- [Announcer] "Montana Ag Live" is made possible by: (upbeat guitar music) 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.

(upbeat guitar music continues) - Hello, everyone, and welcome to "Montana Ag Live."

live from the KUSM studios on the Montana State University campus.

I'm Tim Seipel, an assistant professor in the Land Resources and Environmental and an extension specialist.

Tonight, we have a great show lined up for you.

We're gonna focus on precision agriculture tonight, and we have a great guest.

But before we introduce our panel and our guest, we want to get those phone operators busy answering questions.

And so you know the deal, call in the questions whenever you have them.

So tonight on our panel, we have starting on the right side, we have Uta McKelvy.

She is our plant pathologist extension specialist.

So if you have any horticultural plants, if your wheat's looking funky, call in those questions and get them answered tonight.

Next to Uta, we have our special guest tonight, Ricardo Pinto.

He is our precision ag extension specialist, who's based at the Northern Ag Research Center up in Havre.

And he's gonna tell us about a lot of his great research that he has going on.

We have another new guest tonight on "Montana Ag Live."

We have Kelsey Larson.

She's our agriculture economics extension specialist, and you can ask any questions you want about ag economics and all kinds of things.

And next to me, we have another weed scientist, Jack, I said it, (Jane laughing) weed scientist on the show with us tonight, Jane Mangold.

She's our invasive plant extension specialist.

And so if you have any questions about weeds in your range, your pasture, along your right of ways, get those in.

And then tonight our phone operators, we have Vicky Young and we have Karl Whitmore answering the phones tonight.

So get those guys busy asking lots of questions.

So Ricardo, we're gonna come back, and we're gonna talk about precision agriculture.

And you and I share a number of research projects together, so we're pretty familiar the with this, but let's give the audience the definition of what's precision agriculture mean and how do we do it in Montana.

- Yes.

No, thanks for having me here today, is real excited to talk more about the work that we're doing in Havre.

So when you think about precision ag, what we are try to do is apply our agronomic knowledge considering the natural variability that we have in our fields.

So we all know that we have areas of the fields that produce more and other areas that doesn't produce really well.

So what we try to do with precision ag is optimize those areas to make sure that we extract most potential of those areas to increase our productivity and, consequently, our yields.

- [Karl] Thank you for calling.

- And for that we have a lot of different technologies.

So we go all the ways from drones, satellite imagery, spot spray applications that we're going to talk today, and also variable rates technologies that we are adopting here in Montana.

And we are going to discuss more about opportunities for Montana producers to use variable rate application as well.

- Okay, so when we're talking precision, does that mean we're talking five feet?

Is that precise?

Are we talking 50 feet?

When we say precision, and I make a prescription, what does that mean for a field?

Do I mean for, you know, the size of a yard or do I mean for, you know, two square feet?

- Exactly.

That's a really good question, Tim.

Because with precision ag, what we're trying to do is instead of farming acres, we are going to farm inches.

So every square meter of our field, it matters.

So we can do precision ag with a pen and paper, but it's going to be much more efficient to use all that technology, all those different sensors, and, of course, high-precision GPS to make sure that we apply the right amount of input in the right place in the right time.

So that's really important as well.

- Okay, so Kelsey, you're an ag economics specialist.

And when we think about doing precision ag, sometimes when I'm out in the state, some producers look at me, and they say, "Precision ag, how will we ever pay for this?

Will this pay for itself?"

So how does the economics of precision ag work out for our producers across the state?

And what does it mean to apply precision ag in our systems?

- Yeah, absolutely.

So precision agriculture, there's obviously a lot of things under that umbrella, but most of the technologies we're talking about, one of the big things they let you do is reduce your input use, so spending less on herbicide, spending less on fertilizer, you know, applying it exactly where it's needed rather than covering your whole field.

So basically, the savings are largely gonna depend on what's your chemical bill right now and how much are you able to reduce it through targeting.

So in some of the work that Ricardo and I have done, people have been able to, fields can reduce their herbicide use in fallow by between 60 and 90%.

So that's a good chunk of change per acre that somebody's able to save.

Now it's gonna depend on the cost of the system.

Not every system is gonna make sense financially for every farm.

- When you mean a system, what is a system?

What do you mean by a system - That would be whatever set of sensors and possibly some sort of software subscription that you might need in order to run this precision agriculture technology.

So for example, for precision herbicide, you basically have a bunch of little cameras, Ricardo could put it more technically than me, that sense exactly where those weeds are on the field, and they're gonna basically turn on the herbicide when they see a weed, they turn it off when they don't see a weed.

And so that kind of tech, it does cost some money, but we have seen the costs are falling in recent years.

And so it might be worth at least doing the math to see if it makes sense on your operation.

Generally, the bigger a farm is, the easier it is to make the math work out because you're buying one big piece of technology that you can then use on, you know, maybe your entire operation.

- So if somebody was interested in incorporating precision ag in their farm operations, does this always mean they have to buy like, you know, toss out the old seeder the old, you know, machinery and buy entirely new ones?

