- [Spokesperson] Montana Ag Live is made possible by (upbeat 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 music continues) - Hello, everyone.

Welcome to "Montana Ag Live."

I'm your host, Tim Seipel, tonight.

We have a great show organized for you, so you know what to do.

Call in with your questions about yards, gardens, agriculture, horticulture, economics, tree pruning, or whatever's on your mind.

Tonight we have a great panel of experts here in the studio with us, and we have a special guest, Sophie Lattes, who's a graduate student in the Land Resources and Environmental Science Department within the College of Ag.

And she's going to be telling us about organic weed control in vegetable crops.

But before I do that, we'll introduce the panel tonight.

So on the far end of the table down there we have Mac Burgess, who is an expert and PhD in small vegetable production, small fruits and vegetables, and runs the Towne's Harvest farm here at MSU.

Next to Mac, we have Sophie Lattes.

She's our graduate student and special guest.

She's working on integrated weed management and organic cropping systems, so call in all your tough questions.

She's going to tell us about being a graduate student later, too.

Next to Sophie, we have Joel Schumacher.

He's an ag extension economist here at Montana State University.

So call in, send your questions into Facebook, all the questions you have about agricultural economics, from tariffs to inputs to outputs and And next to Joel, we have Abi Saeed.

Abi is our extension horticulture specialist.

Abi and I travel around Montana sometimes, and Abi talks about weeds, lawns, gardens, trees, and pruning, pollinators, and all kinds of management.

Tonight, answering the phones, we have Bruce Lobo, and we have Nancy Blake.

Make sure to keep them busy with a lot of great questions.

So we're going to come back to Sophie.

She's our special guest.

So really, one really important thing you should know about research in university systems is we have a lot of great graduate students out there who do so much innovative work and are sometimes behind the scenes because their major professors might be out there saying the royal we more often.

But we have Sophie here tonight to tell us about her integrated weed management.

Sophie, give us a little bit about your background and maybe how you came to be in the program and your research topics.

- Great.

Yeah, I grew up gardening and then loved my plant science classes.

The first time that I worked in agriculture, I was at Rodale Institute, which is an organic research farm in Pennsylvania.

And I just fell in love with that, like, how direct it is to grow food in a way that helps the land and then feed it to people.

And so then I went on to farm, mostly in Colorado.

I managed organic vegetable production at a small organic farm there, and then just was interested in finding best practices, so that brought me here to Montana State.

- Great.

So, Mac, you work with Sophie as one of her major advisors and mentors in the program.

How do you go about developing a weed management research program, and what does it mean to do research on agriculture?

- You know, this specific research question that Sophie's working on is one that arose from actually an undergraduate research project on our farm in collaboration with Fabian Menalled, who's a weed extension faculty member here.

So I'm not a weed scientist, but I think I know a few things about managing weeds.

And we were running this organic vegetable farm together, and, of course, weeds are a struggle there.

And thinking about the question of how often I should cultivate different crops and whether I should try to do it early and frequently and kill weeds while they're small or wait until they're larger.

And I'm always one to use tools that are at my disposal that are very efficient, and they might not be 100% thorough, but I can use them quickly to kill small weeds.

And other folks tend towards maybe wanting to hand pick bigger weeds when they get out of hand.

We wanted to answer the question, when?

When should you weed?

And it kind of depends on what tool you have and what crop you have.

- Great.

So, Sophie, what kind of tools are you using to do weed management in vegetable crops?

Is it different than the average home gardener would use?

Or how do you develop a strategy to develop weed management in vegetable production?

- Yeah, great question.

I think whatever tools you want to use depends on your scale.

And part of the hard problem is that the farmers that I'm really working with have diversified organic vegetables, so there's no one-size-fits-all solution to all scales.

But we put out some surveys to all of the organic horticultural producers in the state and kind of got some ideas of what people were interested in.

And so we compared some hand cultivation tools like you might use in your garden.

So starting with just your hands themselves and then scaling up to using some hoes that you can stand up and cultivate with, and then comparing that to a little bit larger.

So most of the farmers who I'm working with are on average, about three and a half to five acres.

And so I was trying these walk-behind tractors and different cultivators on there.

So in my tools trials, looked at some basket cultivators to cultivate between rows of vegetables.

So those can turn up.

- [Tim] I think we even might have a few images of what a basket weeder is or a few of the different types of weeders that you brought with us.

So go on, describe what the basket weeder.

- [Sophie] So here, yeah, now you can see a basket weeder and it runs between your rows of crops.

So in this picture we have some rows of carrots, and each of those baskets will till up the soil just to disturb it for those small annual weeds that come up between those rows.

And then I also looked at finger weeders, which I think I also have a picture of for within-row cultivation.

So the finger weeders have, shown here, those yellow fingers on there are flexible, so they can run right over your crop and you can calibrate them to not damage the crop, but just pull up little weeds in the soil.

And so we were interested in whether these two tools were something that would help farmers save some time that they were spending and labor, and then what the efficacy of those were, whether they were removing weeds and whether yields were the same.

And so those were kind of some of the tool comparisons that we were making.

And then even larger scale farms at the Western Agricultural Research Center up in Corvallis, Zach Miller is trying some different, those same cultivators, but attached to a four-wheel cultivation tractor so you could drive down the bed and then have the cultivators being pulled behind.

