- [Narrator] "Montana Ag Live" is made possible by.

(blues 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.

(blues guitar music continues) - If you haven't guessed it, you are tuned to "Montana Ag Live", originating today from the studios of KUSM on the very beautiful campus of Montana State University and coming to you over your Montana Public Television System.

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

Wasn't here last week, Tim took over.

He did a great job, had a great graduate student that joined the panel last week.

It's nice to see some graduate students get involved with this program and we'll do some more of that as we move through the year.

Tonight we're gonna do something special.

We're gonna talk about an industry that used to be big in the state, kind of died out, and it's coming back with a vengeance right now and we'll talk about that in a little bit after I introduce this evening's panel.

Uta McKelvy, you all know Uta, she's a plant pathologist.

If you have disease problems on your trees, wheat, anything, she can answer those questions.

Our special guest tonight, Zach Miller.

Zach is Superintendent over at the Corvallis Research Center.

It is a fruit research center, not only fruit, but they concentrate a lot on fruits and new plants that are, might be of economic value to the state.

We're gonna learn a lot more about that as the evening progresses.

And we have borrowed from the Montana Department of Agriculture Frank Etzler.

Frank is very a knowledgeable entomologist.

If you have bug questions tonight, hey, and they're coming out already.

I've seen bugs.

My windshield says they're active and they're hard to clean off.

And of course, we all know Eric Belasco, our token economist that we like to have fun with.

And I do have some good questions for you tonight.

- Finally.

- Answering the phone this evening, Nancy Blake and Cadence Lemoni.

And with that, back to you, Zach.

Tell us a little bit about the fruit industry in the state and how it's coming back.

- Yeah, so like you said, Montana used to be, have a fairly large fruit industry.

Back the teens and '20s when you, there wasn't a lot of fruit imports, Montana was shipping apples and other fruits all across the country.

And like yeah, for several factors it sort of faded away.

But now with the interest in local foods, local fruits and vegetables, there's certainly lots of opportunities.

And with our large tourist economy with, you know, it's only a state of a million, but we've got six to 8 million folks visiting us every summer.

There's a lot of opportunities for fruit and products made from fruit, wines, jams, jellies, that sort of thing.

- It's really increased a little bit.

And folks, if you wanna learn about fruit, there's a phone number on the screen.

Call your questions in or any questions you want.

Hey, and we take comments too.

I might screen 'em.

(panel laughs) Depending on what they say, but I do like comments or suggestions.

So anything you wanna say tonight, let's do it.

What, Uta, you had a question?

- Yeah, I have a question for Zach.

The fruit industry coming back, is it basically the same fruits that were grown back in the day or did we see a shift in what's in right now?

- So it's a bit of the old and quite a bit of new opportunities that have really been made possible through university breeding programs.

So a couple examples, used to be that there wasn't a wine or table grape that would survive in Montana, but really through the efforts in the '70s, '80s and '90s by the University of Minnesota and some other Midwestern grape breeders, now we have, you know, there's 20, 30 different types of wine grapes that will grow in the state and that's a great opportunity for tourists and to diversify our ag economy.

- You know, we had Dave Baumbauer sitting right here one time and the grape question came in and he said, "Montana is not the place to grow grapes."

- And I heard a lot about that.

(panel laughs) - So did we, yeah.

And a gentleman that runs Tongue River Winery.

- Yeah, Bob Thaden.

- Miles City.

Yes, we had him on the program and he proved Baumbauer wrong, which wasn't hard to do.

But anyway, it was great.

I'm glad to hear it's coming back.

Let's move on a little bit.

As long as we're on fruit and the Department of Ag, we had a question come in via Facebook.

Does the Department of Ag and the fruit growers, do they have joint programs or do you work together?

- Yes.

Our work mostly right now is about marketing.

So we want to help assist market or ag producers market their product.

On the growing side, the regulatory side, our relationship has been rocky to be completely honest.