Or are there kind of in between solutions where you can use existing machinery and kind of upgrade or adapt it?

- And that's a really good point, Uta, because when you think about precision ag, we commonly do association with the technology, right?

But I would say the first thing that you need to think about is about what we want to optimize.

And according to your goal, you can think about equipment you already have to reach that goal.

So in the recent years, we are talking about more autonomous systems.

So there are some opportunities out there that you have that old tractor that no one wants to drive anymore, and you can retrofit that tractor to have a fully autonomous systems.

So we do have couple of opportunities, but I would say it'll depend of the main goal that the person or, in this case, the producer would want to optimize on their operation.

- So Ricardo, I think you have brought us a little clip of a video of a producer who retrofit his tractor.

And this was an older John Deere tractor.

And it's been made completely autonomous, and it seeds during the night now by itself.

is that what you brought in?

You can describe it if we can't get it up on the screen, but, so this would be, oh here we go, right here.

We have this older John Deere tractor right here.

- [Ricardo] Yes, and that video, we took in Big Sandy.

It's close to us in Havre where the producer had that John Deere with no cabin on it and was trying to take more of his operation to make sure that he was running the ground to have the seeding done properly in the right amount of time.

So what he did, instead of doing huge investment on the huge tractor to be able to cover that area, he retrofit that old John Deere that he had over there to make sure that he was running the same amount of ground, but now not looking about how much you can do per hour, because, in this case, you can run 24 by 7 with that autonomous vehicle.

- Is there a reason why that was happening at night?

- Same question.

- No, I would say it's, eventually, it was the time that we took that video, but just an explanation that we can run 24 by 7.

- [Jane] Okay.

- So generally, people say, "Oh, it can be 24 by 7, but we just see that working during the daytime.

So as we saw in that video, we do have opportunity to work during the night as well, of course, according to the operation, in that case, was seeding.

- [Jane] Okay, thank you.

- Okay, thanks.

Okay, so we've had some questions come in.

Okay, I'm gonna throw a curve ball to Jane.

- Oh, all right (chuckling).

- Jane, a question from Havre, how do you germinate clematis seeds?

- Oh my gosh.

(panelists chuckling) Where's Abby when we need Abby?

- Yeah.

- (laughing) She probably called it in.

(laughing) - Wow.

I dunno.

Yeah, is Abby in Havre tonight?

I'm not sure.

- Yeah, I think that's a good question for Abby.

- Yeah.

- I think there's, you know, I think Clematis will germinate fairly regularly without any scarification.

It has a pretty thin seed coat, but I think you're gonna have to keep it pretty wet and for quite a few probably weeks in there actually, I would imagine it will be.

- Yeah.

- And it might need to go into the freezer or put it into the cold, maybe cold and damp into the refrigerator for a few days.

That's a good question.

- It's also, like, I'm not sure what species of clematis, which there could be some species differences.

- Yeah, there could be a few.

- So yeah, I would reach out to Abby or, you know, reach out to your local extension agent.

And then if she can't help, she'll visit with Abby.

- Yep.

Okay.

- I'm starting off really well with my questions.

(panelists laughing) - Yeah.

- That was a tough one.

- Yes.

- Uta, we have a question that came in.

And this is a very busy time of year for people planting.

- Yeah.

- Pulses are going in.

The soil temperature is coming up.

So this question came in from Gallatin Valley, and they're wondering, they ran short on lentils last week right at the end of seeding, and they had some old seed that was still covered with the seed treatment from last year.

Can they still use seed from last year that had seed treatment on it?

- Well, it's a tricky question that is answered with, it depends.

So my first question would be like what's the seed treatment, right?

Because then we can go and look at the label, which should specify storage conditions and how long a treatment can be used.

And that's really the most specific information we can get.

I think other factors that influence the outcome here are under which condition that seed was stored.

Typically, colder, drier environments preserve the seed quality and the treatment better than a more warmer, more humid environment or where temperatures fluctuate.

So it's really hard to say like a blanket statement.

Generally, we can acknowledge that, you know, seed treatments lose their efficacy over time even in storage.

And so maybe, at this point, one thing to do is to do a little germination test on that seed to just see, 'cause it's not just the treatment, right, it's the seed itself, to just see what the germination rate is and if we're seeing any adverse effects.

But yeah, I think looking at the label and, you know, the better bet is probably just to get fresh seed or freshly treated seed to just kind of eliminate that risk or that gamble, I suppose, yeah.

- [Vicky] Thank you for calling "Montana Ag Live."

- Okay, thanks.

And, yeah, that one came up this week.

Okay, Kelsey, a question that came in for you was about spot spray systems.

What decides how much money can be saved on a spot spray system?

And when we mean a spot spray system, we're talking about a sensor that's going across the field and detecting a weed, maybe green on brown or green on green with a special algorithm, and then it can spray that herbicide at that precise location.

So what decides how much money you would save on herbicide application at that point?

- Okay, so for one thing, this is a great time to pitch the Spot Spray ROI calculator that Ricardo and I have worked on together.

You can find it by googling Spot Spray ROI calculator and following the link.

