- [Announcer 1] Montana AG Live is made possible by The Montana Department of Agriculture, MSU Extension, The MSU AG Experiment Station of The College of Agriculture, The Montana Wheat & Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery and Landscaping, The Gallatin Gardeners Club, and The Montana Federation of Garden Clubs.

(country music) - You are watching Montana AG Live originating today from the studios of KUSM on the very dynamic campus of Montana State University and coming to you over your Montana public television system.

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

Be happy to be your host this evening.

We're gonna have exciting program tonight, even though we have an economist that's our special guest, it'd still be a lot of fun.

(chuckles) I had to throw that in.

Anyway, those of you who have watched the program in the past, you know how it works.

You provide the questions and we will do our best to provide some good quality, solid answers for that.

Let me introduce tonight's panel, Frank Etzler with Barbara Frank, the Montana Department of Agriculture, very talented and knowledgeable etymologist.

So if you have bug questions tonight, it's a good chance to get 'em answered.

And we're gonna get into winter pretty soon.

And those bugs are heading into the house.

So tonight would be a good chance to find out everything you want to know about those creatures that you'll be spending the winter with.

Eric Belasco, Eric is department head, or of Econ.

Eric is very knowledgeable in government policy and we're gonna get into the farm bill, why we don't have one a little bit tonight.

And anything else you wanna know about what's going on economically with agriculture.

And those of you who have been watching the news recently know that there's a lot of things going on in the AG area relative to economics.

Jane Mangold, weed scientist and invasive plant specialist or pest specialists.

If you have weed questions tonight, and boy, if you live in Montana, you've probably will have some questions about weeds.

It's not too late, I don't think, to control some of them.

But if you have questions about that, get a question in and we'll do our best to answer 'em.

And Abi Saeed, Abi's here again tonight.

She's our extension horticultural specialist.

If you have any questions about what to do to save your plants over the next couple days from the snowstorm that's coming tonight would be a good chance to answer that or ask that.

Answering the phones tonight, Nancy Blake and Aishida Isha, and this first time with Aishida here, I welcome her and thank you for coming in.

Eric, tell us about what you do.

- Yeah, well, so I teach an agricultural policy class in my department and I think the intention of the show is talk about the 2025 farm bill, right?

Which- - Yeah.

- Was optimistic.

So that farm bill expired at the end of September.

And so here we are, you know, without a farm bill right now.

And obviously there's a lot of politics going on around budgets and things that need to be resolved before the farm bill.

So we don't have a farm bill.

I don't think there's any immediate plan of having a farm bill done.

So what I thought I'd do is provide a little history of what Montana state's connection to kind of the farm bill process would be.

And so I have a picture provided here, picture one of ML Wilson who, you know, if you're on campus, Wilson Hall is named after him.

He's someone who homesteaded in Eastern Montana, early 1900s, was an extension economist, extension agent in Custer County.

He moved to Bozeman, became a department head in the department of what it was called then Agricultural Economics.

And he was in that position until, you know, the Great Depression in 1929, and the Dust Bowl started in 1930.

And so when FDR was elected in 1933, he went and became the Under Secretary of Agriculture and worked on what became then the first farm bill, the Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1933.

And so, you know, put a lot of research into that.

He's sort of most known for what was called the domestic allotment plan, which was a way to pay farmers to reduce their acreage by taxing some of the processors, and so he kind of came up with that plan.

His legacy obviously is still on campus.

We have, you know, Wilson Hall, but then also November 7th we have our annual AG Econ conference and we have an ML Wilson speaker who comes and usually kind of bridges the gap between extension and research, and, you know, this year we have someone from the Federal Reserve Bank, Dr.

Courtney Crowley will be here talking about, you know, beef markets, which are, you know, have a lot of interest right now.

So yeah, Emma Wilson, a very notable person in the first farm bill back in 1933.

- So what does a farm bill actually do?

A lot of our listeners probably don't understand why we need a farm bill.

Sometimes I'm curious why we really need one also, but what does a farm bill actually accomplish for both the producer and the consumer?

- Yeah, good question.

So within the farm bill, there are these different titles.

So like crop insurance is one, crop insurance, kind of the rules and regulations are managed by the farm bill.

There are some things that have been done outside of the farm bill.

So one of the things that came up in the recent budget discussions were to increase reference prices for some of the safety net programs, that would normally be something that happens with the farm bill, but it happened as part of the budget process.

So from my mind I thought, well that might alleviate some of the discussions about the farm bill and kind of speed up the process.

But yeah, there's a lot of different titles in there from commodity programs.

So ARC, PLC, crop insurance, you know, how we, you know, sponsor export markets.

You know, how we fund that research and education.

All of those things are all managed within the farm bill.

- [Jack] Pretty complicated.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean there's a lot of things in there.

It's pretty complicated.

But from, you know, farm bill to farm bill, there's really not much that usually changes between farm bills.

- Okay, Frank, interesting question.

I'm curious about this myself from Bozeman.

This caller believes they actually saw a week on some flowers that are still flowering a little bit, which is late, but it's possible.

Is that unusual?

- I would say not too unusual.

It depends on how far they've winterized their honeybee colonies so far.

