- [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, (calming music) and the Montana Federation of Garden Clubs.

(upbeat country music) (upbeat country music) - Good evening, everyone, and welcome to another episode of "Montana Ag Live."

Coming to you live from the studio of KUSM on the wet and damp Montana State University campus.

So you guys know how it works.

Make sure you call in, get those questions in, that phone number will pop up.

If you have questions about what to do with all this water.

If you have horticulture questions, disease questions, questions about tourism or the economic outlook of Montana, we have a great panel for you tonight.

I'm Tim Sippel.

* I'm the Crop and Weed Extension specialist in the Land Resources and Environmental Science Program at Montana State University.

We have a great panel tonight, we're gonna be talking about tourism and I'll introduce the panel now.

We have Uta McKelvy, she is our regular crop pathologist.

She's gonna tell us all about diseases and horticulture.

Our special guest tonight is Melissa Weddell.

She is from the Institute of Tourism and Recreation Research at the University of Montana.

And we're gonna ask her a ton of questions about agritourism, where the tourists go in Montana and what their favorite tourist destination is in Eastern Montana.

Next to Melissa, we have Joel Schumacher, our Ag Extension Economic Specialist.

So you can ask him all kinds of questions about what will cattle prices do, what's the wheat market gonna do, and how much are we gonna pay for urea?

And next to Joel, we have Abby Sayid.

* She is our extension horticulture specialist and she's gonna tell you what to do with your lawn, with all our gardens that are going in and everything that's happening in and around our urban landscapes.

So Melissa, we're super excited to have you tonight to tell us about the Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research at the University of Montana and a little bit about what goes on there.

So have at it.

Tell us all about tourism in Montana.

- Yeah, thanks for inviting me on.

We refer to it as ITRR so I can shorten it for you.

We are funded by the lodging tax and we were created in 1987, so we're almost 40 years old.

The original 4% lodging tax and we get 2% of that.

We are what I would consider the research arm for the tourism and outdoor recreation industries in Montana.

We have two main projects.

One of those is to count how many visitors come to Montana, how much they're spending and what they're doing while they're here.

We have 10 surveyors across the state that intercept visitors at filling stations, rest areas and the airport.

In fact, this month we've had a busy month.

We've intercepted I think almost all of our members of Congress and many of our state legislators.

So we have a wide variety we report in on that.

And then the other kind of bucket of research that we do are these annual one-time projects.

We work with the Tourism Advisory Council, which is a governor appointed board and people like you all put in research ideas and then we kind of filter through that and the board helps us pick which research projects to do.

We have about 10 of us on campus, but we have lots of graduate students and we work with other faculty.

Agritourism was a report that we put out last year.

We have a lot of different other ones as well.

And all of our data is downloadable.

It's on a public dashboard and we are here to answer questions anyone has if they were to call our shop.

- Okay, great, thanks.

Okay, so we'll get the question out of the way first.

So people argue often is agriculture a bigger industry or is tourism a bigger industry?

- Yeah, I appreciate the softball question.

I feel like this panel might be a little biased and they might not like what I'm getting ready to say.

I would say tourism is about 5% in Montana's GDP, where agriculture's a little under four, if you wanna look at it that way.

Also, jobs, clearly because there's a lot more sole proprietors.

We have a lot more jobs.

But it depends how you measure it.

- Okay.

- Right.

- Thank you.

Yeah, thanks.

That was a question that came up.

Okay.

Sorry, I was remiss.

I did not introduce our phone operators tonight.

We have Nancy Blake and Jen Grace who are answering our phones tonight.

And I know they've been ringing, but keep them ringing on this rainy evening.

So you'll be prepared to do all your gardening and farming and ag next week.

Okay, so we've had a couple questions come in.

One of them is, okay, here comes a kind of a tough one.

This came from Great Falls, "Is the American Prairie Reserve," which is South Phillips County, Montana, maybe some into Valley County.

If you've never heard of it, American Prairie, "is that considered agritourism?"

- We would say yes, based on what I know they have built out or working on building out a trail system, a campground system,lifted camping platforms, the visitor center, we would consider all of that tourism definitely and definitely agritourism and they pay into the lodging tax.

- Okay.

Alright, thanks.

So we had another question.

Okay, another question from Great Falls this evening.

"When is the best time to overseed white clover and how?"

Why are we overseedng this white clover?

- Yeah, that's a good question, Tim.

Where are overseeding?

That would change my answer in terms of how.

Usually people are looking at maybe diversifying their turf grass lawn and overseeding in existing turf.

One of the best things about white clover is that you can easily overseed right into existing turf.

It works really well.

Spring is a really good time to overseeded white clover.

And one of the best combination ways to do this is you would aerate and then you would overseed because you wanna open up some of that soil area for the seeds to come into contact with the soil, which increases the germination success.

So you can do that in the spring, do that after you aerate, keep an eye on it and just let it work its magic.

If you are doing just white clover though, you're going to need to reseed that every year or every couple of years because it's not a very long lasting full dense ground cover here in Montana.

- Alright, thanks.

Melissa, we have another question for you.