- So sometimes these, so when I was younger, I did some tine weeding in my time on some sandy soils.

And tine weeders are a tine that sticks down and rips these little weeds out.

But often we would increase the seeding rate by 10 or 20% because you often ripped out wheat, the spring wheat, as it was already emerged.

So do you do the same kind of things with these finger weeders?

Do they cause damage to the different types of plants?

- Great question.

I didn't notice a large decrease in the crops.

It depends how aggressive you are.

So if you're really overlapping them, you could cause some damage.

One of my partner farms that I work with in Bozeman is Chance Farms, and I know that Josh Chance does really densely seed his carrots because he plans on pulling some out of the bed with that process.

So it definitely can't hurt.

But it also could then cost you some time later if you have extra carrots in the field and then have to go in and thin.

- All right, thank you.

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

We have one maybe for, yeah, whoever wants to step in and answer this one a little bit.

This is a question from Stevensville.

Person has a two-year-old strawberry bed and it has a lot of dead leaves in it now.

How should they go in and clean up that strawberry bed for the spring season?

- Do you guys want to or do you want me to?

- Why don't you go first?

- Okay, all right.

So I would say a couple of things.

So one thing, yes, it's okay to remove the dead patches of the strawberry bed.

Other things that you can do to kind of improve the quality of it would be to add a little bit of compost top dressing of aged compost too, to help revitalize it.

For a young strawberry bed, it's kind of tough to get going at first here.

And so it would be a good strategy to do that, and then other things to keep in mind at this time of year because we've been having kind of swinging warm and cool temperatures is to keep an eye on maybe adding a little bit of extra mulch on top if you have access to it, because that can help protect the bed and prevent that cold injury that we anticipating might happen this - [Mac] My strawberries are still under a foot and a half of snow.

(chuckles) I was gonna say in commerce, strawberries are treated as annuals essentially in a Montana, maybe a two-year cycle makes sense, but they do just decline with disease.

And starting with fresh disease-free in a new place is always gonna result in higher yields.

- And do you recommend kind of replacing your strawberry about every five years or so?

- Yeah, whenever it starts to decline enough that it's not suiting your needs.

- You know what my problem is?

Is the quack grass that moves in.

If you're trying to keep it mostly organic, and then you end up with a bunch of quack grass mixed into that strawberry bed, it makes it really tough to keep clean.

- And that's got to be one of the reasons they're essentially treated as annuals in commerce too, right?

Is the weed management is just a lot of work.

- Can be much easier.

Okay, we have quite a few questions coming in, so we'll keep going.

Joel, we have a question from Havre, and well, we have a couple questions here actually that come together.

So they're curious.

Caller from Havre.

Will the new tariff war affect Montana farmers and ranchers?

And then to piggyback on that question, maybe you could just tell us what is a tariff and is it a tax?

And that was another question that came in.

- Sure.

I've been traveling a lot this winter and I've heard both of these two questions quite often.

So, first of all, a tariff is a tax.

So the tariffs that the US levied were on goods coming into the US from a variety of countries, but China, Mexico, and Canada being the key ones there.

And they responded with taxes on things that were coming from the US to them.

So it's a higher tax environment, which generally means not as good for economic growth for anybody involved in that, because if you're looking to buy something that came from one of those countries, you're going to pay more.

On the other hand, if you're trying to sell to one of those countries, their government's adding a piece onto that, too.

So either you're going to get a lower chunk of that or they're going to have to pay more on the other side.

So definitely it is a tax.

So in terms of impacts on Montana, it's going to vary by different types of products.

US gets most of its potash from Canada, but I think most of the potash that we're going to use this spring is already in the country.

So short term, probably not too big of an issue.

But longer term, there's not a lot of other suppliers out there for potash.

So an increased tariff on that is going to mean increased prices to US farmers directly, more short term, because just because of our geographic location to Canada, we sometimes deliver to elevators in Canada.

We contract with companies in Canada for different crops.

Lentils, canola being two really good examples of that.

It's really difficult to make a contract with a company for your 2025 crop, just with both sides not knowing what the tariff environment will be at the time of delivery.

So we did have a window before the US tariffs went into place, and I think we saw a lot of the '24 crop that was under contract that hadn't been delivered yet.

People got that delivered while they had some certainty about the policy environment.

But I think uncertainty is kind of the key thing, because we just don't know what the tariffs are going to be in a month, in six months, and same for the retaliatory tariffs, just what level they're going to be at.

So it makes it a little difficult to put in dollars and cents yet just because of the uncertainty.

- Yeah.

I read an interesting article this week that China actually levied 100% tariffs on Canadian canola.

Where did that come from?

And how does that fit in this system of how we are in this new regime of tariffs?

- Yeah, and the logic behind it's being implemented on different products in different ways.

And sometimes I understand the logic, sometimes I don't.

I think with that canola, I think I read a similar article to you.

The seed itself can come in, but if it's already been processed into meal and oil, then you have this much higher tariff rate.

And again, I don't know the logic behind that one, but yeah, it's been an uncertain environment, which could create some both opportunities and challenges for producers.

It might mean that maybe US canola looks a little better than Canadian to an international market if there's a targeted tariff just on Canada.

On the other hand, if it's broader, maybe that's going to be challenging for that market in the US as well, so.

- Okay.

Yeah, complicated.

- If I could mention the word "uncertainty."