But the weather was really nice yesterday here in the Gallatin Valley, so if it's nice out, they'll be out to get as much as they can.

- Okay.

Thank you.

- Can I ask Frank a follow up?

- Sure.

- What do beekeepers do to winterize their colonies?

- They want to insulate it to keep it nice and warm so the honeybees don't freeze.

And also to put in some feed in there.

- Okay.

- So I think bee, I'm not the state apiarist, so I don't know the details myself, but usually bee bread or some other source of nutrition for the bees to survive the winter.

- Okay, thanks.

- And kind of seal it up.

- Thank you, guys.

- Before I go to a question about rhubarb for Abi, I missed this last week.

And we had a caller from Missoula call in and wanted to thank Dan Clark, who was on with the government center extension government center just a couple weeks ago.

He said they were very instrumental in working with the Big Sky Rail Authority outta curiosity.

I haven't heard much about that recently.

Eric, you're into economics.

I know it'd be nice if we had Southern Montana Railroad.

Have you heard where that's at?

- Boy, you're talking outside my expertise on that (laughs).

- I thought you'd know more than anybody else.

- Snow came early today.

- Just get it out of the way.

- Yeah, that's right.

- I'll come up with some more, yeah.

Okay, we don't know, but if somebody has a comment on that, we always take comments and we'd be happy to air where that is if anybody knows.

Abi, from Laurel, this color planted rhubarb this spring, it grew well.

What do they need to do with it to prepare for winter?

- Rhubarb is pretty hardy.

It grows really well in Montana.

Not too much that you need to do to prepare it for winter.

One thing I would do if you have kind of fluctuating temperatures, is you can add some mulch over top of it to help kind of protect that plant over the winter for its first year, but rhubarb is pretty hardy.

It comes back really well in Montana.

It's well suited.

- Okay, I saved this one from before for you, Jane.

This person wants to know why we don't force people to control Canada thistle.

She says in August, it looks like a snowstorm in Bozeman when the wind blows.

- Yeah, that's a complicated question.

I mean, I certainly agree with the viewer, lots of Canada thistle in Gallatin Valley.

There is a County Weed Control Act.

It is difficult to enforce and it takes, last I heard it takes about, if someone were to file a formal complaint about Canada thistle on a property, it takes about three months to process that.

It's also challenging because there's so much Canada thistle that, where do you start?

You know, Jack, if you have Canada thistle on your property, someone files a complaint against you, but down the street there's someone, another landowner with Canada thistle that nobody's complaining about.

It's very difficult to enforce that in a fair and equitable way.

And yeah, it's- - It's a major problem.

- It's kind of a wicked problem.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- I agree.

All right.

I could have predicted this.

First of all, this person from Willard, anybody know where Willard is?

I know that's the first question from Willard.

I think it's in Fallon County, but I'm not sure.

This person wants to know if we start imparting Argentinian beef, isn't the price of beef pretty much the same worldwide?

I mean, is Argentinian beef gonna be cheaper than beef we produce in this state?

- That's a great question.

So, you know, in general, the more beef that we do import, the lower the domestic price is going to go.

So yeah, there is a world price.

There's also different countries that are participating in different types of beef markets.

Think about the products that the US exports to Japan, South Korea.

Looks different than the beef that we're looking to import, you know, from Brazil, Mexico, other places, Argentina being one of them.

So yeah, there is, you know, it's called the law of one price, where you kind of get these single prices for commodities.

But within a country, it's certainly the case that the more you import, especially if you're a net importer, so for the US it would be for products like hamburger where we import more.

The more we import, the more those prices are gonna go down.

- So are cattle number, and another crooked question for you, are cattle numbers worldwide down like they are in the US?

For instance, as the number of cattle in Argentina drop like the US?

- You know, globally, the US is somewhat of an outlier in our decrease in inventory.

But so I do have a picture for this picture too.

I brought, just to kind of illustrate a little bit of this is our production is certainly down.

So this black line here shows the US production.

You can see right now where we are it's at a low point and it's at a low point because, you know, our inventory numbers have been dropping for quite some time.

One thing that you'll notice though is that when that production drops, imports go up, right?

Imports go up to make up the difference for consumers but it's also becomes where US products become more expensive relative to other countries.

If we're producing less, and let's say it's because of drought or, you know, some other reason, that's gonna raise the domestic price.

So we'll look to other countries to import beef to try to bring that down, and that's what we have done.

I guess the bright spot is so in here you can look to the right, there's a 10 year projection that shows production should get back to where it was previously, and imports would then kind of cool off a bit going forward.

- Okay, another question.

This person said they don't like particularly paying the high prices for beef right now.

- Yeah.

- But they think the beef produced in the United States is better quality than beef that might be imparted from Argentina.

I've eaten a lot of Argentina beef when I've been down there over wood fire.

It's pretty good, but in your opinion, you think the quality's similar?

- You know, I mean we're here in Montana some of the best beef, right?

- You better say it.

(laughs) - Yeah.

But actually I, so if we go to picture three, I have just to show where some of our imports have come from historically.

And so, you know, ignoring the quality question, 'cause if that is the case, you know, consumers, you know, will pay more for those higher quality products.