So we're trying to improve that market.

- [Jack] Okay.

- I know there are some people who help with produce safety trainings and they have a great relationship with producers in the state.

- [Jack] Great.

- My area with pests management, not so great.

- Do we have a big pest problem with apples in the state?

- Well, in general, Montana's a great place to grow fruit.

Frank and I were talking about this before the show, like if you go to the Midwest, the Northeast, where you have, where it's hot and humid, you're surrounded with deciduous forests, the insect and disease pressure is huge.

A vineyard in the Midwest will be spraying almost every week to control insects and disease.

And many of the vineyards in Montana have never sprayed for insects or disease because we have this high and dry climate, relatively cool.

So disease management here is generally fairly straightforward.

For apples, you asked about apples, for apples, there are some sort of ubiquitous pests, specifically codling moth and fire blight, cedar apple rust, that in terms of for codling moth, it's pretty much you have to manage for it if you don't want holes in your apples.

Although if you're in the eastern part of the state, the codling moth pressure is not as high.

We've done surveys over there and yeah, it's just, it's not as big of a threat.

But in Western Montana you've gotta be able to, there's a few things that you have to be able to take care of and we've been working with orchards and apple growers across the state to give them some new tools through some integrated pest management tools because when you're controlling those insects, it's really about getting the treatment out at the right time 'cause insects don't look at their calendar, they don't look at their phone and figure out what day it is.

It's just temperature based.

And so if, on our website there's a lot of information where you can look up for your location in the state based on the climate there, when you'd want to be treating for these fruit pests.

- Okay, sounds good.

A wheat question.

This came in from Big Sandy.

And this gentleman says his winter wheat has greened up but doesn't look very vigorous.

He wants to know what the general condition of winter wheat crop around the state is.

Have you looked or heard?

- Well, it kind of depends on where you're at at the state.

Right, I actually, Jack, you told me that in certain parts of the state, I think it's more like Southern Montana, there's definitely winter wheat greening up and with, you know, the warm weather last week, a lot of winter wheat more greening up.

So if you're in an area where winter wheat is greening up and then you have parts of the field that are yellow, this could indicate some winter kill, could suggest some kind of root diseases that have kind of encroached in.

I mean, I feel like it's still pretty early in the season, so I just give it a couple more days or even weeks and see how the crop is recovering as we're actually moving into spring.

And if you are concerned about your crop, think of the Schutter Diagnostic Lab here on campus and send us a sample.

You can find all the information you need on that at MSUExtension/diagnostics.

- Okay, thank you.

Question for Eric.

Do you see an economic benefit from an increasing fruit crop production in the state?

- Well, it probably depends on, you know, where you are.

But I think, like Zach was saying, you got a growing tourist industry coming to town, a market for those products.

And I think if you're in the right environment, then it certainly makes sense.

I know with a lot of our major commodities that we're exporting out, there's a lot of talk of value added.

And certainly with fruits I think you can see you know, value added where you're taking the production.

- [Jack] Right.

- I'm assuming all the way to the end user and, you know, looking for those premiums, so yeah.

- Yeah, good point.

And if you don't believe they're value added, go to a farmer's market sometime.

- Yeah.

- And look at all the jellies, jams, various different things people have done with locally-produced items.

It's pretty amazing.

- [Eric] Yeah.

- It's not big dollars but to people that are doing it, a few hundred bucks here and there can make a big difference.

- Well, and those can be, you know, great souvenirs for people who are visiting and they could be great things, at least, you know, for people who are in Montana, residents who wanna buy stuff from their neighbors and you know, people nearby, so.

- And gifts, yeah.

- Gifts, absolutely, yeah.

- Everything from Montana is a good gift.

- And a lot of the farms we work with, it's sort of, they occupy a unique niche in Montana agriculture.

It's not gonna replace wheat.

Fruit production isn't gonna replace wheat, cattle or major crops, but it does have an opportunity to conserve or maintain some of our most valuable ag lands.