- Yeah, uncertainty.

- I think that's the one.

- We'll add uncertainty in there one more time.

- Maybe just start every sentence with that and then end it as well.

- (chuckles) Okay, thanks.

Okay, so we have some other questions that came in.

We have a question that came in from Billings.

We talked two weeks ago during the pledge drive.

We talked a little bit about aerating lawns.

And we had a caller from Billings who wanted to know what is the best way to aerate their lawn.

- The best way to aerate the lawn, I would say, would be to use a core aerator.

And that's the one where it has these hollow little tubes and it'll pull out these little plugs that looks like goose poop on your garden, but that has the least impact on compacting the soil surrounding the tines.

But any kind of aerator that isn't a vertical mower or dethatcher is still going to be pretty great for your lawn.

- So I think I talked a couple weeks ago about, I used to kind of put all my body weight on the handles and ride the aerator across the yard a little bit, especially as the soil starts to get harder.

So right now is probably a really good time to, well, once all the snow's gone, it'll be a really good time to aerate your lawn, 'cause everything will be soft and you'll get good plugs to come out.

Do you have to worry about going around the edges of trees or around drip lines of trees?

And could you possibly damage root systems of trees if you get too close?

- I wouldn't worry as much about it.

I mean, if you're not sure or if you're already seeing like tree roots that are really close to the surface level, that could be a concern.

And generally it's not a good idea to bring any kind of heavy machinery or any kind of machinery that could impact the tree really close to it.

So I would say it's good to give your trees a little bit of a width and have a mulch layer.

I don't like having turf right up to the trunk of the tree anyways.

But usually tree roots are within the top 12 to 24 inches of the soil.

So these aerators don't go deep enough that I would worry about it being too much of a concern.

- [Mac] Now, is that something I just rent at the garden center?

- You can rent these.

I'm not sure who has them, but yeah, I believe you can rent them.

Yeah.

- In Bozeman, you can get them at some of the rental shops.

The one down by the airport, you can get it.

You can get the core aerator there and rent that if you want to.

Yeah.

So we had an interesting question come in, Sophie.

This person, maybe they want to go to graduate school one day and do research in agriculture.

(Sophie and Joel laughing) What is it like being a graduate student?

What do you do on a day-to-day basis as a graduate student?

You know, you can't be out working in the field running finger weeders and tine weeders this time of year.

So what do you spend your time doing and the rest of the year, and how do you take courses?

- Yeah.

Since I'm a research appointment, my graduate program's really focused around the summertime mostly.

And that's my favorite time is getting out in the field and really seeing things grow, bringing in the produce.

And then I also love sharing those ideas.

So in the summer I teach a practicum class on growing vegetables in the field.

But I also am able to reach students a little bit with some teaching throughout the winter.

And then the rest of my time is spent looking at what I collected from the summer.

So that's analyzing all the data from that and then also writing.

So trying to put all that information.

- [Mac] And you do take some classes.

- Yes.

- You're done with classes, right?

- Mostly, so I have a couple more.

So it's not very course-based.

Mostly a lot of statistics classes to be able to well analyze everything that I've collected and then be able to write it up.

- I used to tell my parents I can count plants and do math is when I became a PhD researcher.

(laughs) That was the simple answer.

Okay, we have a number of other questions that have come in.

We have one from Kalispell.

This person has a variety of trees infectious with spruce tip weevils and wants information on how to best treat this problem.

Caller has been trimming out the dead or diseased parts of the tree, but that has not ended the problem.

- So this sounds like it could be a continuing issue where you might want to connect with your local expert.

And so up in Kalispell, you have a really amazing extension agent, Mackenzie Dey, and she is a great resource.

So working with Mackenzie on the best management strategies would And she can also come out and do site visits, and so she can take a look at the problem and see if there could be any other factors that may be going on that could affect this issue.

So I would say for something like this, for an ongoing issue where you're not seeing very much success, reach out to your local experts or your county extension agent, Mackenzie Day up there, who is awesome.

- Yeah, so sometimes on spruce trees I'll see these kind of gall-like things and it looks like maybe a funny looking cone, but it really is leaves that are maybe distorted and has something in it perhaps.

Is that some sort of insect that gets into the ends of these branches, and can you really just trim off the tips of those branches usually?

- Yeah, there are some insects where, if you catch it at the right time, where in the life cycle of the insect, it's still within the tissue of the plant, you prune it out, that has a bigger impact on reducing the issue, whereas if you miss the mark by even a little bit and the insect has already emerged or moved on to a different part of the plant, that's when you'd miss the window.

So that's why knowing exactly what's going on and taking a look at it is a great strategy.

- Okay, thanks.

Okay, we have another caller.

Abi, this is probably another one for you, but everyone can maybe chime in.

East Helena has some rose bushes of an unknown variety, but would like to know when and where to, how, when, where, and how to prune those rose bushes.

- Yeah, so for unknown variety, again, it's a little bit of a challenge.

This time of year, is a decent time of year to prune your rose bushes, if you can see the structure.

And so Helena you said?

- [Time] East Helena, yep.

- Okay, East Helena.

It would be interesting to kind of see a picture of what type of roses, because in terms of whether they're shrub roses or climbing roses, the pruning would be different.

And I would probably recommend something slightly different.

So if this person would want to reach out to me via email, send me pictures of the roses, and then I could give you more of a customized plan.