- [Jack] Right.

- But we look to see where some of the US beef products are coming from.

And so this is the history of the last five years before this year 'cause obviously, you know, some things have changed with our trade this year.

But really you can see our main importers, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Mexico, and then Brazil.

Brazil's really starting to become a large importer of beef into the US, and just to put it into context, we have about 12 million metric tons that we consume and about 10 million of that comes from domestic production.

The other 16% comes from imports.

So, you know, we're talking about all these countries, you know, really fighting over that 16%.

And that's at a high level, it's usually a little bit lower than that.

So I kind of avoided your quality question, but I guess, you know, what I would say is if that is the case then, you know, you would see the prices be higher to consumers for those higher quality products.

- Okay, makes sense.

Thank you.

And if you have additional questions and some of the controversy that's currently ongoing, Eric is here tonight and be absolutely happy to answer.

- [Eric] Let's go.

Yeah.

(everyone laughs) - All right, let's switch over to, by the way, first of all, Willard is in Fallon County, far eastern Montana, close to South Dakota.

Thank you for that comment.

Bozeman, and this call came in last time.

We didn't get to it.

We'll get to it again tonight.

Caller wants advice on mulching her roses.

She's thought to use burlap sacks and leaf mulch.

It is that a good ideal?

- Yeah, you can do it, especially if you're in an area where you're worried about drying out or wind damage where you don't have too much snow cover.

If you have a good amount of snow cover in the winter, you can often rely on that snow cover to help insulate those roses.

But if you don't, you can use burlap to protect it from the wind, leaf mulch or wood chip mulch.

Both work well to protect it, and then kind of play it by ear next year to see how well it bounces back.

Also, the type of roses that you have is a factor in that too.

A lot of our ornamental roses are much more sensitive to kind of cold temperatures and temperature extremes but our native roses are pretty hardy and do really well.

- They do better now than they did 25 years ago when we were a lot colder here.

There's no doubt about that.

Jane, this person from Missoula is curious.

Are there any new serious invasive pests that Montana is concerned about?

- Well, I'll try to speak to just plants 'cause I think we need to remember that, like, I mean I work on plants, but there's insects, there's mammals, there's diseases, there's all sorts of invasive pests.

The Montana Invasive Species Council works on across all taxa.

As far as plants, this past summer we did see a lot of expansion of rush skeletonweed, which is on our state noxious weed list, and previously kind of been contained to the west side of the divide, and even there it was kind of in isolated areas.

But the last couple years we've found plants on the east side of the divide.

And we're real concerned about that species because it could impact wheat, I mean, it could be a crop weed in addition to a range and pasture weed.

So that one comes to mind right away.

I mean if you look at our state noxious weed list, there's priority 1A and 1B species.

I don't remember the exact number, but it's probably around 10 to 12 species that are either not here at all or they're here in small amounts, isolated areas, and really any of those species would be plants of high concern that we're really focused on prevention of them becoming established.

And then like early detection and rapid response.

- Okay, you're on top of it.

- People are on top of it.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

The Department of AG has an early detection and rapid response coordinator and there's a lot of focus.

I think that's one thing that's changed over the course of my career is the recognition of the value of prevention and finding something early when it first invades and taking action to eliminate it.

I feel like when I first started in the invasive species world, you know, we weren't talking about that as much and now it's a much more common conversation.

- Okay, thank you.

- And I'd like to build off of that too.

It's economically early detection and rapid responses.

The cheaper option 'cause it saves a lot of money for eradication.

We're having an economic person here.

And then just also stress the Montana Invasive Species Council, MISC.

So look them up online.

They have a lot of great resources for things in Montana.

- Thank you.

While you're up, Frank, this person from Musselshell County, roundup seems to be having a lot more bugs in their home this year, and this is an email question.

Is there any reason why there seemed to be more this year?

- I would say it just, we've had a beautiful fall this year.

Oh it just, we really haven't had that hard cold snap yet.

So that population is still pretty big and they're just kind of starting to gather to do their nice fall aggregation and they'll find your house the perfect place to over winter.

So get out your vacuum cleaner as we stay here.

- So last week, just as the program was over, caller from Billings emailed and said, for next week, new to Montana and they are appreciating the program and all the fascinating questions and answers.

What they want to know is what's the difference between yams and sweet potatoes?

So we've sent Abi home with homework and she grew some sweet potatoes this week.

(everyone laughs) She brought 'em in.

- Yeah.

- You wanna explain the difference?

- Yeah, absolutely.

So while you are watching, I did a little poll before the show started and asked everyone in here, which one is the yam and which one is the sweet potato.

And if you kind of zoom in, you can kind of think of your own guesses.

But this is a trick question because these are both sweet potatoes.

So if we pull up that graphic that I have, sweet potatoes are in the morning glory family, but true yams are actually very, very different from sweet potatoes.

So they have this really starchy flesh, they have this really fuzzy outer skin.

They don't taste like very much, a pretty neutral flavor whereas our sweet potatoes are really sweet.

And then yams are primarily grown in Africa and Asia, whereas sweet potatoes, we do grow these here in the United States and grow them pretty well.

And we also grow them in parts of Montana.