"What prompted the ITRR," Thanks for typing in the acronym "to take a closer look at agritourism specifically and why does it matter to Montana's ag community?"

- Yeah, that's a great question.

I think our first report came out in 1997.

We did another one in 2007 and then ours was published in 2024.

There are a multitude of reasons I think we've seen in agritourism.

There was this idea that it was just someone coming to the farm or a ranch and purchasing tomato or zucchini meat, whatever.

And we've really seen that model of agritourism in the past decade really expand.

And it includes education, hospitality, different types of produce, entertainment, venues, music festivals, all kinds of things.

We also know as the land prices go up, as it's harder for families to stay on farms and ranches, when you're able to diversify that business model, it helps.

In fact, I think in our survey over 70% of the respondents said it enables them to stay, to keep the farm in the family.

So you have that happening and then a lot of people talked about how educating the community and being part of the community was really important to them.

And so it's a really critical part of our research.

We also work with the state and so when policymakers or legislators try to help communities, understanding like the Made in Montana has really increased thinking about those products that come in from Eastern Montana.

And so it was time for us to update that report.

- Okay.

- So kind of along those lines, I mean I imagine there's some geographic differences in Montana.

I mean down the Gallatin Valley, there's some dude ranches that existed in the 1800s that are still in operation, but I grew up on the Highline and I didn't see any of dude ranches was not a thing up there.

Are there still some regional differences in what offerings people are seeing?

- Yeah, absolutely.

There's a lot of different regional offerings.

I also think it depends, we were talking before the show thinking about farmer's markets and whether locals and residents come to those farmer's markets or you have a lot of visitors come, right?

So you have that all the way to, one of our surveyors in Eastern Montana owns a large ranch and a lot of visitors come.

Also, a lot of ranches in the east have different homesteads on their property and have started to turn those into short-term rentals and family stays thinking about wedding venues and different things.

There are some challenges with bureaucracy and regulations and of course insurance.

Farms are very dangerous places to be.

So when you bring people on, you know, I joke if you want an unpredictable life, you should buy a few horses.

And then when you invite visitors on your farm, it creates even more challenges.

So there are a lot of differences but still critical in all the different regions.

- So what are some of the largest tourist draws, let's say east of Forsyth.

Forsyth, your question's queued up here.

So if we go east of Forsyth, what are the big tourist destinations in eastern Montana?

- Yeah, I don't wanna play favorites but I will say we finished a museum in paleontology study last year and have found like the dino trail, the dinosaur trail that runs through Eastern Montana, very popular, brings in a lot of visitors, brings in a lot of residents too, education programs.

I think about our state parks are very popular.

We've done some travel on the highline up east.

I have some personal favorites, I'm not gonna point those out.

But what I think is happening is, I joke, you have the national parks in Western Montana and they might be the first draw to bring people here, right?

And then they come and they realize how big the state is and how much there is to do.

And Eastern Montana is just magnificent and thinking about the Missouri River and other opportunities.

And so we have a very loyal repeat visitor that continues to come back and I think that's when they start exploring the east to see more and learn more about the culture and the history and the agriculture.

- Alright, thank you.

Okay, Forsyth, we'll tee up your questions now.

So couple questions from Forsyth.

The first one for Abby, "Caller has heard that black walnut tree roots can negatively affect other nearby plants.

Is that true?"

- That's a good question.

That's kind of a tough one.

So black walnuts produce this chemical called juglone and when plants inhibit other plants from growing near them, it's called allelopathy.

And so historically we used to think that juglone was going to impact the plants that were growing around the root system of black walnut trees because we didn't see very much growth.

But in lab studies that were done after that, they showed that there wasn't really an effect of the juglone.

So the answer to that is it's complicated, but it probably doesn't have the effect that we had been led to believe that it does.

It's not that direct allelopathic effect that some other plants can have.

So in this case, I would say it probably won't have an impact.

- Okay.

That's, yeah, interesting.

There's a black walnut down the street from where I live and many years it actually doesn't make black walnut because it's right on the edge of where it can really grow.

But the warm years it will actually make black walnuts and you'll see them hit the ground.

Okay, other question from Forsyth, "When the collar spot sprays 2, 4-D on his bind weed in his garden, does it poison the soil so he can't plant that area the next season?"

You want to touch it first or should I?

You tell us Tim.

Okay, so 2, 4-D is a synthetic auxin herbicide widely used.

Actually the first time it was sprayed west of the Mississippi was in Moccasin, Montana.

And there's actually a plaque at the central ag research station that says it.

And so great tourist secret spot if you want to stop by.

(panelists laughing) 2,4-D sticks around for about a month and then it is consumed by microbes and is essentially gone.

So if you wait a month, you can plant basically anything you want back into that situation.

The bindweed may not be gone but you can plant other things back in there.

2,4-D works reasonably well on bindweed.

So is it gonna poison your soil?

Poison is maybe a a harsh word, it's gonna be present in your soil and it would affect things like tomatoes, brassicas to a lesser degree, but nightshades especially, cucurbits too, it would affect those for next month.

You basically can't plant wheat for about three weeks, two weeks after view of applied 2,4-D but then after that it's gone.