- Okay.

Yeah, great.

Okay.

Well, we have a number of questions that's come in.

One here for you, Sophie, and maybe you and Mac can share this one.

And I might chime in a little bit, but I gave my opinion about this a couple weeks ago.

We have an organic, this person is looking for an organic method to control purslane in their gardens.

They say they hoe it out, but small pieces keep sprouting maybe.

This is from the Columbia Falls Gardeners Club.

Any insight on managing purslane in organic vegetables?

- You know, purslane isn't the worst weed.

It's present.

It's gonna be there.

It doesn't like climb up your onions and pull them down or anything like that.

It just kind of occupies space, and I don't really.

And it emerges kind of later in the season.

I don't find it that threatening.

It's difficult to manage, though, because the way it's prostrate, and it has that central taproot, and so it's hard to find.

Where do I?

I want to pull purslane, and I grab a handful of it, and I don't get the base of the root of the plant.

It will just grow back then if you don't get the root out.

So in that sense, it's difficult.

But, I mean, the organic methods are to cut it off with your hand or a tool, (chuckles) and that's challenging.

But I think the mentality of do I need to or when do I need to, maybe is more important.

And what crop?

Or if this is your home garden, it doesn't bother me that much.

- Yeah, I have it come into my warmer beds usually.

I call it my understory cover crop in my tomatoes quite often.

And I don't feel like I get a lot of yield loss from it because the tomatoes are big enough, they're binding up through.

They're getting long enough, and it forms a nice cover crop in the bottom.

It is a very edible weed.

You know, it has been grown in lots of parts of the world.

There are actual upright varieties that don't grow prostate that people use as a food source, and people have eaten them.

You can actually buy purslane from Johnny's Seeds, which is interesting, interesting enough, so you can always try eating it a little bit.

But Sophie, you work some on weeding inorganic cropping systems or organic vegetable systems.

When do we have to worry about a weed, and when can we leave it there?

And I know that's maybe a little bit of a question of how much you'll tolerate in the field, but when should we manage a weed and when should we kind of say, "Ah, maybe we should just let it go?"

- Yeah.

I like to think about weed management rather than control.

So thinking at what point is it actually lowering the yields or whatever your goals are for that bed?

So it depends on that.

And purslane doesn't bother me too much.

But I've also seen it in northern Montana, where it's taking over a farm and really decreasing yields.

So I've been doing trials, finding the timing of when it's important to cultivate in order to prevent yield losses.

And so that's different for different crops.

You have more competitive crops.

Like, if you're growing cabbage there that you transplant and it's already really large, and then it shades out the ground, purslane's probably not going to have a big impact.

But something like carrots, where you're seeding them really densely and they aren't the strongest competitor of crops, then it might be a bigger problem.

But I would say manage it while it's small if it's really going to reduce your yield.

So a lot of the tools, like I was showing you pictures of earlier, are really designed for those small annual weeds, and they're not very effective on larger weeds.

And it's the same thing with like hand pulling.

You can knock out hundreds of weeds in one swoop with a little knife tool or something, whereas it would take you a really long time later in the summer.

So maybe being proactive every week, getting in there and passing those implements through, that would really be pretty helpful.

- And you can even be strategic about the timing of specific crops and specific locations or fields, depending how big your farm is and how you think about your locations.

But if you know you have a patch of a certain weed in a certain place, and you know you want to plant a crop that you know it's later in the season and you know when it's going to merge, you could kill all of them when they first come up and then plant later, or conversely, plant something competitive earlier before it comes up.

- So, Sophie, are you also looking at mulches as potential ways to suppress weeds, and if so, like, what are some situations where that might be a simpler strategy for a home garden or something?

- Right, yeah, that could be a good way to cut out some weeds.

I'm not working personally too much with mulches with my research, but I've definitely used it in my farming before to success.

I'm working a little bit now with interceded cover crops as a living mulch to fill some of that space, so.

- [Tim] Oh yeah, did you bring an image of the interseeded cover crop?

- I did.

I might just first, so that everyone's on the same page, just describe what a cover crop is.

So we're talking something that's not the cash crop that you're producing that you seed for some other purpose.

So one of them could be weed management.

It could also be for soil improvement of nutrients by planting something that will fix nitrogen in your soil.

And by interseeding, I'm talking about seeding the cover crops in the same rows as your vegetables during the season.

And so in this instance, if you have purslane growing between your vegetables, you could maybe compete it by putting it in that space.

So if you look at this picture here, I'm kind of showing a little bit of the methods of interseeding.

So on the left, we have two growing rows of carrots.

And then we just seeded an alfalfa down the middle.

So once your carrots are established, you could plant something there that would come up before the purslane, since purslane is late in the season, and then it would grow and fill that space, maybe out-compete weeds.

And then you could harvest your carrots.

So here I'm using an undercutter to loosen those carrots, but you could also use a broad fork in your backyard, pull your carrots out, and then let the cover crop keep growing.

So on the right picture here we have an annual rye grass that's recovered after the carrots were harvested and then is still filling that space so that you might have a lower price purslane problem in your garden there.

- Great.

So speaking of carrots, Mac, in front of you and Sophie, you have a selection of local vegetables here that you've brought in.

Do you want to tell us about them?

And maybe a little bit.

- Sure, sure.