But oftentimes in the grocery store you might find these red colored sweet potatoes that are labeled as yams.

I think that's just one of the ways that they label them.

It's often the Garnet variety that's labeled that, whereas these white sweet potatoes are usually just labeled as sweet potatoes.

But that's a fun maybe Thanksgiving You can make sweet potatoes two ways and pull the people who are eating and ask them which ones which.

But these are both sweet potatoes, true yams, you're probably unlikely to come across them unless you really go looking at specialty grocery stores.

- You know, I did not know that because I have been buying Garnet yams for a long time and I always thought they were yams.

- Yeah.

- But they're actually a sweet potato.

- They're actually a sweet potato.

Yeah.

- Well.

- Abi are both tubers.

- Yep.

Both of these are tubers.

Both of them are tubers, so - And yam are tuber as well.

- True yams are also tubers.

Yeah, but the interesting thing, if you're a plant nerd, is that true yams are monocots.

So they're closely related to grasses, which is different than our sweet potatoes.

- [Jane] Yeah.

- Okay, thank you.

Jane, I'm gonna get that in a minute.

But before we do, and I thought this question would come in, a Helena, our caller wants to know the thoughts of the panel on the recent tariff policy and the impact on Montana agriculture.

Specifically, they were asking about beef, we've already covered beef.

How about the tariff policy on some of our other commodities?

- Yeah, I mean it depends on which one you're talking about.

But I think, you know, as far as Montana farmers, the big one has been with Canada for a lot of the machinery, fertilizer that we do import from there.

And we can even see it in some of those beef numbers where we do, you know, trade, you know, with Canada, we've seen some of those fall off in the last year.

I mean Mexico and Canada are two of, you know, they're our largest import, you know, origins.

And they're also our largest export markets for those products.

So I think we've seen it mostly on the input side in Montana.

If you go to the Midwest, you know, with soybean farmers, I think they'd probably tell you, well we've seen it in our output markets, but luckily our wheat market seems to be pretty insulated.

The countries we're trading to there, Japan, South Korea, you know, we haven't experienced any tariffs.

You know, Governor Gianforte was just on a trade delegation there last week.

So I think there's a lot of kind of forward progress in those markets.

And then just the whole kind Asia Pacific region just trying to strengthen those.

But so we've been somewhat lucky in some of our commodities.

You know, a lot of our lentils, you know, go to India; we've seen some tariffs there.

So there's, you know, it's kind of depends on which market you're pointing to.

- The soybean growers have really been hurt by that.

And I did read an article on the Wall Street Journal that normally at this time of year, China is importing millions of tons of soybeans and they haven't purchased any soybeans for the last three months.

Will that market ever come back for the soybean producers?

- It'll take a while and I don't know if it will come back.

I mean, we've seen it- again, if we borrow like the example of the beef market for the US, we think back to when we had the BSC outbreak and we had countries that shut down trade with us and then they reopened, but they didn't, you know, it took us a long time, even with Japan, to get back to those pre-BSC numbers.

And so yeah, you look at China, I mean they're investing in South American countries right now, you know, they're, you know, investing import infrastructure and the same ways that we have some countries investing in the US countries like Japan investing in that infrastructure.

You know, I think China's doing those investments in South America.

So yeah, you know, I think we're gonna have to find some new customers for a lot of those products, frankly, kind of in the longer term.

- Okay.

Makes sense to me.

Frank, Fallon seems to be common town this evening.

- Okay.

- This person from Fallon wants to know grasshoppers prediction for next spring.

- I have not seen the current grasshopper outlook yet.

I don't think they quite published it.

Usually, if I'm basing it off of what previous years have been, I think it's still gonna be pretty high.

So there'll probably be high numbers.

So we'll probably have red a lot of counties in the eastern part of the state, and it really depends on how this winter and spring goes.

So I think we're in a La Nina year, so we should have a cool winter.

A lot of moisture.

And I think with that we should knock down that population and we should be pretty good next year.

Of course, there's still gonna be a lot of grasshoppers for Montana, but overall I don't think we're gonna have as bad of a year as we did in 2020.

- This past year was not particularly bad, was it?

- No, I was really worried at the very beginning of the year because of how it was looking like a drought, but then we had that spring moisture event coming through and it knocked that population down and it was manageable.

- Okay.

Thank you.

That beautiful flower that you have in front of you with a nice purple petals.

- Isn't it nice?

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- You wanna explain what's going on?

- Yeah, well I brought, this is spotted knapweed.

So this is kind like the poster child noxious weed for Montana.

We are well known for our spotted knapweed.

Not really talking about ID, but I guess what I just picked this plant today because I think it's fascinating that it's still flowering.

You know, it's late October, we have had some frost, this plant, you know, obviously flowered produced seed, drop those seed earlier in the summer, but it's still, you know, still going a after it trying to make some more flowers.

And my point with bringing this plant in is, like, we're dealing with an invasive species.

You know, we had a caller ask about that just a little while ago.

Like, these species are really good at doing what they do, right?

You know, this plant's like, hey, I'm gonna try to make a few more seeds before I die back for the summer.

So I was on a couple weeks ago and brought a hoarylis plant in that was still doing the same thing.