So if you're worried about next season, no problem whatsoever.

Don't spray milestone in there because it will be there next season, which is aminopyralid, which sticks around for like 36 months.

So, okay, that'll be the last weed question we answer tonight maybe.

- We'll see about that.

We'll see what happens.

Okay, Joel, question for you from Fort Benton, "Given increased input costs fertilizers, can a producer make more money turning his grain land into pasture and raising cattle versus keeping it under row crop conditions?"

- Yeah, well there's a couple things to think about there.

I mean, one, if you could just flip a switch like painting your house and make it pasture land, this year would probably be great if you had some critters to feed and it would probably be, you know, definitely more profitable this year.

But you know, if you're gonna make a transition like that, if you were to plant a perennial, increase the size of your herds, you had these AUM units that you could then graze, you're looking at a, you know, probably a minimum three years to get that established into a forage rotation.

And then you'd probably wanna leave it in that, you know, perennial for you know, five years or seven years or something.

So you're looking at a six or seven year, 10 year time horizon that you'd wanna look at profitability I mean currently right now, you know, crop profitability isn't very good but what's it gonna look like in year 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 of that discussion?

And that's a lot harder to consider.

But there's other factors when you're talking about being, you know, in the cattle business versus in the, you know, crop business and some of those factors you know about what your labor force looks like, what you're wanting to do, what erosion might look like, what the yields are on those fields are probably as important as this year's economic return.

- Yeah, yeah.

I get more questions in drought years about annual forages, whether that be something like triticale or barley, pea mixture, things like that.

That's probably the intermediate step before you actually go into a perennial grass and that actually can provide you some forage.

Maybe we do have soil moisture out there.

It's hard to think about it now after this rain.

I was in Conrad this week and Ledger and it was very hot and dry at the beginning of the week.

Okay, so another question, Uta, we have the cedar apple rust.

So it's been a rainy weekend and do you want to give us the show and tell?

You brought this on a couple of weeks ago and it was really dried down and it wasn't so gooey as it is now, but do you wanna show us the cedar apple rust?

- Thank you Tim.

I would love to.

So call back to last time I was on, I brought this by now very dry branch of a very old cedar apple rust here.

And back then I was saying when it gets wet and we are in the spring season, which is exactly this weekend, these galls that are the rust galls will produce these jelly-like horns that are full of spores.

And so that's what I found this weekend and I brought in and so this is like the best jelly, rust structure I could hold onto this branch.

And then this is the amount of like spore jelly that fell off of it.

(panelists laughing) It's so cool.

So basically right now the cedar, the rust on the juniper cedar host is producing spores and these spores will travel on to the other host that makes the disease cycle.

And so those are your crab apples, apple trees, sometimes Hawthorne.

And so in a few weeks we can, or days even we can go out and scout for the rust symptoms on those leaves.

So who knows, maybe next time I'll be back with some leaves with symptoms.

Apple leaf, that is.

- Is that toxic, Uta?

Is the yellow or orangey stuff, is that toxic to humans or is it toxic to livestock or anything like that that might ingest it.

- I've never read about that.

Like when I read about this disease, it never comes up as, "Oh it's dangerous.

: And then I haven't tried out myself.

We had some brave folks here in the studio kind of give it a quick lick before the show starts.

So maybe let me report back next time, see how many of those return.

(panelists laughing) Hopefully it's not toxic, I've been told it doesn't taste like much, so let's just play with it.

It feels good.

(panelists laughing) - So we had an interesting question come in, Joel, and this is about fallow acres in Montana.

And I went through Power Conrad this week and we were making comments about, and this caller made comments about it too.

He said it looks like there's a lot more fallow acres in Montana this year given high input costs, given the low moisture.

How do we measure fallow and is that easy to determine?

- Well you know, 20 years ago in grad school I got put on a project about tracking fallow acres over like the course of the last century, looking up, digging up old documents.

And what I kind of learned then, and it's still true today, is what USDA generally tracks is what they call mechanical fallow or mechanical tillage.

But as you know, we have chem-fallow in the state so we have a really hard time 'cause they don't ask about chem-fallow, we just ask about mechanical tillage.

So there's a huge chunk of fallow acres that we're missing just in that measurement.

So the other measurement is just what crops do we actually plant?

So you can kind of come together with, you know, add up all the different crops, let's say in a county and the mechanical tillage and maybe get a little bit of a feel of like, hey, there's acres missing that are normally planted and we might be able to assume that those went into tillage.

and if they're mechanical they'll get counted.

But if they're chemical fallow, they're not gonna show up anywhere and it's a little bit of a guessing game.

- So how long does it take before we get clear idea of how many acres of wheat there are this year versus pulses versus fallow?

- Let's see, I think that's a June 1st release.

So I think it might be tomorrow.

It's either June 1st or June 15th.

- [Tim] Okay, so then we get an update on plan.

- Yeah, we had a prospective plannings report come out March 31st, which was kind of, that's your first indication of what folks are gonna plant.

But then we will get a kind of planted report a little bit later here in June.

- Okay, thanks.