It's a lot easier than giving you a URL.

But basically there's a few key ingredients that we need to figure out how much you're gonna be able to save off of these systems.

One of them, of course, is gonna be how much does the system cost?

There's a pretty wide range of technology that's involved there.

Some of them you can just MacGyver onto existing stuff.

And the prices keep changing as new products enter the market.

The second thing that matters is, essentially, what's your current herbicide bill?

Because what we're going from, you can kind of see in this graphic, we're going from completely covering all of your field in herbicide to only hitting precisely the spots where you have weeds.

So if you've got a big herbicide bill right now, then there's more, essentially, savings that you can potentially get out of one of these systems.

So the things we need to figure that out are, basically, how many acres are you talking about?

The bigger the farm, the bigger the bill, the more you can save.

It's gonna be, how expensive are the chemicals you're using?

If you've been dealing with herbicide resistance, for example, and are needing to switch to some other more expensive chemicals, then sometimes we can particularly be helpful there in saving some money.

And, finally, what's the weed coverage like on your fields, which generally has been ranging from like 10 to 40% of a field, which means you get 60 to 90% reduction in chemical use afterwards.

And those are essentially the main ingredients that go into deciding how much this is gonna save you and whether that's gonna be economically worth it or not.

- And just to add what Kelsey mentioned is really important, and it's one of the elements that we have in the calculator is how many acres you farm.

So this is really important to look into the technology that you are adopting, because there are technologies in the market that you can only run when you have your chem fallow because those technologies are looking for chlorophyll fluorescence, but you have more advanced systems that does also what we call green on green.

So you basically can run those systems when you have crop as well, 'cause those systems, they have artificial intelligence models that can differentiate between a crop and the weed and spray only the weeds.

So if you have one of those systems, sometimes it can cost more or less but you have more flexibility to run in both situations, green on brown and green on green.

- Okay.

Yeah, thank you.

We could get into this a lot.

(panelists laughing) We'll we'll save these questions.

I have some Luddite questions, and I'll come back to you guys in a little bit.

Okay, from Superior, Mineral County, we have a question.

Is there a non-toxic way to control dandelions?

And how important are dandelions for bees?

Maybe we'll skip the dandelions for bees.

I've heard a little bit from entomologists that the nectar available from dandelions is kind of like the high fructose corn syrup of the nectar world.

And so sometimes it's not that particularly healthy for bees compared to other things.

But is there a non-toxic way to control dandelions, Jane?

- Yeah, well a weeder.

- Oh yeah.

- I mean I do that a lot in my yard.

I have a, you know, postage-stamp-size But, I mean, I stay on it, (Kelsey laughing) I stay on my dandelions and just hand weed them.

There's also this idea of like keeping your desirable, if we're talking about grass, you know, dandelions in a yard, was this dandelions in a yard?

Or?

- Yep, I think so.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

I mean, keeping your yard as healthy as possible so it is the most competitive against the weeds as it can be.

And then we're probably looking at, there are some, like, herbicidal vinegar or, you know, some of the more natural herbicides that are out there.

- Yeah.

- One thing to keep in mind with these like a herbicidal vinegar or there's, you know, some other products on the market too that are like spruce oil and some different essential oils is many of those products are just burndown herbicides.

So they kind of burn up or kill any part of the plant they come in contact with, but they're not translocating into the roots.

- Yep.

- So you're not really killing the plant, you're just burning back the above-ground green portions of the plant.

So because dandelion is a perennial, you know, it does have that root system that you're going to have to try to address.

- [Tim] Yeah.

- But yeah, - Yeah.

- Do you wanna add anything, Tim?

- I think, even when you dig, so sometimes I jokingly call it dandelion yoga in the backyard.

(panelists chuckling) I come home at the end of a stressful work day, and I do some bending and digging of big dandelion plants out of the ground.

But what is amazing is you can cut them off four inches below the ground, and you'll come back to it next year, and that same perennial will be there.

And if you dig down that far, you'll see it'll have four, five, six, seven eight corms on the plant, and it will be coming back.

So I do it for a wellness benefit, (Jane laughing) maybe more than I do for a weed control benefit, but it's actually really hard.

And then this year I was messing around with a burndown, it was a propane torch.

- Mm-hm.

- And even I burned dandelions with the propane torch, holding the torch on them two, three seconds.

- That sounds therapeutic as well in certain ways.

- Well, maybe I'm, yep.

But you know what, a week later they were growing like you never, - Yeah.

- Like they'd never had anything done to them before.

So dandelions are an incredibly difficult thing to manage.

I think what you said, Jane, about keeping the yard, keeping the grasses in good condition as you can.

relatively well fertilized, not that you have to mow too much.

- Yeah, the other thing that I often think about with dandelions is like right now, this time of year is when dandelions are in their glory.

- Yeah.

They're very conspicuous.

- And then you know, they kind of go away - Yeah.

- For the rest of the summer.

And, you know, if you can forget about them, (panelists laughing) That's probably good therapy too.