You know, some of these species are flowering from May through October.

- Yeah.

- So I guess it just speaks to the challenge of managing a species like this.

- So you mentioned that and it has been a late fall, there's no doubt about that.

So I had somebody clean up my garden this past week taking out all the residue and so forth, and I had a lot of grassy weeds and hoarylis plants in there.

I sprayed them on Friday with glyphosate, the old Roundup.

Did I do the right thing?

- You know, I don't think you would hurt anything by doing that.

Thankfully, we had a decent weekend because glyphosate does move, translocate through plants pretty slowly.

But, you know, we had some 50s, 50 degree weather might've hit the low sixties.

- It was 64 when I sprayed.

- Okay, good.

You must've read the label.

- It was 70.

(everyone laughs) - Spray when at least 60 degrees.

But, you know, you're not out anything you probably won't get as good a control as if you would've done that 10 days to two weeks earlier.

- Well, I didn't have the garden cleaned up at that time.

But that brings up another question.

Now you probably can't answer this, but when we took off and all the asparagus fronds and discard them so I could spray 'em in the spring if I did that say two weeks ago, the asparagus is already pretty dormant.

Could I spray with Roundup then and not hurt the asparagus?

- Yeah, you should be able to.

Roundup has to-glyphosate.

- Glyphosate.

- Make sure we're saying glyphosate 'cause there are Roundup products that don't have glyphosate in them.

It's a trademarked name now.

But glyphosate has to come in contact with photosynthesizing plant tissue in order to get absorbed by the plant and then moved around in the plant.

It does not have any activity in the soil.

So if it hits soil, it's inactivated as a herbicide.

- Okay, thank you.

I think I probably got some control, we'll find out in the spring.

- Yeah, you'll find out in the spring.

- Well, we got several here for Eric now, and one is from Bozeman.

They'd like you to talk about origin labeling and one from Missoula and wondering why they can find out where the beef she buys is from in the grocery store.

Do you wanna touch on that?

Where do we stand with- - Yeah.

- The origin of the labeling.

- It's a great way to get in trouble.

- I know.

(everyone laughs) - No, but, yeah, so there are, I guess, you know, there's a long history of that I guess I'll say.

And, you know, we had a mandatory country of origin labeling enacted and then it was litigated through the World Trade Organization.

Canada, you know, basically came to the US and felt like we were discriminating against some of their products because, you know, what was happening is it started increasing the cost for meat producers in the US to manage Canadian animals and sort them kind of appropriately 'cause when you label something as, you know, US, well, what does that mean?

If it's born, you know, and then grows, you know, where it kind of, you know, and then where it's processed.

Those are kind of the three different segments.

So you can imagine all the different combinations that we could have here in Montana.

We see animals that are born in Montana and then they go up to Canada and then maybe they get slaughtered in the US and you have a whole range of iterations of that.

So that information is somewhat costly I guess as far as why don't we know where beef comes from?

You know, that is a political question that I think continues to be raised by politicians on like, you know, having a mandatory country of origin labeling or just a voluntary country of origin labeling process whereby, I mean I could imagine with the voluntary label you could have if, you know, American products wanna label themselves as such, they could.

But I think the complaint on the other side as well, you know, what's to keep a product that you know comes in from Brazil, you know, is it labeled product from Brazil?

Not all the time, and so I think, you know, being able to distinguish that is kind of the origin of the issue.

You know, I think it's more of probably a political issue honestly.

- Yeah, so on that note, Angus beef, that's the US.

- [Eric] Yep.

- So if you're buying Angus beef, you're buying US beef products most likely.

You know, a lot of countries are proud of importing things to the US; avocados from Mexico.

We don't grow a lot of 'em in the US, we do some, but a lot of countries will say where it's from, especially on our produce.

- So.

- Yeah.

- Meat, not so much.

- Yeah, and the main difference I think is, you know, you look at the way that, especially avocados is a great example because those are ones that are really just, I mean there's one country that, and then it's shipped somewhere else, - [Jack] Right.

- As an end product.

Whereas with beef, especially as you get to the processing side, you're talking about such large volumes, so many animals that are coming from different farm operations that it becomes quite costly to try to, you know, segregate them in the same way.

It'd be a lot simpler, yeah, if it were just kind of one country.

But, you know, before I was here I was at Texas Tech and we had a lot of animals from Mexico that would come up into the feedlots and they're in West Texas and then they'd go and get processed and, you know, seasonally that helped them to stay full year round by having that, you know, that seasonal flow.

And so, you know, how then do you label when you have some, you know, of these cattles that were born in Mexico, raised in the US and then, you know, are they American?

Are they Mexican?

And it's a little more complicated than other products.

Not to say we can't figure it out 'cause I think, I think we can, but, yeah, it'll be an ongoing issue, I'm sure.

- It's been an issue for a long time.

- Yeah.

Yep.

- No doubt about it.

Changed tunes a little bit.

Abi, this caller is new to gardening and she has a raised bed in Missoula.

She is wondering if she can incorporate all the leaves in her yard into a raised bed this fall?

That might be a little much depending on how much.

- Yeah, I think it would depend on how many leaves you have.