Yeah, more complicated than you would think to actually determine the number of fallow out there.

- 'Cause you know, naive grad student, I assumed I could knock that out in a day or two.

I'd wait for interlibrary loan back in the day to get some physical copies (panelists laughing) and I don't think we ever got to an answer on that.

- Yep.

Okay, thanks.

Melissa, we have a question that came in.

How does high school sports and youth sports contribute to tourism and the number of nights that are stayed in hotels in Montana?

- Yeah, that's a great question.

I really appreciate whoever asked that because it tells a bigger story of what happens in Montana around travel and tourism.

I'll give you some of the data that we have.

I think it was last year in quarter two we do intercept residents.

In fact we'll intercept between three and 4,000 residents each quarter and ask them maybe four or five questions about a topic that people wanna know about.

Sport tourism is a project that we are working on in this upcoming year.

And so about 40% of residents say they travel for either youth sports or I would say like high school sports.

So the first answer is a good amount, right?

How many of them spend the night?

I don't have an exact number of that, but what it tells is a bigger story, is I think sometimes we envision, when we say tourists, we think it's people coming from outta state.

And while that's certainly true, we have to remember a lot of us travel regularly throughout the state too.

And so by having different types of visitors come into your community, it enables you to have better restaurants, direct air support, maybe, to go to bigger airports, cheaper air support and shopping.

And so that question to me is a good portion of Montanan's travel for sport, we know that.

But then also that we have a lot of residents that go to different locations that are part of this economy.

- Okay.

Yeah, thanks for that.

Yeah, it's a big component of what happens in Montana night overnight.

Okay, Uta, follow up from Boulder, "How do the spores of the cedar apple rust persist in the air or the soil?

- Well they don't persist very long.

It's like the rain splashing and wind that carries them onto the host right now.

So I guess a transient spore in that sense.

And I was also pondering just a little bit more, you know right now if you were to look at your cedars, junipers, et cetera, you would, you know, it would be very apparent if you have this kind of rust.

I don't know if now is like the best time to prune it because as you can tell, like you lift it up and it all falls off and so now you have like, spores falling everywhere.

So maybe make a mental note of like, oh, this is where the galls are and once it dries out, prune it out then and then definitely take care to disinfect your tools after you prune, before you move into a more healthy stent so you don't spread it anymore.

- There are some fungi that their spores can live a really, really long time in the soil.

Is there horticulture and crop diseases we think of, you know, Pythium spores may stay around forever or oomycetes, these little spores.

Is that also what happen in horticultural settings where... So say I rip out some of my aspens and I try to get rid of all the fungal diseases associated with them.

Do those stick around for a really long time?

- I think some could, and I also see a lot more persistence with the bacterial diseases.

I think those can stick around for a long time.

A lot of what we usually say is these disease issues are going to be in the landscape.

So keeping your plants healthy and preventing ways that would encourage infestation with these pathogens is the best way to keep them healthy because they can persist.

- I just say it depends, you know, it's like pathogen or organism specific.

And then another element is maybe in addition to, you know, a pathogen being able to produce structures that can last or survive for a really long time.

Another strategy is having a really broad host range.

I'm thinking more maybe of a gardening situation, right?

There's some pathogens that can just attack a lot of stuff.

So it's really hard to rotate out of a host to help this pathogen population go down.

And so that's another, yeah, so you'd have to follow your garden for maybe several years, which nobody wants to do that.

- Yeah, okay, thanks.

Another call, Melissa, "How do we measure tourism, number of boats, number of hotel overnights?

What are our metrics for tourism in Montana?

This was a question that came in.

- Yeah, it's a great question.

You can always email me and I'll give you a whole visitation counting model that we use.

But basically we have a lot of different data points.

We look at DOT counts, how many cars come in.

Our surveyors actually look at license plates on cars to look at resident versus non-resident.

We look at border crossings.

And then we have again these surveyors that go around the state.

And so we have a larger model that we've been using since 1992 to count people that come in.

When you talk about boats and different things, that gets a little more complicated.

But that's how we count how many visitors come here.

- Okay.

Roughly how many visitors come or... - Yeah, the numbers are hot off the press.

For 2025 we had 13.2 million visitors.

So it's down a little bit.

As you can imagine, we definitely saw some peaks during Covid and people felt a little bit of crowding.

We do know that those were also Montanians going to different places because the outdoors is what was open and available.

But last year, 13.2 million visitors and about $5.6 billion in spending, 52,000 jobs.

- Do you have a sense of, or a way to track which are international visitors versus you know, national?

- Yeah, it is much harder to do.

It can happen if we actually intercept an international visitor at one of our points.

However, we often, there are new types of data looking at like visa data, mobile location data.

So we can kind of get these percentages but it can be really challenging.

The national parks have really great visitation counts too and they kind of look at that.

So we put that in.

I would say we have many more Canadian visitors than we do other international visitors, but we try, but it can be challenging.

Have we seen a decline in Canadian tourists coming in to other Whitefish or, that's where I seem to see a lot of Canadian tourists.

But we had fewer Canadian tourists coming into the United States or to Montana specifically?

- Absolutely.