But sometimes it's just, like, just turn the other way for a couple weeks, the dandelions will do their thing.

- Yeah.

- And then the rest of the summer will be fine.

- [Tim] Yep.

It can be pretty bad in alfalfa though and other hays - Yes.

- And things like that.

- They can.

- Because they tend to become very moldy when they get pressed into a bale.

They become moldy, - Okay.

- And then leave a moldy spot within the bale.

So that's why they're really difficult in alfalfa - .

And I have to guess that, I mean I have seen some fields where it's just a carpet of yellow right now.

I have to guess that that is having some impact on yield.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- Yeah.

Just wondering if anybody had a favorite dandelion recipe since, you know, that's your true motto, Tim, (Tim and Jane laughing) "If you can't beat it, eat it."

(laughing) - No, I mean, but, you know, you do see it in the store, and there are people who produce dandelion roots that they harvest the root system, they dry it, they peel it, and they make it into coffee.

And it, also, it has like an in inulin flavor.

- Mm.

- Interesting.

- Much like the poppy drink that comes in the store that is very popular now.

So it has this inulin sugar in it.

Okay, enough about dandelions.

(panelists chuckling) Uta, another question about seed treatments.

They were applying a seed treatment to wheat earlier in the week and their atomizer, their spray system got rather splotchy and they noticed that the wheat seeds were not completely covered with the seed treatment.

- [Uta] Mm-hm.

- And this is a question from Fort Benton.

And they're wondering, if you get poor coverage of the seed treatment on the seed, does that reduce the efficacy of the seed treatment?

- Mm-hm.

Yeah, so I mean, yeah, fungicide seed treatments or insecticide seed treatments for that matter, right, they're there to give that early season protection to your seed and seedling.

And so to achieve that, we need good and even coverage.

Now if we have this uneven application, which is probably apparent from an uneven coloration that seed treatments have, this means that we have areas with low coverage or thin coverage and others with higher.

So besides that uneven coverage in general, it could also mean that we have these areas of concentration where we might actually have a harmful effect now on our seed, right?

So that's something to think about.

So effects could be that, you know, we observe reduced germination or lower seedling vigor.

The other effect could be that we don't have that efficient disease control early in the season, right?

So the question here, or I guess the similar recommendation as I made earlier would be to do a little bio essay and see what the germination rate is looking like to see if it has any of these adverse effects.

And then obviously to troubleshoot what part of that seed treatment process kind of went wrong and resulted in those problems, right?

There are all these different steps.

So is it the calibration of the system?

Was maybe the recipe not quite right?

Is it how the seed was mixed, if that's the chosen method of distribution, right?

So we need to kind of do some troubleshooting here to prevent that from happening in the future.

- Okay.

Thank you.

Okay, quick question to Jane.

This is a real difficult one for another question from Fort Benton.

I'm interested to hear what your answer is.

How do you get rid of quackgrass out of a lawn?

- Oh my gosh.

(Tim laughing) These are hard.

I mean, they're not hard questions, but it's hard to achieve.

- There's no easy answer, yes.

- What the viewers are trying to achieve.

- [Tim] Whoa.

- I mean, there really isn't anything.

(laughing) I hate to say it.

I have actually like wiped glyphosate on quackgrass in a very small part of my yard where it was just starting to come in.

I actually took like I was doing like a wick application, and it worked, but, you know, it was tedious.

Let me turn the question to you, Tim.

- Ooh, yeah.

- That's a weed specialist as well.

- Yeah, and I have a lot of quackgrass, but it's more of a garden.

I try to minimize the tillage in my garden, and it becomes more problematic there.

I think having a healthy lawn is actually important so you can get the Kentucky bluegrass to grow more dense if that's what your aim is.

I think that helps a lot.

I've also, in patches where I've had too much quackgrass, I've dug out sections down and sort of cultivated it and pulled out quackgrass rhizomes.

I was actually pulling them out of the garden yesterday.

And I had some that were a foot long.

- Oh wow.

- And, you know, and so I try to get those rhizomes out and then I either put plugs of grass back in there or else, I try not to seed grass, 'cause it takes too long to be competitive.

But I'll put some plugs back in there or put little pieces of sod of Kentucky bluegrass that kind of prevents the quackgrass.

- Yeah.

- I think if the quackgrass becomes, you know, the lawn is majority quackgrass and you can't tolerate that, like it's beyond what your threshold of tolerance is, like, you're probably looking at redoing your lawn.

If you really, yeah.

- Yeah, that's what I would think too.

And probably using some sod to really block - Yeah.

- Some of that stuff in there.

It's a tough one though.

Okay, we have another question on spot spraying systems.

These people were actually asking a little bit, what do the spot spot spray systems do?

And are they only really useful in fallow.

This producer's heard that they're more useful in fallow than they are in crop.

- Okay, that's a really good point.

So as I mentioned before, there are different systems in the market.

So those system that are looking for chlorophyll fluorescence, it's more the ones that you work for fallow.

So those are the first one that start to come here to the market.

And we do have producers using that technology for about 10 years now, I would say, in Montana.