So like I work and live in the Bitterroot Valley, which is one of the jewels of irrigated agriculture in the state.

- [Jack] True.

- And is like the Gallatin Valley, is facing a lot of pressure to develop and you're not gonna be able to keep land and agriculture if you're just doing cattle and wheat in these metro areas or suburban areas.

But if you had a, you know, with berries, with apples, these fruit crops, vegetable crops as well, you can have a viable farm on 10 acres and employ a lot of folks and add to the local economy and to the local selection of fresh fruits and vegetables.

- Sounds good, all right.

- I just do wanna add the Montana Department of Ag is really keen on promoting like value-added agriculture.

So there's a lot of resources there with the Department of Ag and the state to assist people getting started.

- Yeah.

- With a lot of these smaller agricultural things.

- We actually have a question we'll get to later on.

And person in the Joliet area, which used to be a production area for apples, would like to start a one-acre orchard.

And while we have that up, how, what did they need to do to be successful to start a one-acre orchard and how long before they would be producing apples for sale or whatever they're growing?

- So the key, one of the keys for successful fruit planting is understand your own objectives and motives before you plant anything and understand the markets.

An acre of apples can produce tons of apples every year, more than a family can use.

Who's gonna buy them?

What are you gonna do with them?

There are plenty of varieties that can grow there.

But a lot of the folks I talk to, I really encourage them to think about yeah, down the line.

'Cause it is gonna be three or four years before you get into production.

But think, talk to people who are buying apples.

Do some research in your local markets and that'll guide what you should plant.

And also what labor is available?

I mean, these crops are potentially very profitable, but they're also very labor intensive.

And Montana isn't a cheap or abundant labor state.

And so how do you solve that?

In general, most of our growers solve that either through diversification, so they can spread out when they have to harvest by growing a lot of different fruits or vegetables and by mechanization and with apples, that's a little harder.

But with grapes and berries, there's a lot of combines for fruit, basically.

- Yeah, well just to add to that, 'cause I think, you know, Zach brings up an important point of when you're in those channels, you do need to be pretty good at, you need to be entrepreneurial.

- Yeah.

- Finding those markets and you know, a lot of time farmers, you know, they understand about farming, you know, they're pretty good at those.

But then marketing might be a completely different game.

- [Zach] Totally.

- But you might also be, you know, very good at finding those markets.

But it is critical in those.

- And that's another unique aspect of specialty crop production in the state is that you're not just a farmer, you are running a small business.

- [Eric] Yeah.

- So you have to, you're, yeah, not just picking and taking care of the plants, but marketing, storing, adding value.

And we, so at the Western Ag Research Center in the Bitterroot, the MSU research farm that I manage, we try to help farmers identify what they can grow profitably, how to grow it profitably.

But we really rely on other partners like Montana Farm Connect in Missoula to do that small business education because it is, yeah, it's much more comprehensive.

You can't go down the street to your apple elevator and drop off your load of apples.

- [Eric] Yeah.

- [Jack] Okay.

- You can with the barley farm.

- You got a bunch of questions coming.

I want to get to more of 'em as we move along.

Before we do that, Uta, you've got what appears to be a sick plant there.

- [Uta] Yes.

- A conifer of some kind.

- Part of a plant, yes.

- [Jack] Part of a plant.

- Yeah.

(panel laughs) - [Jack] Thank you, I did know that one.

(panel laughs) - Know it all.

(panel laughs) No, so this seems a good time of the year to talk about winter kill, which we are seeing in our conifers.

So this is a sample of a spruce tree that was sent to the diagnostic lab and the client was concerned that this might be some kind of disease.

And in this case, this is winter kill.

And so I thought I'd talk just a little bit about how it, we can differentiate between what might be disease and what's like environmental occurrence.

So basically, winter kill happens when our evergreens are running out of water throughout the winter because as they're staying evergreen or as they're always green, they're transpiring, they're like using water up, right?