Our border crossings are down.

That's easy to monitor.

They keep track of that.

There are a variety of reasons that's happening.

Some, the weaker dollar, tariffs, you think about shipments just as well as people coming over.

But we've even heard it's easy to track those in quicker time by looking at... So if you use a visa card, they report that data and you can see where people's home location is.

We think that's about only half of actual spending that takes place.

People use other credit cards, they use cash and all the way I've heard from folks at Big Sky, they've seen Canadian tourism down there as well.

But it has big impacts up on the high line.

- Huh, interesting.

Thank you.

Abby, do you wanna talk about this lovely chunk of saw that you have in front of us here?

With this dense layer of thatch?

- Yeah, so I get a lot of questions about thatch and what causes thatch buildup.

So thatch is basically just a combination of living and dead organic material that's found between the growing grass and the soil below the grass.

And so a little bit of thatch is a really good thing.

It's like a little sponge which you can kind of feel.

And if you have a little bit of thatch, specifically if it's less than half an inch in length, that helps protect the crowns of the turf grass.

It helps provide insulation and it makes the grass more resilient.

But as soon as it gets beyond that half an inch in size, that's when it can be hydrophobic.

So it can repel water, it can interrupt the flow of nutrients into the soil, it can impact root growth.

And so if you have poor microbial if you have turf grass varieties that produce a lot of thatch to begin with.

So those are often the rhizomatous turf grass varieties like creeping red or chewings fescue or the other fine fescues, which this is probably one of those, that's when we have that buildup of thatch, which can then interrupt your grass.

So you might see your turf starting to turn yellow, even if you're irrigating it plenty, you're not seeing it green up like the rest of the lawn might be.

So if you investigate and you see this batch build up, then you wanna address it.

And the best way to do that in home lawns is by core aeration.

So that's where you have those little plugs pulled out of your soil.

They'll slowly break down on the surface of your soil, that'll help reduce the amount of thatch.

It'll open up those pore spaces for your roots to continue to grow.

And in healthy turf you wanna do that once a year or every other year.

But in turf that has a dense thatch layer, you may even consider doing that twice a year in the spring and the fall when your cool season turf is actively growing.

So you do need to do that to address the overall health of your turf grass.

One thing that people used to think, and it was a common misconception, was that if you leave your clippings in your lawn that can contribute to thatch buildup but that's not the case.

So keep your clippings on the lawn that adds nutrients into the soil.

But the thatch buildup is caused by many things.

- Alright, thank you.

Yeah and that is a nice fine fescue lawn.

I do like fine fescues as a long grass actually.

It's pretty nice.

Oka, Uta, we got a question from Broadview about aphids in winter wheat and how do you manage them and do they spread other diseases?

- Yeah, so it depends as almost always there's different species of aphids that can go into our winter wheat and really to know what impact they have depends on the species.

And I'm definitely not the a aphid expert but I know some people who are so I can put you in touch.

So there's like five to seven species of aphids that are known to go in like cereal crops and a lot of them can transmit at least a viral disease that's called barley yellow dwarf.

And so that's one way aphids can damage your crop.

The other ways are, you know, they're obviously feeding on the plant, basically sucking the plant juices and drying out the crop that way.

And then some of them may also inject toxins with their saliva that can cause some malformations on the plant.

And what I have heard, this is not confirmed, like I haven't seen a species and confirmed it.

Not that I would be able to, but I've heard that in yeah, the Western, central Montana, there's probably the Russian weed aphid out there right now at higher numbers than is maybe normal.

And so that particular aphid is actually not damaging because it transmits the disease, but it's just the feeding itself that makes the leaves really curl up.

And so you can end up with these trap hats and you just overall with curled leaves you have less photosynthetically active area.

So that just reduces plant productivity.

But again in terms of management, if management is necessary in terms of thresholds and then what can be done in terms of insecticides really depends on what species it is.

So I recommend you reach out with a sample to your local extension office and/or the Shutter Diagnostic Lab and we can identify species and then take it from there.

- What do aphids like?

Would they rather have it be hot and dry and they can grow their population more quickly?

Or is this cool wet rain, is it gonna knock them off the leaves?

Is it gonna reduce their growth rates?

- That's a good question.

And again, not the aphid experts, so I don't know like details about their lifecycle, but you know, I'd say they're probably well equipped to like stick on a plant even in the rain.

So especially those that cause the curling or they have ways to hide in the whirls where they don't get washed off.

So to my knowledge, most aphid species are not really good at surviving in Montana in the winter.

So most of them actually move in from more southern regions in the spring.

And so except for the Russian wheat aphid that is better equipped to actually survive So I suspect that this very mild winter that we had probably promoted aphid survival and/or early arrival here in the state, which is why we're probably seeing higher numbers.

- So all those aphids on my aspen trees did not over winter here?

- Some species can over winter here, but a lot of them will migrate and then so some aphids too are better equipped at handling the moisture.

But a lot of aphids, they don't handle moisture, especially persistent rain very well.

So they can get knocked off of plants, but they're one of the fastest reproducing insects you can find there.