But we do have more advanced systems.

And as Kelsey mentioned, is impressive how those sensors is becoming less expensive while we now progress in the years.

So we do have systems now that's capable to use artificial intelligence models and differentiate between a crop and the weed.

And not only on the corn/soybean world, but we have some algorithms that has wheat and barley as well, so crops that we cultivate here in Montana.

So I would say, here in Montana they start using in fallow, but now we do have technology to work both on fallow and when you have crops as well.

- Yeah, and Ricardo brings up a really good point that essentially for these green-on-green systems, how well different ones work will depend on exactly what crop you're growing.

For example, if you need that algorithm to be able to pick out weeds in whatever particular crop you've got on your land, so if something says it's green on green and it's only trained for corn/soy, then that's not gonna work out for a Montana wheat farmer.

But that's the kind of thing that you should be able to figure out fairly easily in the process when you're looking at one of these.

But I'd say the reason that this kind of question comes up of, is it just for fallow years, is because those systems are older, they're a bit cheaper now.

I would say there's probably more Montana farmers for whom these green-on-brown systems are gonna be affordable than there are folks for whom green on green is working.

But that said, this is a really quickly technologically evolving area.

Prices are changing and getting lower over time for these more fancy green-on-green systems, and the algorithms keep getting better.

So the idea that it only works in fallow is something that might've been true, you know, five years ago, but these days I think it's worth another check for a lot of farmers.

- Is it analyzing color differences like green on green or do these systems look at like plant shape or leaf shape?

Where does like the shape of a plant come into play versus fine differences in color?

- That's an excellent question, because it's, in fact, a combination.

So when you think about the camera, there are different cameras in the market.

Some ones that are only RGB, which is our external color, red, green, and blue.

They're looking for the morphology of the plant, sometimes the aspect of the plant itself, and that's it.

But we have more advanced features in the market that they do have what we call hyperspectral cameras.

So those cameras, they get a really good detail of the electromagnetic spectrum of the camera.

So, basically, you have details, not about shape and morphology of the plant, but we also get information about chemical composition of the plant, moisture content.

And all those combinations are used to train those AI algorithms that is taking the decision in real time while we are driving to understand what's the crop, what's the weed, and spray only where we have the weeds.

Excellent question.

- So I'm gonna be the devil's advocate a little bit.

So in Montana, in our pulse crops, we have no herbicides that can be sprayed within a pulse crop that are labeled essentially.

There's one called Tough and then there's maybe one called Basagran.

And their efficacy is, Tough is called tough because it's tough on lentils and not tough on the weed.

(panelists laughing) - [Ricardo] There is a weakness in it.

- And so we rely on residual, pre-emergent herbicides in pulse crops.

And so how does a spot spray system fit into managing pulse crops?

Kochia, for example, we use pre-emergent herbicides, because they have three to four flushes every time it rains.

When we have false spring one, false spring two, we get a new flush of kochia, so we are relying on pre-emergent herbicides.

How does using a spot spray system then improve weed management in something like pulses?

- Oh that's a really important question, Tim, because when we have those new algorithms, is bring us new possibilities and new opportunities to test different crops like pulse crops that we really need more research on to help us optimize the weed management there.

So the one one reason that I see, and one way that I see those systems working on pulses is when you do your residual, sometimes you have some scapes, right?

So we would be able to come afterwards, using those systems that can do green on green, and maybe you can have a different chemical that we will make sure that is taking out that weed in the system.

And one time that's localized, it can hurt.

Let's say that spot that we have the pulse crop, but we make sure that we are having a really strong program in terms of the weed management.

So I would say it's a trade off but also brings us a new opportunity to test these technologies and improving weed management in pulses, we know that's one area that we need more research on that.

- Yeah, so I would say, right now, it's probably gonna be pretty limited as far as whether you can go to the store and buy a system that can help out for that, because, again, it is mostly dependent on detecting weeds after they emerge.

- Interesting.

- So Ricardo and Kelsey, are either of your research programs kind of involved with basically helping the industry develop and improve these algorithms?

Particularly for, you know, pulse crops, it's a pretty narrow geographical range, within the US anyway, where they're grown, right?

So I imagine that's part of the reason why the systems are not as advanced as - No, excellent.

And that's a real timely question, because Tina and I, we do have a project together that we are looking into.

That is this company that we are working with that I do have that system in Havre that just released a new algorithm for pulse crops.

And that algorithm involves peas, lentils, and chickpeas.

So this season, we are going to have two field trials, one in Havre, another one in Conrad to try to validate if that algorithm works and also how a pulse crop respond to those treatments.

So we are going to measure both on the spectrum and also physiological measurements because we want to understand if we do a herbicide treatments, if that stress will link and connect to a plant that's more susceptible for those pathogen that's already in the soil like Ascochyta and all those complex that you're really familiar with.

So we want to understand that relationship and that interaction between herbicide, plant stress, and susceptibility to the pathogen in the soil.

- Mm-hm.

Okay, cool.

- Okay, I got a number of questions tonight about insects, and I think we can answer a couple of them, just we'll skate around them.

