, which actually caused a lot of herbicide injury issues on tobacco in some places when it first came out because of bulbization.

I would imagine you guys probably do have some waterhemp - Oh, yeah.

- and some palmer amaranth around.

Yeah, it's really problematic in the Midwest.

We really don't want it.

We're gonna continue to be on top of it and Yep.

- [Jack] Hopefully we can keep it out.

- Yeah, hopefully we can keep it out.

- Is there any, you know, I mean I buy bird seed And I feed partridge and stuff.

I'm not supposed to, but they feed it the bird feeder.

- Yep.

- Is there any way that you can make sure you don't bring it in via bird seed?

- You know, I think actually I have a meeting with Montana Department of Ag folks next week and we're actually gonna talk about this.

There are basically no regulations on bird seed.

There's not like a, it's not like buying certified seed.

I don't think you can actually buy any weed-free bird seed.

And they did a study of a hundred bags of bird feed, actually.

97 of those bags had herbicide resistant weeds in them, believe it or not.

Whether it was kochia, marestail, palmer or all these different things, it's kind of, I think of it as kind of the screenings that come out of what's left over, you know, there's some millet in there, but there's a lot of trash in in the bird seed too.

So you have to be really careful with - [Mary] It's value add.

- Yeah.

- So I forgot to mention, I don't see a beer with my peanuts here, so I wasn't sure bring it up.

(panelists laughing) But you wanna talk about the peanut, that's something I've never really understood was a peanut industry, high quality peanuts are sold this way, lower quality are made into peanut butter.

and they have - And powdered peanut.

- Yep.

- Yeah, - Aflac toxin issues.

What about the peanut industry in Virginia?

Is it viable?

Strong?

- We have a very strong peanut industry.

We collaborate a lot with other states that have in North Carolina, Georgia and our, the Virginia peanut is more of a culinary peanut, a large, salty, wonderful thing.

- They look great, - They're great.

And you know, for Christmas, maybe I'll send you some, but we do have a peanut variety quality evaluation or program and peanuts are fascinating because if you don't know, the peanuts grow underneath the ground and you have to dig 'em out and basically pressure wash 'em to see if they're ready to mature, mature enough to harvest.

Whereas when I was here, the only peanut I ever saw was a sample that came into the diagnostic lab because somebody tried to grow it and we said, well you can grow it as an ornamental, it's something like sweet potato here, we can grow sweet potato in Virginia, but not here.

- You know, we're getting closer to growing sweet potatoes.

My wife grows sweet potato vines and actually when we tear 'em out at this time of year and we have a longer growing season now we have sweet potatoes about that big in, you know, it takes I think about 130 days to mature a sweet potato.

Nina could probably tell us better and I'll ask her after the program, we'll mention it next week.

But sweet potatoes eventually with the change in our environment, you might be able to grow 'em here.

- Well you could do some season extension and sure, you could sure.

Get round, round with it, but I don't think it'll be a major Field crop.

- No, I- - So sweet Potatoes are not true potatoes, right?

Sweet potatoes belong to the genus ipomoea, which is in the knotweed family actually - Right.

- and potatoes are in the nightshade families (faintly speaks).

- So (indistinct), okay.

So, and on that note, we had a question last week, I don't remember exactly where it was from, but they wanted to know, are we growing corn for grain now in the state?

He thought that everything was for silage and I can say yes we are because we shorter seasoned varieties, genetics improved and warmer temperatures, we can definitely grow corn for grain.

If you haven't driven between Bozeman and Helena this year, all that used to be wheat, barley, alfalfa, potatoes, ton of corn up there now.

And this valley has a lot of corn in it and some of this in the valley is still cut for silage, but a lot of it is also harvested for grain anymore.

Global warming plays a role in that.

There's no doubt about that.

Butte, can this person still prune their wild roses?

Is it too late?

- Nope, yes, you can still prune your wild roses.

It's not too late.

- I don't think there's anything you can do to kill wild roses.

(panelists laughing).

- They're pretty hard to kill.

They're pretty hard to kill.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

We had several questions about squash this year and people had issues with squash and some didn't produce squash, some rotted at the tips, some just made small squash and a lot of 'em had pottery mildew.

Does pottery mildew reduce the yellow of squash?

- Probably, yeah.

I mean it's taking up some, you know, photosynthetic tissue and so would thereby reduce the yield?

- [Mary] I think I've seen a kill squash depending on the variety.

- I think it reduces my squash yield to, well maybe my zucchini and yellow squash yield to normal level (panelists laughing) - Manageable amount.

- And when you're planning you can look in the seed catalog and look for resistance.

- Yeah, good point.

- For Mary, since you have a large chicken, a broiler industry they call it, how about the egg industry?

Is that big and- - Yeah.

Yeah.

We know we've got a pretty robust egg production.

Most of our poultry production is turkeys, but also broilers.

There's several large industrial organizations that I eat regularly that produce their - You know, it's interesting, we got that question by the way that came from Billings- - And a lot of that goes to the, like the pet food industry.

- True.

- And a lot is exported, you know, specialized products.

- Yeah, there was an article last year in the "Wall Street Journal" about Iowa being the egg state and one of six eggs, one of every six eggs that are produced in the United States is produced in Iowa.