You may have heard like they're born pregnant, but they pretty much are (panelists laughing) and they like the tender kind of new growth.

So even if the rain kind of knocks them back a little bit, any new flush of growth, the young foliage that's attractive to them too.

- Okay.

Oh interesting.

Okay.

Yeah, good question.

Okay, here's a real tough question for you, Abby.

- Oh no.

- And maybe I'll jump in on a little bit but I don't have a good answer either.

Caller from Great Falls, they have Virginia Creeper, which is a big viney looking palmated leaf that grows all over the place sometimes.

It's actually, yeah, not native to western United States, growing around her peony.

How can she kill the Virginia creeper without harming the peony?

- I am a big fan of the elbow grease method, especially around desirable plants.

So I would say physically remove that Virginia creeper out of there and keep your peonies healthy that way.

I would not recommend a herbicide for that kind of a setting.

So physically remove the Virginia Creeper.

You can also use maybe some wood chip mulches.

Those are great for being around the base of your peonies too.

And that will help prevent more encroachment from vining plants like that.

So I'd say like roll your sleeves up when things are a little bit drier and pull those plants out and that kind of control works well for Virginia Creeper.

- Yeah, I was thinking maybe even dig the peony out first, move it somewhere else, go back after the Virginia Creeper 'cause it's gonna be not so easy I think.

Well it depends on how big it is.

And then put the Peony back in there later.

- Yep, you you could do that.

- I think, yeah, Virginia Creeper can be really tough and it can be hard to get rid of totally.

So it's really good to use your elbow grease and get in there and clean it out.

If you took the peony out, you could maybe use a herbicide, like a generic herbicide like glyphosate or something.

Okay, so Melissa, what's your advice for farmers or ranchers who are curious about agritourism but don't know where to start with agritourism?

Yeah, what would you say?

How do you get into it?

- Yeah, there are so many great resources.

I would say our website at ITRR has our report, which I think is very insightful because we did a lot of qualitative research asking ranchers what worked, what didn't work.

And then you go down the line.

Of course extension would be next, right?

Especially I think Shannon with agritourism here.

And then I'd go down the chain of you have your small business administration, small business development centers, abundant Montana, your Farmer's Credit Unions.

You have all of these resources, in addition to if they're doing it, I think they might be doing it every year, the Agritourism Conference, which has been held here to go and talk to other ranchers that have done something similar or get on the web and search for those things and talk to people, what's working, what's not working.

I think what we saw were the biggest barriers and challenges were again, the regulations, the insurance, if you're actually bringing people on your land is a problem.

Thinking about that insurance and making the place safe.

And then the other part is the marketing and the business planning and the cash flow.

Like if you are just selling tomatoes and zucchinis, it might not work for you.

I mean we joke like in August your car will be full of zucchinis if you leave it unlocked, right?

So like that might not be the best business model, but thinking about expanding it or going to markets, it depends what you're interested in.

If you wanna have that one-on-one interaction with someone coming or if you don't want that at all right?

You wanna put your product somewhere else.

So I think there are a lot of great resources and I'm sure these folks also know.

- Yeah, and I've attended a few conferences I've been speaking and then got to hear an agritourism panel and it's interesting to hear the other owners and the things you can learn from people that discussed with their insurance agent and what words they needed to hear to get them classified right, you know, to help over a barrier so that they could get the coverage they needed and then run that business.

And if you can get a chance to attend one of those events, a lot to be learned from folks that have already been down that path.

- All right, we had a question from Billings.

"Is block management use that's tracked by FWP, counted as agritourism?

If so, why or why not?"

- Yeah, that's a good question.

I actually don't know the answer to that.

I'm gonna lean towards no.

However, I have met some of the agritourism and actually the outdoor recreation conferences, a lot of ranchers that use block management that also rent out other homes on their property as short term rentals during different seasons, especially hunting seasons.

So I think it might get a little complicated.

Yeah.

- Yeah, you know, hunting feels like it's gotten a lot more crowded in Montana.

Do we get a lot more out-of-state hunting tourists that come into Montana or has that changed over a period of time?

- Yeah, I don't feel fully equipped answer that question.

Although we are getting ready to publish an outfitting and guiding report and I've talked to different people.

I do know out-of-staters pay considerably more to hunt, right?

And they help supplement and fund a lot of the initiatives and the education.

That's probably where I'll leave it from there.

I don't have any exact numbers right now.

- All right.

- Melissa, you were at the beginning saying that you're doing research too and I'm just curious what that research is.

You know, I'm like plot designs and measurements and all of that I imagine is probably different for your institute.

- Yeah, it's almost all social science research, right?

And that would include like the economics, we looked at the Yellowstone flood impacts, what that was for the FEMA counties, again, the Eastern Montana report, museums.

We are doing an arts and culture project.

We also do all the state counts for the state parks.

So as you probably imagine, counting people is really hard.

(panelists laughing) But that's what we really excel at.

And so I would say we're the workhorse of social science research in that we do a lot of surveys and we actually talk to people and then we report that out.

It guides a lot of management and public policy.

- So Melissa, I've heard that North Dakota actually gets more tourists than Montana does in pure numbers.