Here we are, it's the spring equinox, it's late March.

And we don't think of this as a time of year of great abundance of local foods, but these are all things that were grown in the Gallatin Valley here, so one of the actually colder places in Montana.

And most of these things would have been harvested last fall.

So we've got a Tetsukabuto winter squash, one of the best storing winter squashes, that and the delicata squash.

They've just been sitting on my dining table since September, so six months old.

I ate one of these delicatas last week.

The delicatas are declining a little bit in their texture, but the flavor is still great.

And the tetsukabuto squash is an excellent storage squash.

They're still holding on great.

Of course, we grow great garlic in Montana and garlic stores very well.

I did buy the spinach at the grocery store just now.

Spinach can overwinter and it'll grow back in the spring or this may well have been seeded in February inside of a high tunnel.

But this is from a local farm here in the Gallatin Valley.

Beets and carrots, these are both from Towne's Harvest Garden and my personal stash out of the fridge.

But these are available in local grocery stores still.

Of course, onions and even apples, well could be stored.

I think we maybe don't have the apple storage technology here that they have in more serious apple production regions, but all these things, storing vegetables like this allows producers to have a longer duration of marketing.

And so the winter farmers markets and some of our bigger cities are really, really great places to get some food.

- All right, thanks.

All right, so we have a number of questions.

Joel, question that came in for you.

So this caller from Chester is a little bit confused about the Farm Bill.

What is the status of the Farm Bill now?

Are there any major changes?

And wasn't the Farm Bill due last year, but we still don't have a Farm Bill quite yet?

- Yeah, and it's kind of getting buried in the news with some of the other ag policy things.

But the Farm Bill expired in September of 2023.

Five-year bill.

We got a one-year extension for the 2024 growing season that essentially continued it as is.

And of course that year came and went.

So we got another one-year extension with some very minor changes for the 2025 growing season.

And they're currently negotiating a new It's gotten a little buried in some of the other news that's going on, but kind of the key issues that are sort of on the table, it looks like they're going to keep most of the major programs intact and just make adjustments to them as opposed to throw them out and start over.

But they're worried a lot about the total price tag.

It seems to be one of the catching points.

Again, about 75% of the funding is for nutrition type programs.

So anything related to total cost, you need to consider what's going to happen with the SNAP program or Supplemental Nutrition Assistant, Women Infants and Children, and then some other programs that are kind of similar there.

Most of the farm groups are pushing for higher reference prices.

So those are the prices that trigger payments when you drop below.

With essentially the argument saying that input costs, cost of doing business has gone up.

To give us the same safety net coverage, we need a higher trigger level for those payments.

But that's new dollars into the Farm Bill.

That's going to cost more.

So if we're trying to lower the total cost of the bill yet we're asking for more, there's going to have to be some kind of trade-offs.

But again, at this point we've got a one-year deal in place for the 2025 year.

So ideally something would be negotiated prior to, say, September.

But my crystal ball on what goes on in DC isn't very good.

So we'll just have to watch and see when that comes to the forefront and see if they can get enough backing to move a bill forward.

- [Tim] Don't forget the word uncertainty.

- That's right.

- Okay, caller from Great Falls.

Does Montana produce organic wheat, and if so, where can I buy it?

We do produce a lot of organic wheat.

- Montana is probably one of the larger, if not the largest organic wheat producing states in the country.

- And if you're looking for it, I can think of Montana Flour & Grains out of Fort Benton has, they sell a number of different organic wheat flours there.

- [Mac] Yep.

- I'm trying to think of some of the other mills that might be around, maybe might check with Montana Specialty Mills or Montana Milling.

They do some specialty grain.

- I would say your co-op or similar type health food store.

They're often going to have organic and that's often going to be local and will be marketed as such.

- And you can always reach out to the Montana Organic Association in the state.

They could definitely point you in the right direction.

- And Great Falls would be just the center of that.

I mean, the processing is right there.

So I'm sure that there are markets.

If this is a consumer asking where can I buy some organic flour, I'm sure that the co-op or health food store in Great Falls would have it and it would be local.

- Yep.

Okay.

We have a question from Charlo, and maybe you have some experience with this, Mac.

And if we don't give you a good answer tonight, we're going to have Stephen Vantassel on.

He's the vertebrate control specialist.

He'll be on in a couple weeks, and he'll let you know.

This person is looking for an organic, safe way to get rid of voles invading her garden.

- Voles.

Organic and safe.

Mousetraps.

Think habitat.

So seriously, think habitat.

Why are they there?

What are they eating?

What are they hiding under?

Can you clean up, you know, the stuff they're hiding under?

Is it like piles of old wood or leaf debris?

That's where they're hiding.

And then that exposes them to the predators that are out there, whether that's your cat or osprey in the tree or what.

- I unsuccessfully went vole hunting last year, but a neighbor's cat solved the problem for me.

- You know, and organic, strictly in alignment with organic, national organic program rules or in alignment with your personal values.

There are products that are fairly natural that are not allowed to be used on a certified organic farm.

I'm thinking of like some of those smoke bomb kind of products that are like charcoal and sulfur.

Those are not allowed in organic agriculture, but you could use one in your yard.

You know, if you could excavate a hole, and I don't know that voles' holes are as readily accessible.

I would get a cat.

(laughs) - You know, Stephen Vantassel is going to say, "Don't get a cat."