And I never know that, I mean that, that fascinated me because you think of Iowa as a hog state, you cross the Nebraska border and you know, you're in Iowa.

(panelists laughing) It might be chickens too.

- Oh we do a lot of pulled pork in Virginia too.

- Okay.

From Billings.

Caller has an apricot tree that has produced, that hasn't produced for seven or eight years.

They say they have good fertility, it might be too much.

A flowering crabapple tree was formally planted at the same site.

Any ideal as why this tree is not, isn't producing buds.

- So maybe if it's too much nitrogen, it could be diverting its energy into producing kind of leafy growth instead of buds.

In terms of apricots in general in Montana though, a lot of people will say with an apricot, if you're lucky, you'll get fruit every five or six years.

We just don't have the spring temperatures that are required to keep those apricot flowers alive.

This year was one of the exceptions where a lot of people's early spring flowering fruit, like plums, we're able to produce by the end of the year.

But apricots can be pretty finicky.

They can be tough to grow here in Montana.

So that's another one where I would probably look into what that fertility is.

Sometimes adding certain nutrients that could be missing, like phosphorus can help with fruit development.

Whereas nitrogen can detract from fruit development.

Maybe looking into that could be an option, but apricots are usually not very productive in Montana at all.

- I agree entirely.

Interesting question from Bozeman.

This is probably somebody you knew.

They wanna know is there anything that you really miss about leaving Bozeman?

- I miss you, Jack.

I miss you.

(panelists laughing) I miss all the people here that's the thing I miss the most, yeah.

- But besides this group, anything that you liked here that you don't have?

- The community.

Yeah, well I mean I'm developing my community in Virginia, but you know, you grow up with, you know, (indistinct), agents trained me to do my job.

I knew the grandpa, I knew the father, I knew the son.

And it takes time to develop those connections and luckily they still call me and say hi from time to time.

(panelists chuckling) - Okay.

How big is Blacksburg?

- It's about 40,000 people and - Similar to Bozeman?

- well yeah, most of those are college students and in the summer it's dead.

It's wonderful.

(panelists chuckling) - Yeah, I would like to say that here about I the tourist industry.

I'm sorry I said that, go to Eastern Montana.

(panelists laughing) you'll really enjoy it out there.

I do.

It's nature at its best.

Okay, from Frenchtown, caller has a burning bush that has never turned red in the fall.

It barely changes color at all.

Any?

- Yeah, it could be like a variety that doesn't really turn as red or it could be one of those strange things.

I'm not sure why that could be.

- Could you give it a little more drought stress maybe.

And so it finesses better earlier in the season.

You know we were talking about the leaves finessing very late here this year.

And yeah, I had a nice burning bush that turned, yeah, quite, quite red and striking.

And I had it under pretty good drought stress I think.

- I'm surprised it wouldn't get enough drought stress just naturally in our landscape.

(panelists chuckling) - [Uta] Could this be related to some soil properties?

- It could be.

I'm not sure, yeah.

- Like nutrient, like I remember we once had a situation about a maple tree where that person was told that a low pH soil makes the colors brighter, which they ended up overdoing then.

But you know, so there are certain soil related factors that can influence fall colors.

- Yeah, there could be, there could.

- Orangetown has some pretty acidic soil though, actually.

- So I see Uta brought in some kind of an evergreen and we have 1, 2, 3, 4 questions tonight about why their evergreens leaves, needles, are turning yellow.

Any suggestion?

- Yeah, so well it could be something natural, which is called seasonal needle drop.

But more often than not, if you notice your evergreen not, you know, dropping needles excessively, it more likely indicates a disease issue.

So this is another sample from the diagnostic lab.

In this case, this is sudden needle drop.

So the thing that you'll notice is that you know, other than your youngest grove, the other needles have dropped off.

And if we were to look more closely, we would see some black fruiting bodies on the branch here.

There are other diseases that can cause that dropping, - But most of the time at this time of year, it's just a seasonal natural (indistinct), okay.

- This time of the year, - Not that- - we would also notice this a lot.

Yes, so it's more about like, is it like subtle or is it quite excessive?

That would tell the difference.

And so if it was a, so send us a sample or some more pictures, we can start there.

And with the diagnostic lab and you know, most often the disease element of this, it's often related to watering and so moisture drives fungal diseases.

So checking if your irrigation is maybe set up in a way that it hits the canopy could be a factor once again.

Maybe planting your trees a little wider apart to encourage airflow can help with that.

- All right, I'll make one more comment before the music starts telling us that we gotta get outta here.

But this is a good time to water your conifers from now until the time the ground freezes because that will reduce winter damage.

And for this next couple weeks, I think you can still do that very successfully.

So with that folks, we've had a great program, lots of good questions and from some places that we're not familiar with.

Mary, thank you for showing up.

It is great.

You know it's good to have you back in town.

(bright music) So next time you're here, let us know.

Uta, Tim.

Thank you.

Where we're at now is getting down to the very end.

Next week we have Eric Velasco who will talk about the farm bill or the lack thereof.

Join us next week and I think you'll be kind of impressed with where the farm policies are going.

Have a good week and good night.

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

(bright music) (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 of Agriculture, the Montana Wheat & Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery & Landscaping, the Gallatin Gardeners Club, and the Montana Federation of Garden Clubs.

(bright music)