We had a question from Potomac and it was about how to get rid of a grasshopper nest.

And we may not be able to answer that one.

- It's a tough one.

- But we also had another question about mite, and then we had a question come in on wheat.

And this year, a number of producers have noticed seeing more creepy crawly small insects on their wheat than they have in a number of years, and they're wondering if that's related to, one, maybe the the winter that we had and then what they should do about it.

Should they do anything about these insects?

- Yeah, yeah.

I wanna preface that with I am not the entomologist here (panelists chuckling) so I'm just going to give it my best try and refer you to other people who know more about it.

So what we've been overseeing in the Schutter Diagnostic Lab is, indeed, a few samples of winter wheat that have mite issues.

And so there's two types of mites that we have observed.

One is the brown wheat mite and one is the winter grain mite.

Both of them are basically new to me, as in, I have not seen them in my limited time here in Montana and involved in agriculture.

So these are mites that are kind of cool-season mites.

So we see them, their life cycle is such that they would show up in the fall and then again in the spring and then they kind of disappear over the summer.

And so this mild winter that we had is probably one of those reasons why we're seeing, particularly the winter grain mite, more like right now in our wheat.

And I believe the brown wheat mite is more associated with continuous wheat systems, and it's also associated with drought-stressed wheat.

So that kind of adds up too, right?

A lot of our winter wheat is not particularly well supplied with water and so those factors kind of play into that.

Now, this week we had an ag alert come out from our extension entomologist, Tiziana Oppedisano, that talks about these wheat mites and also talks a little bit about management options.

The key element here is, in terms of management, is to figure out which of those two mites, or whatever else it might be, to figure that one out, because that would inform if you can apply something, if it's necessary to apply something, or what other options you have.

So I would say look up that MSU Ag Alert on mite issues that came out last week.

And I think if you just googled MSU AG alert, that should pop up.

And then if you suspect to have a mite issue, take some pictures or, better yet, bring a sample to your local extension office or maybe your agent would even come and scout the field for you.

And if they wouldn't know, they could send a sample to the Schutter Diagnostic Lab, and we could try a diagnosis from there and figure it out, yeah.

- Thank you.

Folks, the phones are a little quiet tonight.

We know it's really nice outside, but get those questions in (panelists chuckling) that you have about gardens, about weeds, about precision agriculture or pathology.

Okay, so Jane, here's a question.

You know, I joke with Jack often about being a weed scientist versus a weed ecologist, but we have a caller who called in from Bozeman, and he has a plant ecology question.

And that is, - All right.

- Caller wants to know what's the function of cover crops in ag fields?

Why do we use cover crops?

- Oh, wow, I have to answer an ag question.

- Well, yeah.

- Like the ag fields.

I'm gonna rely on the rest of the panel to chime in here too.

- Okay.

- But being a weed ecologist, one of the things that cover crops do is they provide competition with weeds.

Like you have something that you have seeded into a field that you intentionally seeded that, it's growing there, and it's competing against weeds which might be trying to grow there unintentionally.

- Yep.

Maybe we should start with the basic definition of a cover crop.

It's a crop that you grow in a field, but you don't really earn any money on it.

It's not a cash crop, it's covering your field.

- Yeah.

- And so it's not usually something that's harvested.

It might be harvested for forage sometimes, but you can get a lot of benefits out of it.

For organic producers, having cover crops in the field is often mixed with a legume.

So they do nitrogen fixation, and they will add nitrogen to the soil, especially for organic producers.

Some people use cover crops to break up soil compaction, growing large radishes, yeah, they're called groundhog radishes, I think, deep rooting plants that will go in and change the soil health.

We have done some research in Havre that's shown that they actually, sometimes when you have mustards in mixes of cover crops that they change the soil microbial communities.

And so they can have nutrient cycling benefits, weed competition benefits, and soil health benefits.

- Yeah, I was gonna say - And I can- - [Jane] Oh, go ahead, Kelsey.

- Oh, okay.

I can add a couple more as well from the ag economics perspective.

For one thing, cover crops in Montana systems are most frequently profitable when you can combine it with grazing on them, at least a little bit.

That's one of the best predictors for whether a cover crop is gonna be profitable.

Also, they help to reduce erosion and reduce some things, like improving water quality, for example.

So you can actually sometimes get payments as a producer from different USDA programs that are available that, in order to get some of those environmental benefits, will pay producers to try adopting cover crops.

- Yeah.

- I think a follow up question, I mean, there there are many benefits to cover crops, right?

We've talked about a lot of them.

I think someone might, a follow up question might be, "Well, why doesn't everybody integrate cover crops into their cropping systems?"

And that is a great question.

It's a question that, like, MSU researchers have looked at a lot.

You know, we do live in a water=limited system, so I think one of the concerns with cover crops is they are using water then that is not either being stored for the next year's crop or for the crop you're growing this year.

So I'd just add that, because someone might, if you're wondering like, "Well, what is a cover crop?"

You might wonder, "Well why aren't they planted everywhere?"