So first of all, if there's kind of diseased material in your leaf or if you had kind of black spots and stuff like that, any sort of fungal or bacterial issues, don't put those in your raised bed.

But if you have healthy leaves, I wouldn't put more than maybe like four or five inches of leaves inside your raised bed.

Mix those in.

You can start a little compost pile if you want with the rest and have them kind of work to form a really nice compost for your gardening next year, but I wouldn't put all of them in there at once.

- Okay, thank you.

It's my turn to throw Frank a curve ball.

- [Frank] There we go.

Okay.

- And this is a good one.

From Bozeman, comment about next year's grasshopper maps.

Caller mentioned that since a lot of the data for grasshopper maps are taken by federal funding, there is a high possibility that the prediction for next year could be skewed.

In other words, do we have adequate funding to do the maps?

- So this year they were a little bit late to get out there to do the survey, but they did have a full seasonal staff to go out.

So I was worried again at the beginning of the year that we would have skewed data, but from my knowledge I work closely with them with USDA, FSPPQ and I would say we do have good knowledge.

Going forward that is up in the air, especially with the status right now.

But I have confidence that this year's data is good.

- Okay, thank you.

Good answer.

Eric, this person says their homeowner's insurance and car insurance has skyrocketed over that it has going up.

They wanna know, has federal crop insurance increased?

- Oh, good question.

Yeah, so, you know, home insurance is gonna increase if you experience, well, if you have higher home values or if you have more wildfires and different things that are gonna cause risks.

So crop insurance would be very similar where, you know, if the price of crops are going up, which we haven't seen too much of that would cause crop insurance to be more expensive.

If it becomes riskier and you might think, well, have yields become riskier?

And they're looking at historical data.

So I'm assuming that if we're looking at kind of price uncertainty, you know, that might have a little bit of an impact on the revenue policies and those are gonna be priced in there.

But I would think with most of the yield policies, they probably stay about the same.

- Okay, thank you.

Great answer.

We had somebody calling and say some viewers are having trouble with getting their calls in this evening.

Try calling again because I think the phones are working pretty good.

I'm hearing people talk in the background.

From Helena, Jane, this caller wonders if it's true that weeds prefer poorly fertilized soil.

That's an interesting question.

- Yeah, well, weeds tend to take advantage of nutrients more than like native species will.

So I mean we often, like, if you have a lot of weeds, we oftentimes do not recommend fertilizing because the weeds are, like I mentioned earlier, they're really good at growing, they're really good at taking up excess nutrients.

With that said, however, you'd also see weeds growing in like poor soil and I don't know if that's so much like they do better in nutrient poor soil.

I think it's more like they just have a really broad amplitude of the type of soil they can grow in.

Again, they're weeds.

Weeds are really good at growing so they tend to be able to grow in poor soils as well, and think about spotted knapweed, which I just had.

I mean you see nap weed growing in some of the like coarse shallow soils and it seems to be just fine.

- [Representative] Thank you for calling.

- If you think about our native species, like, I work a lot in range lands.

It's like native, you know, still native prairie.

And those species persist and survive in extremely low nutrient soils.

They just don't need a lot of nutrients.

- And Jane, do you think competition with other plants has something to do with that too in terms of those nutrient poor soils not being that suitable to desirable plants so more open spaces for?

- Oh sure, yeah.

Yeah, they're always- - [Jack] That makes a big difference.

- Yeah, vying for, but it's so there's competition but there's always just like some of these weeds can just survive in like they're gonna occupy really poor soils.

You often see cheatgrass growing along like road cuts.

Like it's sometimes weeds are the only thing that will grow in certain places.

So that's not so much competition as it is just the ability to tolerate kind of harsh conditions.

- You mentioned cheatgrass and I think you brought in a photo of somebody that did something that you suggested.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- You wanna bring that photo up?

- Yeah, we can bring up that photo of the bioassay, so.

- Explain what went on.

- Yeah, so there's a new herbicide on the market.

It's called Rejuvra and it's really good controlling annual grasses, but it's a pre-emergent herbicide.

It acts on seeds in the soil and it persists in the soil for two, three years you'll get control.

This was actually someone who visited with me.

They had applied Rejuvra actually three years ago and they were wondering if they could go ahead and revegetate, they were interested in seeding desired species.

So I encouraged them to do a bioassay.

Go out into the field where you applied the herbicide, collect soil and put it in pot.

So this picture, the cells, the square cells that have a blue piece of tape next to 'em that where you can see more soil, those were ones that are field soil where the herbicide was applied.

The other cells that are a lot greener that have a white piece of tape kind of to the left side of that cell that was just, they did potting soil so they just bought some potting soil, shouldn't be any herbicides there, and they seeded their mix into these cells to see what would happen.

And I hope that you can see that this bioassay worked really well for this person.

There's still active herbicide in that soil.

You see fewer seedlings and they're much, much smaller.

This person also sent me some photos, they had actually pulled some of those seedlings outta the ground and you could definitely see where the roots were stunted on the seedlings coming outta that field soil.

So they're making the decision to delay seeding till spring or maybe even next fall, but I just thought this was a great example of someone doing a bioassay.