Do you know anything about that?

This was a North NDSU bison was pretty proud about this.

- [Uta] And where do they go?

- Yeah, so you're making me kind of go back 'cause if I'm right, I believe on the Bieber tour, I had a slide on this.

I do think the answer to that is yes.

And I will say what's shocking about that is not where they go actually, but they don't spend as much money on marketing.

They have a really small in-house team that's kind of a powerhouse.

I don't know everything that they do, but I will share that the Teddy Roosevelt National Park, the Medora musical, if you haven't done that, it is phenomenal.

And then I think they're a big drive-through state too, like us and they have a lot of big industry there.

- Yeah, I second the Medora, I love Medora and Teddy Roosevelt National Park.

- It's pretty, if you've been to the Badlands, like the Badlands were kind of the first place I went and I was like, "Oh this is beautiful."

And then I went there and it was like... - You have your pitchfork steak with the golf course view.

- It was a game changer.

And we camped down along the river and woke up to bison and horses outside our tent outside.

Like it was, it's pretty unbelievable.

So I'm gonna push back on that.

There are some things to do.

- There's some things to see.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Really cool stuff.

- I'm gonna vote for the Terry Badlands though actually.

- This is still Montana.

- Yeah, this is Montana Ag.

(panelists laughing) - So we're gonna vote for the Terry Badlands.

- That's right.

- Okay.

- And maybe Jordan too.

You know, we do see in Jordan, it's amazing, I've traveled through Jordan a couple times a year when crops are growing and there are a lot of tourists that end up in Jordan and coming into Jordan, it's actually a lot of geology camps who are there to learn about, I guess Jordan's part of the dinosaur trail in that respect.

- Yeah, and in fact, when we finished up that report, that wasn't something that we measured, we're just the big digs and how many scientists come and how many people stay and fill up the hotels.

But I think there's a whole sector to that that's pretty exciting.

- Okay, we have about 10 minutes left folks, if you have any questions you want to get in before the end of the show, now's the time to do it.

And I will bring up, there's a "Profitability in Montana Agriculture" podcast.

I think we have an infographic that's up for it.

And it is produced by Montana State University Extension by Joel Schumacher here and John Hawley, who's the MSU extension director of communications.

And so it's been a pretty successful, we've done like how many episodes of that?

- [Joel] We did a initial batch of four episodes and we kind of wanted to feel the waters and see how it was going, but we've gotten a pretty good response.

So I think we're gonna do another batch of episodes relatively soon.

- Okay.

Yeah, thanks.

There's a lot to talk about in ag profitability out there.

So Uta, question that did come in, and maybe we touched on this a little bit, but we'll come back to it.

Effective, cool, rainy weather on the disease outlook, herbicide injury and pulse crops.

- See, yeah, I was pondering, you know, oh what's gonna happen in the diagnostic clinic next week.

And yeah, the herbicide injury was among those things, but I'm gonna leave that to you, Tim.

But yeah, so it's cooler and it's wet and so those kind of conditions favor a lot of diseases, especially fungal diseases.

So I'm thinking all sorts of leaf spot diseases, like your tan spots, septoria.

I'm talking crops, and Abby you can chime in, for the hort world.

But yeah, so leaf spots in your cereals, your barley, I was thinking Ascochyta blight probably on chickpeas, lentils, et cetera.

Your alfalfa is gonna have spring black stem, stuff like that.

Stripe rust risk is probably gonna go up.

Stripe rust risk has, you know, the initially the year looked like it was gonna be a big stripe rust year, then for some reason the risk went down.

But with this cool wet weather, I think that's gonna promote it.

We have seen stripe rust in the flathead area like a week ago now, and we also have a pocket at our research farm here in Bozeman that has a bit of stripe rust.

And so I expect that to go up now and expand a little bit.

And then I was also thinking, you know, in areas where our cereal crops are headed and about to flower, we wanna be mindful of Fusarium head blight.

That's another fungal disease that is very critical to manage to protect yield and yield quality.

And then also ergot, another fungal disease.

So that's the one that forms these sclerotia that looked like, you know, big blops.

- [Tim] Black legs sticking out of the weed head?

- Yeah., and so scouting for that would be, look at the grassy etches around your field and see if you can kind of see this like orangey sticky dew forming on the grass heads.

That's the honeydew.

This is from where it would spread probably to your crop.

So lots of fungal diseases.

- Check on cheatgrass too.

Cheatgrass also often shows the signs of ergot really soon in this time of year.

So you can really see it.

And then obviously I could go on for the rest of the show, but I'm not gonna, but I will add also, you know, bacterial diseases with like heavy rain.

And we did have some hail last week too.

And so those kind of events cause injury on your leaf surfaces and provide an entry wound for bacterial pathogens.

So I wouldn't be surprised to see some examples of bacterial blight on various crops or horticultural plants included.

Do you have anything to add, Abby?

- Yeah, like you were saying, those leaf spot diseases, things like damping off are also gonna be more common, like rhizoctonia and pythium.

- Root rot, yeah.

- Anthracnose, black knot is also gonna be favored by the cool, moist spring conditions.