(Mac laughing) But we were bring that question back up again when Stephen's on here, and he'll talk a little bit about some of the different traps that are out there and modifying habitat.

He's really a great resource and a very unique resource that we have in the State of Montana.

So yeah, we'll have to look for him again.

We'll have to bring that question up when you come back.

Okay, Abi, a question for you.

Caller from Clyde park, and they have a spring snow crabapple with fire blight.

When is the best time to prune that out?

Caller, I also asked Abi earlier before we went on air about a funny-looking disease on my crabapple tree.

So thank you for calling that in, getting it on the air.

- So I would do that now.

I would remove at least eight inches or so below where you see the fire blight damage, remove that, and make sure you sanitize your pruning tools in between each cut, because you don't want to transfer it to healthier parts of the tree.

So I would definitely say do that now before we get slightly warmer temperatures and it's going to continue to spread.

Cut it about 8 inches beyond where you see that damage into the healthy part of the tree, and keep an eye on it this spring and kind of reevaluate after if you're starting to see some more damage.

- Okay, so, Abi, I think you brought us a clip of a pruning video that you were doing a little bit.

So we have a couple questions in the queue here.

Is this a good time of year to prune trees?

And I know next week we're going to have Zach Miller on from the Western Ag Research Center, who's working on small fruit production, but maybe you could just talk a little bit about pruning today and tell them what's going on.

- [Abi] This is a really good time to prune your trees.

And the reason for that is you can see the structure really well because you don't have the leaves on there yet.

So it's a good time to prune any kind of troublesome branches, anything that might be crossing.

If you had dead branches from last year, now is a good time to get rid of them.

So they're not going to break with this upcoming year.

It's a good time to kind of prune any, like overcrowded young trees, especially where you have branches that might be crossing, rubbing against each other, growing downward or inward to the tree.

Get rid of those problematic branches and kind of have some fun with it.

Don't remove more than one third of the branches, the living branches of the tree, but you can get kind of carried away pretty well.

A few things to keep an eye out for.

Some of those trees that produce a lot of SAP this time of year, like our maples, birches, elms, where there's going to be a lot of sugar flow, they're likely to bleed, which is ooze that sap, which is fine.

It's not going to harm the tree, but it may be kind of something that's not very pleasant or when you're pruning.

And other than that, early spring flowering trees and shrubs, you shouldn't prune those at this time of year.

Wait until after they're done flowering to prune them.

But other than that, it's a great time to prune.

- [Mac] Is it ever not a great time to prune?

- Honestly, if you're worried about diseases, mid-growing season would not be.

But you can prune pretty much any time of year as long as you're careful and going with the specific plant itself and what would work for it.

- But for lilacs, right?

Lilacs, you don't want to.

- [Abi] No.

- So I need to move some lilacs back towards their bed and I'm just going to cut them off at ground level.

The rest of the lilac will flower, right?

It's a large, long lilac hedge.

But I've heard that if you cut your lilacs or prune them this time of year, they won't flower.

- Yes, so those early spring flowering trees and shrubs shouldn't be pruned now.

You wait until right after they're done flowering, within that two-week period.

That's a really good time to prune them because that's you're going to get rid of your blooms if you prune them now.

You can prune them now, you just won't have blooms.

- Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

Okay, so we have some other questions that are coming in.

We have a question for you, Joel.

We talked about ag producers and farmers ranch maybe being affected by tariffs.

Will consumers in Montana be affected by tariffs?

- I mean, the US Imports a lot of agriculture.

I mean, even though we're a big ag producing country, there's products we don't grow either at all, things like bananas, some of the fruits like that, cilantro.

If those come from countries that have a tariff on them, that's going to increase the price for that importer.

So that's going to come right to the consumer.

Other things that might be more seasonal.

So maybe we're getting our fresh tomatoes out of the US in the summer, but maybe as we move into this time of year, we are getting more from more southern places.

Tariffs on those type of goods would increase the price at least seasonally on some of those products where maybe we grow them in the US but not year-round as effectively or something.

So certainly those prices are going to go up.

One other thing to think about too though, US exports a lot of ag products.

And if foreign consumers aren't buying those because of tariffs that have put on those as well, it might create kind of a surplus of some goods here in the US that have historically been exported, which then some of those products like wheat can go to storage.

But you may see some softer market prices for some of those products that can't go to those historical international markets that we've sold them to.

- So a lot of our malt barley in Montana is exported.

Correct?

Where does that end up at?

- I think it goes a lot of places.

It certainly goes down to Mexico, and certainly all across the US, and it's hard to track some of that because sometimes it'll go to, let's say Canada, but then be re-exported to another country.

So that certainly happens with some of our lentils.

So some things you might not directly think of, it's not that Canada is this huge buyer of lentils in terms of the consumers in Canada, but things are oftentimes processed there and then reprocessed or sent out to other international markets for specifically lentils, happens a lot in Canola too, as well.

- Now, if we send barley to Mexico and it gets taxed and then they make beer out of it and they send it back, it gets taxed again and they don't get to deduct the barley tariff or anything like that?

- Yeah, and certainly we see it in non-ag industries like the auto industry.

You see parts of cars going back and forth and getting hit with a tariff at various points as it moved back and forth before it gets into one single assembled car.

And the same happens to some extent here.

We certainly send some calves in the fall into Canadian feedlots and then they come back to the US for processing.