They executed it really well and they know now exactly what's going on at their site and what sort of management decision they should make.

- Good suggestion.

- Yeah.

And that was a very intriguing photograph.

Abi, quickly Weed and Feed will that over winter in the soil?

- No, most of the time the active ingredients that are used in Weed and Feed products are things like 24D, dicamba, MCPA, MCPP.

Those are not going to usually be active that following year.

- What about the fertilizer?

What about the feed?

Because I haven't fertilized my lawn yet and I remember the recommendation used to be like Columbus Day or you know, October 12th, 13th.

Should I put fertilizer on my lawn if I haven't yet?

- I wouldn't put fertilizer on your lawn right now.

But if you are good about fertilizing and it looks fairly healthy, it should be fine.

You can start in the spring and fertilize it then, and nitrogen is so mobile in the soil that it doesn't really, it's hard to capture how well it stays around.

But it usually, depending on if you used a slow release fertilizer or if you used a fast release fertilizer, the fast release ones are probably not gonna stick around, but if it was a slow release product, it could probably continue to provide that nitrogen for your plant.

- Okay, surprised, this one took so long to come in.

Eric, the government shutdown, has that affected Montana agriculture?

That call came from Great Falls.

- Oh yeah, that's a great question.

I'm sure someone in Great Falls has a good answer.

You know, I think a lot of the programs, especially in agriculture, have been developed so that they can last kind of without the government being open.

So things like crop insurance, you know, there's a government being open and then also without a farm bill these things continue to operate.

I think the biggest problem is FSA offices being closed and then when people need to go to those offices, like let's say there's a payment that's due, you know, those payments aren't being sent out or if they want information on signing up for a new program, there's nobody there, and that's probably the biggest area where we see it in Montana.

- And that's probably pretty important in the state.

- Yeah.

- There's no doubt about that.

- Absolutely.

- Frank, this person has earwigs in their compost pile and they don't like 'em.

They'd like to get rid of 'em.

Do you think they need to?

- They probably don't need to get rid of them, but earwigs are actually non-native to Montana, so they're all European.

Earwigs introduced first came in 1939.

Fun fact.

From Sanders County and spread across the state.

But yeah, they're kind of annoying in a lot of population, but they'll just be fine in their compost pile.

- You know, if you harvest your sweet corn and let us sit around, you can have Earwig races on your counter because you're gonna have 'em.

There's no doubt about that.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- While I have you up, you mentioned before the program, we talked about the banana slug that somebody was curious about in Ravalli County.

I don't know if they've sent one in yet.

If they have, we'll take a look at it and make sure what it is.

Do you have any thoughts on what it might be?

- So in Ravalli County we do get banana slugs up to the Idaho border.

So it wouldn't be that big of a surprise if it got into Ravalli County, but there is no documentation.

So if you do see one, I would take a photo, put it on iNaturalist.

A possibility, purely guesswork.

There's a genus arion, A-R-I-O-N, which is introduced genus of land breathing slugs.

And there's one species that can be a little bit yellowish with black eye stocks that can kinda look like a banana slug.

- Okay, well again, if this person from Ravalli County, Stevensville is watching, please send us a sample of that because we're curious what it might be.

- Yes.

- This question has come in several times.

I haven't gotten to it.

This persons lives in Hamilton, they have a lot of dahlias.

They have a huge problem with tarnished plant bug getting in the buds and destroying the bulbs.

They've tried to control 'em with neem and it hasn't worked too well, also stylet oil and Spinosad.

Any suggestions?

- That's a tough one.

If it's a continuing issue, I mean potentially relocating where you're growing the dahlias could be helpful.

A lot of times it can be difficult to manage some of these very mobile insects too.

And they can go to where you're going.

I would probably, let me do some homework on this and get back to you with more information on tarnished plant bug spray.

Do you have any?

- You'd be here in two weeks?

- I don't for this one.

- Yeah.

Okay.

From Conrad.

Simple question for Eric.

Why are wheat prices so low?

- Well, why are they low?

So they've come down quite a bit from where they were.

- They're way down.

- They're way down.

Yeah.

I mean it's, the economist says supply and demand, right?

So what's been happening in the market production has mostly been good around the world.

Global demand is fairly strong for wheat products.

But yeah, so kind of where we look at where wheat prices are today is pretty close to what we call like the long run, you know, break even price, which is kind of like where nobody's really making any money, you know, on that product.

But that's kind of where prices tend to settle in, you know, short of something happening in the global market.

So, you know, for on the Montana side, yeah, in the last year there's been a lot of talk of how do we keep our costs down?

You know, what kind of things, and that's really on the farm side, you know, that's really all you have control over is kind of keeping your cost down in that kind of environment.

- Okay, thank you.

I will say that I think my wife spent more for a loaf of bread today than a farmer gets for a bushel of wheat.

- Oh, okay.

- Yeah, it was pricey bread, so I'm well I'm just saying.

- Yeah, I mean, you know, everything that happens after the farmer has gotten more expensive, right.

The logistics, the wages, everything is, has gotten more expensive.

- Yeah.

Okay, thank you.

Jane, from Columbia Falls, this caller wants to know how she can get rid of black medic in her lawn.