And if the water in the ground is frozen or there wasn't enough to begin with, they run out of it.

And so basically, they burn.

And so what you can see is this kind of winter kill affects the youngest growth.

So it will be the top of the tree and the younger needles on the tip of the branches.

Oftentimes, you will see it more severe on the south and southwest-exposed But if you're in a windy location, it could be all around the tree, okay?

And I think we had a picture up just now to just give you an example of what diseases would look like.

Maybe we can bring this up again.

So diseases often, you know, attack the older needles first.

So we would find those symptoms at the lower part of the tree and the inner needles or the, of the inner branch.

And then oftentimes with diseases, I mean we see fruiting bodies which are kind of just structures that the pathogen produces where they release more spores.

And so the smaller pictures on the left and right are just examples of that.

And so with winter kill and with disease management, the first and foremost thing to do is just to ensure good plant health and reduce stress.

So planting them in the right environment, especially for winter kill going into the winter, watering adequately is a good strategy.

And then, so if you know that you have disease or maybe you send in a sample and we diagnose it to be a fungal disease, spring, like in the next few weeks is actually a good time to consider a fungal, a fungicide treatment for intervention.

What we wanna do is protect the newly emerging needles with a fungicide.

Yeah, so basically you wanna apply like a chlorothalonil or a copper-type product when the needles are emerged halfway.

So you have half the needle exposed and then you probably will wanna repeat that treatment once the needles are fully outgrown about two weeks later or so.

- [Jack] Okay, thank you.

- Yeah.

- Frank, the caller from Sidney and I also saw this in the paper the other day.

This person saw that the deer tick, not deer, black-legged tick, which I think is also known as a deer tick?

- [Frank] Yes.

- Has been found in Dawson County, which is Glendive, and it's known to be the primary carrier of Lyme disease.

- [Frank] Yes.

- Is that a big concern in this state right now?

- Yes it is.

I would say it's a very big concern.

That one was actually pulled from a dog.

- [Jack] Right.

- So it was pulled in, it was actually to the Schutter Diagnostic Lab.

So again, thank you.

(panel laughs) - [Uta] It was Marni Rolston.

- Yes.

- [Uta] Right, yeah.

- So she found that and she passed it on.

So we also are home to the Rocky Mountain Laboratories.

So that's a major area for tick research.

So I, the Lyme disease was actually isolated there in Hamilton, Montana.

- Okay.

- And it was started early on in the 20th century for Rocky Mountain spotted fever, another tick-borne disease.

So having this additional pressure is a big concern for us, especially 'cause we're a big recreation state.

- I will say I fished out of Glendive at a friend of mine's pond out there in early May.

And the number of ticks on my two Golden Retrievers at the time, it was unbelievable.

They were only out for a couple hours and their face was covered with ticks.

- [Uta] Oh boy.

- It probably was not the black-legged tick at the time.

Probably wood tick.

- Yeah, you, the size is a big concern.

So our, I grew up in the East, so I'm very familiar with the black-legged tick.

It's a lot smaller.

- [Jack] Okay.

- It's like a pin prick.

It'll almost look like a freckle, like a moving freckle.

So it's not as big as the ones we normally see here in Montana, which makes it more harder to see and more, and that's why it's such a concern because it's so tiny and harder to detect.

- You know, I'm gonna tell you how old I am, when I went to school as an undergraduate at CSU, I had to have a shot to prevent Rocky Mountain spotted fever before you could go to school there.

There is nothing for Lyme disease like that.

I know there's treatments, preventative like Bravecto, which a vet can give for dogs and cats, but nothing for humans is there?

- Not that I know of, no.

- Okay.

- So I have a question for Frank.

So I mean, having identified this black-legged tick as almost was like a lucky circumstance, right?

- Yes.

- That somebody found it and noticed the difference to the regular ticks and thought of the diagnostic lab to bring it to.