So you do see products that go out and then come back to the US, and barley would be another example.

And you'd have to look then specifically about, okay, was it a barley tariff coming this way and then was it a finished alcohol tariff coming back and what would those kind of rates be?

But the details matter a lot when you get into some of those.

But it's certainly possible that products get taxed going out and coming back in at various levels.

- Is this a big job opportunity for tax accountants?

- (chuckles) You could spend a lot of time reading and tracking these things.

And that's why when some of those negotiations or some of the free trade agreements they have teams of negotiators that work for years on those.

And it's because of working through issues like that to come to an understanding of where they want to be.

- Okay, thanks.

So we have a couple questions here that have, they're about weed management and organic cropping systems, and we'll put them out to Sophie and Mac and Abi, you can chime in too.

So we have a caller from Whitefish, and they want to know how to get rid of horsetail fern, they called it, which would be equisetum in a small garden.

And at the same time we have a caller from Drummond who would like to know if there's a recommendation for killing grass organic with an organic herbicide or a way to do it organically.

So maybe hit the horsetail first, because that one comes up quite a lot.

And then maybe we could see if we have a weed management solution for grass.

- Equisetum is a kind of a wetland plant.

I don't see it in my garden or farm.

I see it in kind of ditch banks and along the crick more.

And I've never dealt with it as a weed.

I don't know if they're looking for an herbicide recommendation.

But it's an odd plant, right?

It's its own thing.

- [Tim] Yeah.

- Not related to anything else.

I wouldn't know anything about her besides for it.

- Yeah, I get asked quite a few questions about it in sub-irrigated or irrigated forage systems in Montana.

It can be kind of hard, and it will move in when the water table is high.

It will show up in many places.

So I would imagine maybe this caller is in around the Kalispell area, maybe in an area where the water table might be a little to look at.

- [Joel] Such a cool plant to look at.

(laughs) - Might be a little bit coming in there.

It can be kind of weedy and almost problematic in some situations.

It's rhizomatous and interconnected, so I would say probably some deeper cultivation, maybe mulching over the top of it if you could do that, if you have it around your beds.

Let me scroll look at that question a little bit.

Yeah.

Maybe if it's in a small garden you could mulch it out in some situations.

Some deep cultivation would probably pull it out too.

And then you might be able to do some other things.

Have you ever dealt with it in any situations?

- In Colorado, I had it a little bit at one of our farms and I think like you said, it's thinking about the whole system.

Am I irrigating too much in this area or if the ground tide was too high?

I like to, like my project is about integrated weed management.

So applying as many little hammers as you can to the situation rather than one single fix.

So I would think about the health of your crops and prevention of it being there.

So maybe it's keeping it a little drier if that's possible.

But I think it also since you're saying it's rhizomatous and perennial, it could lead into the grass question too here that I think of more long-term solutions there being either cover cropping, so planting some crop that could out-compete that, maybe applying tarps for solarization or occultation, there like to heat up your soil and dry it out.

Try and try and prevent some of those from coming back with like a more long-term rotation kind of solutions.

- You know, there are some organic herbicides, really strong horticultural grade vinegar, and there's some products made out of clove oil and other things, and they will burn plant tissue, but they're not systemic, and they're not effective on perennial weeds, which would include most of the problem grass weeds.

So you make it turn brown for a few weeks, but it's going to come back.

So yeah, there's really not, the organic herbicide situation is they're not effective, they're not cost effective.

But I think if you're thinking about managing grass around a tree or something like that, mulch, cardboard layer mulch, something like that is probably a more effective tool.

And then there are of course simple non-organic, but grass herbicides are fairly straightforward.

- Yeah, I think, yeah, it can be really tough with the obviously mechanical cultivation for grass will really, I mean it will kill it, but it's also a soil disturbance that's involved with it too.

Yeah, even most things where I've seen people ask me about mixing vinegar and salt and things like that, it usually is just burning the top off of the grass.

So there's really, it doesn't affect the root system that's below the surface.

So that can be really tough.

I think the mulching and the mechanical combination.

- And you have to be careful with the salts too because you don't want those to accumulate in your garden.

- [Mac] Yeah, you'll see these things like dish soap and salt.

I wouldn't do that.

- No, I wouldn't either.

- And that 20% vinegar, that's no joke either.

That's a pesticide and you want to read the label, and you don't want to get in your eye.

- Yeah, definitely wear glasses.

Okay, we have some other questions.

We had a follow-up question for you, Joel, from Billings.

This caller is wondering if it would be possible to label products that have been affected by a tariff.

- Yeah, I don't know if there's specifically a way to do that.

You'd have to be a little careful about those products that may have multi-country origins.

Like we talked about crossing back over the border, would you still call that American if it was calf born in Montana, went to a feedlot in Canada and came back to the US for processing?

You'd have to kind of work through those issues.

So if it was truly a product that was labeled, "Made in the USA," you'd know it hadn't been across the border and then wouldn't be affected.

But the others, it'd be a little tougher.

So I haven't heard any movement towards labeling things in that way.

- That's funny.

This morning I was making my smoothie and the big bag of frozen mixed blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries that I use a cup of every morning in my smoothie.

It said right on the bag, "Product of USA or Canada."

They didn't even know.

It could change from maybe some of the, maybe the blueberries.