- The yield drag is real.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, yeah, - I would add two other things about that.

One of them is some of that's gonna depend on, like with cover crops, you've got a really wide choice of what you plant, when you plant it, when you kill it, how you kill it.

So for a lot of people, it takes a few years to figure out exactly what combination is gonna work on their land to have like fit well into their particular production system and what their area needs.

And the other thing is it does cost money both to plant the cover crop and then to kill the cover crop on the other end.

So there's always a question of, am I saving enough in these other benefits from maybe not needing to do another pass of wheat control to be worth the extra passes I'm doing to sew this cover crop seed and then kill it.

- Yeah.

All right, thanks.

We have a question from Great Falls.

Jane, this is one for you.

How do you control whitetop in a garden and in an adjacent field?

- Oh.

- Whitetop's - Yeah.

- Really starting to take off right now.

- Yeah, so whitetop is rhizomatous, which is probably one of the reasons why it is so challenging.

So you can't just mow it and expect it to go away.

It is on the noxious weed list.

So I would, I mean in the garden, I would pull it as much as you can.

I mean it is rhizomatous, but I think, you know, just continuing to pull it to try to wear out those roots.

Moving out of the garden and into like adjacent fields, I think you would wanna be looking at more like some sort of herbicide application.

You know, what are the details of that site and what would be approved, but.

- Your local weed district and your county agent could probably really help out with some of those situational- - Yeah, some of the specifics.

Yeah, there is a whitetop mite that has been developed as a biological control.

Jeff Littlefield here at MSU has been working on that, and it's not experimental, but it's fairly recently been approved for release.

So he's been doing field releases and kind of following those places where it's been released, like just in the last year or two, to try to understand the full impacts of that mite on whitetop.

So it's encouraging that we do have an insect available now, but I would say we're still learning just how impactful it will be.

- Yeah, I would say if you're digging that whitetop out of the garden, you want to take that rhizome in the biggest chunk you possibly can.

- Mm-hm, yep.

- And I think, yeah, 'cause if you leave little fragments, that tends to be stuff that regrows.

- Yeah, try to keep it intact as much as possible.

- Yep, okay.

So we have quite a few questions about insects that have come in tonight, and, unfortunately, we don't have an entomologist with us on the panel tonight, so I will make sure those questions are here next week for the next episode.

Okay, couple other questions.

Jane, we have one question that came in.

There have been question came in talking a lot about precision ag.

How can people implement, can people implement precision ag in rangeland systems?

- Yeah, we were talking about this a little bit before the show started.

You know, rangeland systems there, it's a lot more diverse plant communities than in a field crop.

So the ability to be able to detect the target weed in amongst maybe 20, 30 species that could be growing in that plant community is more challenging.

But my sense is that, as the technology advances, the likelihood of being able to do that will increase.

There are applications using satellite imagery or drone imagery even as well to detect invasive annual grasses kind of taking advantage of the different phenology and like the color of some of these invasive plants at certain times of the year to try to detect those like large patches of them from other vegetation.

There's also work being done, and please chime in here if you are familiar with work too, Ricardo, is like trying to develop the algorithms to be able to detect, early detection, rapid response, like high priority species where you could find small patches of those and building the algorithms to be able to do that.

I don't know if you've, either of you, have had any experience with that or think about that very much or have anything to add.

- I have a question.

I sometimes refer to it as brute-force precision or poor man's precision.

- Okay.

(panelists chuckling) - And I, essentially, sometimes managing Canada thistle, I worked with a producer recently who had a big hay/wildflower meadow, and he had a ton of thistle in it.

And he didn't want to spray the whole thing out.

And so we just walked around and we had a backpack sprayer on, and we sprayed rosettes of thistle in the fall.

Is that considered precision agriculture?

(Jane chuckling) - (chuckling) It's a type of spot spray, right?

- Yes.

- But instead of rely on the sensor, you are the sensor itself.

(Kelsey laughing) But coming back to what you mentioned, Jane, I would say there are opportunities there.

So the computer vision, what we call those algorithms processing on-the-go, it's evolving so fast in the sense that you can park your vehicle close by the pasture, for example.

You can fly a drone, create on-the-go prescription, just creating boundary box on what the object you want to identify, and then you can come back maybe with a spray drone or even with a spot precision.

But in this case, you are loading the prescription from the drone into your sprayer.

And then using the GPS and high precision GPS that we call RTK, then also is going to open only where the prescription map identified that specific width.

So I would say the technology is there, and the way that you can customize that, it's amazing.

So it's evolving so fast that you can design on the go and have that prescription written and the application being performed right there close to the field.

- Yeah, and I've seen field demonstrations where they used a drone to map noxious weeds at a certain time of the year, growing season, when that target species was the most obvious to map, and then they're coming back and using those same maps to use the drone to spray where those patches are.

- Yeah, and I think that gets to a good overall point, which is that it's not an all or nothing where you either have to go and buy the fanciest detection system that's on the market right now or you know, just keep doing the whole thing.