Do you know if there's any kind of statewide, systematic survey going on for ticks or do you think at this point this would be a good idea or worth pursuing?

- So a lot of that's done, I believe, by the Rocky Mountain Laboratory.

They would do occasional tick surveys.

So they're also aware of it too.

So I believe they might do some, but I know with cuts to federal funding, the fact of that happening soon is, could be doubtful.

- [Uta] Yeah.

- So I don't know if there's gonna be anything.

I know with the state itself, there isn't any sort of survey for that.

- Okay, thank you.

Something to be concerned about and Department of Ag and the Schutter Diagnostic Lab will be on top of this, no doubt about it.

- [Frank] Yeah.

- Okay, I will point out though we are a plant health clinic, so tick diagnoses are not like our daily bread and butter, so.

(panel laughs) So like kind of moderate the amount of ticks you're bringing this summer 'cause we also have some crops to take care of.

- [Jack] Thank you.

- Also, you wanna put them in a vial of isopropanol.

- Yes, thanks Frank.

- Or alcohol of some sort?

- Yeah.

- Vodka work?

- Vodka will work.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Anything, not free roaming ticks, because then you'll be sending ticks in the mail, and.

- Yeah, don't do that.

- I don't recommend that.

- Okay, I appreciate it.

This is a good one.

I've got a couple good ones coming up.

First of all, for Eric, forecast for egg prices with Easter coming up.

- [Eric] Ag prices?

- [Frank] Egg or ag?

- [Uta] Eggs.

- [Jack] Egg.

(panel laughs) - Can I do ag instead?

- [Jack] No.

(panel laughs) - Because I don't think you're gonna like the egg prices.

- [Uta] Don't need to gold, make them golden anymore.

- Yeah.

- Just like, just an egg is like woo.

- Those plastic eggs.

Maybe there's a market for those.

- Yeah.

- Probably.

- Plastic eggs.

Yeah, you know with bird flu and just culling a lot of animals, the price of eggs have gone up.

You know, I think the forecasts I've seen are at least for the next year before they'll start to decrease.

I mean, until we get a handle on supply, you're gonna see those high egg prices.

- [Jack] All right.

- Which is not a month from now.

(panel laughs) - We really, bird flu is the big issue there, absolutely.

- [Eric] Yeah.

- And on that note, and I don't think we have a good answer for this, but we will bring it up anyway.

Chris sent this in via email.

He says, "We get inundated by Canada geese in our pastures and hay fields.

We are immediately adjacent to hundreds acres of riparian and river bottom lands they can easily access.

They grazed the clover and grasses down to the dirt in our fields.

It negatively impacts growth in the field.

Any good ideas to keep them out would be appreciated.

Dogs work, but they just fly to the next field.

Cannons, wildlife cannons.

But another option is call your local Game and Fish and they might figure out a way to, not remove 'em but discourage 'em, so.

- What do they do at the Berkeley Pit?

Don't they have these air horns?

- Yeah, and the other issue they have is with as many geese as they have, they're concerned about bird flu.

- [Uta] Yeah.

- Yeah.

And definitely we have had a case of Canada goose here in Gallatin County that had the bird flu, that's been verified.

Okay, a question for Zach from Drummond.

This person wants to know can we grow avocados in Montana and if we can't, where are most of them growing?

(Zach laughs) - No.

Well, unless you're gonna grow 'em inside, you can't grow avocados in Montana.

Most of our avocados are grown in Mexico and will become, yeah, will become more expensive.

- [Jack] Yes, okay.

And on that note.

- That's easy.

- They would like to follow that up.

(panel laughs) - Follow that up?

- Yeah.

- Oh.

- This person would also like to know is avocado a vegetable or a fruit?

- Both.

- [Jack] Both.

- [Uta] What?

- Yeah, I mean we have this, we have scientific terms and culinary terms.

In culinary terms, tomatoes, avocados, they're vegetables.