- Yep, and some of those, it's seasonally how they do it too.

So maybe that particular company packages for six months of the year and during four of those months it's mostly US-based.

And then the winter months, they package other places.

So then they just make one bag that covers them for anywhere they may have sourced those.

- You mentioned tomatoes and actually we import a lot of tomatoes from Canada grown under glass actually too.

So it's to the north and the south.

- Yep.

- Yep, okay, we have a caller, another caller from Helena who has a question about their lawn.

This person wants to change the lawn from grass to clover.

He plans to aerate, add two inches of compost, and seed clover.

Will that work?

Should he fertilize it?

If so, before or after seeding?

- Good question.

So clover is one of those things that really seeds easily within turf too.

So I would say aerate.

I wouldn't put two inches of compost.

That's a lot.

I'd maybe put a quarter inch of compost down, and then overseed with some clover seed.

One thing to keep in mind though is that clover will naturally thin out even if you replace your entire turf with it.

And so you may need to reseed to cover any patchy spots of clover.

But yes, aerate, add a little bit of compost, and overseed it with clover seeds.

And then I'd reduce some of your irrigation.

Traditional turf requires more irrigation than clover does, so scaling back on that irrigation will naturally allow your grass to thin out and the clover to take up space in those gaps.

But keep an eye on that and keep up with seeding the clover.

Every couple of years or so you might need to do that.

- When I think clover for this kind of a thing around perennials in a farm situation, I would think of Dutch, white clover or New Zealand clover, which I think are the same thing, more or less.

Are there even lower growing clovers for turf replacement use?

- There's a variety of Dutch white clover that's called microclover, and it's just bred to have the smaller size leaves and less flowers, so it more closely resembles turf.

But that's still Trifolium repens, is still Dutch white clover.

And so, yeah, that's the common one that people use as turf replacement.

- I've seen a lawn, you know, lawn, very recently for the first time.

And it was pretty cool.

- Yeah, yeah, I love it.

- Just don't walk across it barefoot because you're gonna get a bee sting.

(laughs) - Yeah, the pollinators love them.

And clover's a great source of food for bumblebees and a lot of those early season pollinators.

- Okay, so we have kind of a funny question from Missoula, and I was just in Vermont this week.

It's sugar season in Vermont, and this call came in from Missoula.

Can you tap maple trees in Montana?

- Yes.

Yes, you can.

You can, there are a lot of maple trees that you can tap.

Sugar maples are the most popular because they have the highest sugar content, so it tastes the best.

But there's a lot of different maple trees that you can tap.

I'm not sure how good the syrup will taste from it.

You can even tap things like birch trees.

And again, I haven't tried birch syrup or birch water or anything, so I'm not sure how good that tastes, but, yes, you can tap maple trees here in Montana.

- Okay.

You probably need a lot of maple sap to get really much syrup out of it.

- It involves a lot of boiling out, for sure.

- I'm gonna confess, I don't know.

What are the most common boulevard maple trees that are planted?

You see a lot of maple trees in Montana and planted in boulevards and yards and things, and they all have sunburned sun scald on them.

Almost all of them.

(Mac laughing) So do you know what type of maple tree we plant in the state?

- I mean, we have a lot of Norway maples.

We have some white maples, red maples, like some silver maples.

I've seen a variety, but I see a lot of Norway maples.

- [Tim] Okay, yep, good to know.

- [Mac] And boxelder is a maple tree.

- And it's a maple too.

- Very much a native tree that's around.

- Which you can tap as well, apparently.

Yeah.

- So if there's anyone out there who's ever tapped boxelder, we'd be really excited to hear a little bit more about what it tastes like.

Okay, we have a bunch of questions.

We only have a few minutes left tonight, so we won't be able to get to all the questions that we have in the queue, but we will get to them absolutely next week.

So we have a question from, actually from out of state, Cody, Wyoming.

Caller killed a hornet's nest in a maple tree using hornet spray last year.

This season, the branch on which the nest was attached was dead.

Will hornet spray kill or injure a maple tree?

- I can't think of an active ingredient that would hurt a tree from hornet spray.

It is possible that the branch could have been damaged already, but I can't think of anything.

It'd be good to look at the product and maybe read into that, what that chemical is.

But I can't think of hornet sprays affecting the tree.

- [Mac] I think most of those things are pyrethroids.

- Most likely.

- They shouldn't be problematic to the tree.

But they were there because there was a cavity.

- Yeah, and I doubt it was the spray.

- So there was already a hole.

(chuckles) - Yeah, exactly.

- Okay, so we have about minute left tonight.

Sophie, thank you for joining us, as a graduate student at Montana State University in the Land Resources Environmental it was really great to have you.

We have one last question.

What is the most problematic weed in organic vegetable production?

- Oh, I mostly hear about bindweed and thistle from Montana farmers.

- And those are perennial weeds with underground root rhizome systems in there.

(upbeat music) Well, with that, I think we'll stop with the questions for tonight.

Thank you to the panel for joining us.

Thank you for all the callers who called in tonight and asked a bunch of great questions, and thank you to our phone operators.

We will see you next Sunday.

Zach Miller will be the special guest.

Have a good evening.

- [Spokesperson] For more information and resources, visit montanapbs.org/AGLIVE.

(upbeat music continues) - [Spokesperson] 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, and The Gallatin Gardeners Club.

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