A lot of these like satellite imagery, drone imagery, there may be some cheaper options that aren't gonna get down to six-square-inches level of precision that one of these top of the line things can, but might still be the right combination to help somebody save a little bit of money and, you know, cut something out from, you know, spraying the whole field to, okay, we're just gonna spray a few chunks of it or something like that.

- One a little bit different aspect of precision agriculture is the prescriptive grazing and, you know, using the, what am I trying to say, the virtual fencing.

- Virtual fencing.

- Yes, thank you.

I think it'll be interesting to see what that might offer in terms of targeted grazing of noxious weeds, because if someone target grazes noxious weeds now, you know, you have to move the animals and move all this electric fencing.

Where with the virtual fencing, you know, you could have large patches of weeds mapped out and then be moving your animals with the virtual fencing.

So I'm very interested to see where that goes in the future.

- As a follow up, we have a really good question from someone in Helena, and they would like to know, "Explain the difference between precision, regenerative, sustainable, and organic agriculture."

(Kelsey chuckling) - Oh, wow.

- Oh boy.

- [Tim] And you only got a couple minutes.

(panelists chuckling) - [Uta] I was gonna ask, how many do we have?

(chuckling) - Yeah.

Kelsey or Ricardo?

- Sure, I can.

- I can hit that one with maybe some of the definitions that some of these USDA programs might use.

So with precision ag, the idea is just treating different areas of the land differently.

You might still be using whatever heavy-duty chemicals, you're not necessarily wildly changing the way you operate, aside from just reducing the inputs on places where they're not needed.

You're just using more information to get more precise.

Sustainable is really hard to define, and I don't think there's a good universal- - It's the three-legged stool, environmental, - Yes.

- Social, and economic.

- Economic.

- You want to have all three of those satisfied in that sense.

So, okay.

And we know organic's basically not using synthetic pesticides.

Is precision ag applied in organic systems as well?

We've talked a lot about, we've talked a lot about spot spraying systems and these very conventional systems, which, I'll quote a famous weed scientist, "A herbicide problem is not gonna have a herbicide solution."

And so when we face resistance is, you know, I don't think herbicides are gonna, precision's not gonna save us using our herbicides.

But is precision agriculture applied in organic systems as well?

- No, that's a really important point, because we are starting getting more questions about how organic producers can take advantage of those precision agriculture technologies as well.

Just that we are in the talk of spot spraying, we know that we have really effective organic herbicides, but they are real expensive.

So think about, you know, spot spraying might give you an opportunity to use those herbicides that are expensive to broadcast.

But if you are spot spraying, it might start making economical sense if you are targeting those application instead of broadcasting that application.

So there are opportunities there for sure.

And thinking about that weed management is one of the major challenges in organic systems.

I would say that's a good opportunity to take advantage of that as well.

- Yeah.

- So you know, we've been talking about all these different ways that precision agriculture could be used in different systems and stuff.

Do you have any recommendations for somebody who's like dabbling with the idea but doesn't really know how and where to start?

Like who should they go and talk to besides you?

I'm sure your phone will be ringing very much, you know, starting tomorrow morning, but like where's a good place to start to kind of figure out what system, what configuration, et cetera, et cetera?

- Yes.

No, that's a good point.

So we do have a MontGuide that talks about precision ag and with a lot of examples for Montana.

So how we can use precision ag here in Montana.

But if there is anyone interested in starting precision ag, "Where do I start?"

I would say the first step is thinking about which problem do you have, what you want to optimize in your operation.

And then if it is weed management, you can talk about spot spraying and other target spray application.

If you want to optimize your input use, we are going to talk about variable-rate application also.

So you do have opportunities according to what you want to optimize.

And then one thing that a lot of people forget about it, it's timeline expectations.

So when we talk about auto-steering that or spot spraying, those type of systems, you buy, and right away you have the return on that investment.

For other technologies, like variable rate, sometimes not in the year one, you can have that benefit.

So you can have that benefits along those years.

So the timeline is different.

So it's important to better understand where you want to apply and when to expect those returns too.

- All right, thank you.

Thank you for these really interesting questions.

We have just about a minute left tonight.

I want to thank Ricardo and Kelsey for coming on the show tonight.

It was great to have you.

Jane, you have just 30 seconds.

- Oh my gosh.

- To talk about, (panelists laughing) we keep forgetting our show and tells.

- Yeah.

- But we have field pennycress here.

- Yeah, this is all over Gallatin Valley right now.

It's probably one of the most common weeds.

It's a white-flowered mustard.

Field pennycress - Yeah.

- It's an annual.

You can pull it.

(coughs) Excuse me.

- You can see the root.

- Yep, you can pull it.

It'll make silver-dollar looking seeds that will show up soon.

And yeah, so get out there and pull it out.

So next week, I think, (upbeat guitar music) we have our "Profitability in Ag" podcast that's available on the MSU Extension Store.

And then next week, I don't have the paper in front of me, we have Farm Fair.

We're gonna be talking about Farm Fair.

So all those fourth graders in the Gallatin Valley, see you this week.

Thank you for tuning into "Montana Ag Live."

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

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- [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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