What does black knot look like?

Is that kind of a black constriction on your... - It looks like black, like bumps like tumors on the branches of prunus.

Oh, we see that on the cherry.

- We call it poop on stick.

- Kind of, yeah.

- Ah, poop on a tick.

- It does kind of look like poop on a stick.

It does.

- Okay.

So we had another question, Abby.

Is it finally time to plant?

I was thinking about it.

You know, we've said wait till June 1st.

Now it's kind of wet.

I have some potatoes that are sitting in the bag, they're ready to go into the soil, but I'm gonna hold off until we get a couple warmer days and the soil dries out a little bit.

Yeah, what else should we be, when do we finally get to... - I know.

- The gate open and we get to run out and plant.

- I'm sorry, everyone, I've been the bearer of bad news for don't plant yet, but for those of you who've been patient, thank you and hopefully you'll reap the rewards of that.

But like Tim was saying, it's been really wet.

So a lot of us go by the June 1st planting date and that's tomorrow.

And with all this moisture, I would say, wait.

Wait a couple of days after the rain.

Make sure your soil isn't like mushy and wet and saturated and sticking to your shovel.

Planting in that is not gonna be good.

So wait a couple of days, give it a few days after the rain.

Your soil can still be moist, but as long as it's not wet and squishy and spongy, wait until then.

And then also, like people, I like to tell people that there is a difference between the minimum temperature for germination, which for a lot of our warm season plants is usually between 50 to 60 degree Fahrenheit soil temperature.

But optimal soil temperatures are 10 or 15 degrees higher than that.

So the longer the seed is in that optimal warm soil temperature, the better that plant will grow, the less likely you're going to have root diseases and diseases that impact the seeds as well.

- Okay, thank you.

- So just a couple more days, everyone.

- Just a couple more days and keep waiting, yep.

Okay, Melissa, this is a question that came in.

"Where can listeners find the agritourism report and stay connected to ITTR's website?"

- Absolutely, we are in the Frankie College of Forestry at the University of Montana.

So you could go to that website, you can find ours, just type in ITRR Montana.

And then our report, you kind of have to look at publications on the left.

And then we are with all the scholar works publications or I even think the interweb is so smart now, you could type in Agritourism Montana and it might be the first one that comes up.

- Okay, thanks.

And then, yeah, okay, thanks.

We have a couple more questions we want to try to get to before it's over.

"I have spider mites in my garden.

: How should they address this issue?

- So good news with this moisture that should help with spider mites.

Spider mites really like dry conditions, so increasing the humidity, increasing irrigation can be helpful.

This range should be helping with spider mites.

I also like to deter people from using any broad spectrum insecticides around spider mites.

There are issues with resistance to insecticides with spider mites.

They can develop resistance really quickly, but also that'll knock out a lot of their natural enemies like predatory mites and other generalist predators that keep their populations low and manageable.

But in general, increasing that humidity, increasing that moisture can really help reduce spider mite issues.

- All right, and then in about a minute, Uta tell us about freeze.

(coughs) It seems very hard for us to think about freezing.

It was 95 degrees this week, but winter wheat has seen some freeze injury.

- Yeah, and so it's not, yeah, but before that 95 degrees or so last week before the rain came, we had like freezing temperatures in like May 20th or so.

And so this is what we're seeing as a result.

And so one thing to know is as the winter wheat is breaking dormancy and growing, the further developed it is, the more susceptible it is to cold injuries.

So at jointing we're talking about 24 degree Fahrenheit causing injury, at heading it's 32.

So yeah, that's right.

And so I just wanna point out a typical symptom of freeze injury which hit the stem here is this brown discoloration of the lower stem.

It feels very mushy.

You might see just a dark ring around the node.

This is something that came in two weeks ago.

And so this is unfortunately basically going to kill the tiller.

There's not gonna be a head expected from that because with the stem that they can't support head development.

- [Tim] So it basically froze through the stem at the basis it stem.

- And so it interrupts the water flow nutrient transport, and so this tiller can survive and likely it also hurt the growing point in the stem.

So you might see a yellow leaf emerging and then no head emerging at all.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

Interesting, yeah.

There's quite a bit of winter wheat out there in Montana, but then also quite a few acres of fallow.

So Melissa, you're our special guest tonight.

Is there anything else you want to add about the ITRR?

We have about one minute to go.

- I just really appreciate being on the show and sharing all of our research and work.

We're part of a much larger team in the state.

You also have commerce and the tourism office.

And then when you were asking about other resources, if you do have agritourism and you wanna market, you should talk to your chambers of commerce, economic development or your destination management organizations, convention and visitor bureaus.

There are all these people across Montana that are there to support and help with any of that and to get folks on your farm and ranch.

And we're available to answer any questions, so just reach out to us.

- All right, thank you everyone for joining us tonight to talk about tourism and sending in all of your other questions about horticulture, ag and economics.

Next week we'll have Nate Powell-Palm on as our special guest and we'll be talking about ag and we look forward to it.

Have a good evening and enjoy planting the garden.

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(upbeat country music) (upbeat country music continues) (upbeat country music continues) - [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.

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