Good luck.

Will 30% vinegar work on it and other weeds?

- Yeah, well I'm gonna go to the second part of that question 'cause it's easier to answer, and that's the one about the vinegar and it will probably not get rid of black medic because what 30% herbicide strength vinegar does, it's a contact herbicide.

It burns down any foliage that it comes in contact with, but it does not get moved around in the plant and get down into the root system.

And black medic is a perennial, it has a pretty like robust root system.

I mean I pull it outta my lawn and so it's gonna burn back the top of the plants, but black medic is good at growing.

It's not gonna get that vinegar down into the roots, which is really what you need to address if you wanna get rid of black medic.

- Okay, I find that's probably one of the toughest long weeds to get rid of.

- Yeah, it's tough.

- And 30% vinegar, have you noticed the price on that?

- I haven't.

Have you bought some recently?

- Well, I wouldn't buy it but- - [Jane] Yeah.

- It's pricey.

- Pricey, yeah.

Just, if this helps viewers, if you do wanna use herbicide strength vinegar for controlling weeds, the best time to do that is the spring when you have little baby plants coming up.

You got the seedlings, you got the, you know, it's early in the spring because if you burn that plant back at that point, like it's just, you know, it might be small enough that it doesn't have enough of a root system to spring back.

- Okay.

- So keep that for the spring.

- Alright, makes sense to me.

Caller from Hamilton wants to know with a trade uncertainty, has that affected our prices for commodities here in Montana?

- Yeah, you know, for some, you know, we were talking about, you know, wheat seems to be fairly unaffected.

Although these things, they all move together, right?

Because, you know, if you're a soybean farmer and you're looking at these soybeans, you're gonna try to switch to corn.

So there's a bit of an impact that kind of goes sector wide, but, you know, we've seen it in soybean prices they've dropped pretty dramatically.

That's probably the most obvious example.

You know, beef, we saw beef prices come down even though they're, you know, they've been very strong for a long time, you know, limit down moves on Fridays.

So there's some downside pressure.

Now granted, you know, they're at the highest we've seen, but still kind of some of that downside movement when you see, you know, trade maybe being disrupted.

- Do you think the threat of importing Argentinian beef caused some of the decline in the recent beef prices?

- It could; I mean, yeah, it's hard to know what exactly speculators are thinking, but I think that was part of it.

It could also just be a thought that the administration is gonna maybe target beef and try to bring down the price in one way to do that is by importing more beef from other countries and that could, you know, hurt a lot of U.S.

ranchers, you know, they wouldn't wanna see those lower prices but, you know, a lot of times farmers and consumers can sometimes be battling over those, you know, high prices are great for producers but not so great for consumers.

And so finding a happy medium can be hard.

- Okay, thank you.

Frank, this person, and you could jump in too Abi, wants to know how cold does it have to get before wasps won't over winter in Montana?

Any idea on that?

- I'd say they would over winter in Montana no matter what.

Even if it gets down to the negatives, they've been around for years and years with cold winters.

So I don't think temperature's an issue at all.

- Yeah, I honestly don't think I had as many wasps this year.

Now I've been after 'em for three or four years in a row with traps and bug spray that you spray on them, but definitely did not have as many this year.

Have you you guys noticed the same thing or not?

- I haven't noticed the same thing, but oftentimes you can for kind of incidental populations, it could be what is available, how the local populations overwintered and what those life cycles look like.

So it's hard to say if that's consistent throughout.

- Yeah.

- But Frank do you, I assume that they're talking about maybe some of our introduced social wasp species.

Do you think cold temperatures would deter those?

- I still don't.

A lot of them are from Europe, so we're similar latitude, kind of similar temperatures.

So I don't think there's enough buildings around to keep some populations happy in overwinter.

Going back to you for Jack, probably your trapping has probably brought that down.

- Okay.

- You said it's years, you prevent it building up and that's probably knocked it down.

- So well when I first started after 'em they pick up my hamburger and fly off.

(everyone laughs) Yeah, we had a lot of 'em.

Quick question from Custer County.

They wanna know if we have local weed in this state.

- Yeah, we do.

There's several different species of local weed.

- And they are toxic?

- Yes, they do.

They all have varying levels of toxicity.

- Especially to what animals?

- Oh, well, I think it typically affects cattle more than anything.

This is one of those species that they say, you know, cattle can kind of develop an affinity.

- Okay.

- For local weed.

It kind of depends on the species.

- Alright, we down to the last minute.

From Missoula, Abi, quickly this caller wants to confirm that the panel just said Weed and Feed should not be applied after October.

- Not necessarily after October, but quick release fertilizers at this time of year can be tough 'cause if you have new growth in your grass, you're gonna stress it out in the winter.

- Okay, thank you, and I did for my fertilize mine on Columbus Day.

Folks, we're down the last few minutes.

I wanna thank Eric, our guests this evening.

Frank, Jane, Abi, as usual, you guys did a great job.

Next week we've got Jillien Streit, Director of Montana Department of Agriculture that will be on the program.

That should be really interesting because you can answer her some of the questions that Eric tried to dodge tonight.

(everyone laughs) Have a good night.

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