But scientifically, any plant part that's used, that comes from flowers and it contains seeds is a fruit.

So most of our grains and vegetables are fruits.

The only real vegetables would be like celery or carrots, plant parts that aren't part of, derived from a flower.

- [Jack] I didn't know that.

I learned.

- You learn something new every day.

(panel laughs) - And I need to, believe me, no doubt about that.

From Chinook, this question is for Uta.

This person wants to plant some of their own barley.

They want to have it treated, but they notice a lot of black, what they believe is ergot, which I suspect it is, in that seed.

What do they need to do and can they seed that?

- Well, so I guess what they need to do, it depends on how much there is in there.

So just to introduce that, ergot is a fungal disease.

And at the end of the season, that fungus produces what we call sclerotia, which are these black, funky-shaped grains.

And so they wanna probably see if they can clean out some of the ergots.

So ergots are a lot bigger and also lighter.

So there are like gravity-based methods.

You can separate the grain from the ergot, so using seeds and the, what do you call like the.

- The blower?

- The blower, thank you.

- Yeah.

- Simple words to kind of get rid of as much ergot as possible is what I would recommend.

And then there are some other management strategies that they can implement, so planting one to two inches deep is gonna basically prevent a lot of those sclerotia to germinate.

They produce like what looks like a little fungus that releases spores.

So that's a good strategy.

There's also research that suggests using triazole fungicide, like difenoconazole that reduces the germination rate of the sclerotia.

It's not 100% fixed, but it's just gonna knock the numbers down.

And so this is what they can do with that seed lot.

I would certainly not plant in the field where they got that contaminated seed last season.

I would rotate to a broadleaf crop in that particular field.

And then just generally speaking, oftentimes the ergot moves in from the grassy edges around, edges around the field.

And so keeping a close eye on those and mowing them before they flower and set seed is a good way to prevent that fungi or this pathogen moving into the field.

And then as we're moving to harvest, scout the field before you're harvesting to figure out if there are areas with heavy ergot infestation and that you wanna harvest separately into a different grain bin is a really good way to kind of knock that down down the road, yeah.

- Okay, perfect, thank you.

You know, we had a person send in a photograph.

It's an excellent photograph.

It's from James.

He wanted to know if it's purslane and if we could pull that up on the screen over.

Yeah, there it is.

We don't know.

It has some characteristics of purslanes.

We don't have a true weed scientist here.

I think it might be some type of a knotweed.

I see some knots that are suggestive of knotweed.

I tell you what we'll do, next time we have a weed scientist on here, not a weed ecologist, but a weed scientist.

(panel laughs) We will find out what this is and let you know at that time.

But thank you for the picture.

Eric.

- [Eric] Yeah.

- From Helena.

And I wanna thank this person from Helena because anytime we can put an economist on the spot, it's good.

- [Uta] Don't you love coming here?

(panel laughs) - Sitting right next to you, that's optional, I can call in.

- This person wants to know why avocados are so much more expensive than bananas when bananas are more perishable.

I think that's a good question for an economists, have at it.

- Are avocados more expensive than bananas?

- Than bananas.

- Okay, well I can tell you where prices come from.

- [Jack] Yeah, sure, and no backtracking now.

(Eric laughs) So I, you know what?

I have no idea.

I mean I, you know, I think the one thing right now you can think of is, as Zach mentioned earlier, a lot of avocados do come from Mexico.

And so, you know, with some tariffs on Mexican product coming to the US, that's gonna add to that cost.

But then other things go in to the price of the product.

You can think about like the demand, the demand for avocados is really high right now.

So that's gonna bring the price up.

I don't know too much about the cost of production for avocados and for bananas and how that compares.

My, in my head I envision bananas just kind of growing on their own and avocados might be a bit more labor intensive.

(panel laughs) So.

- Yeah, that would also.

(indistinct crosstalk) - Higher water need, yeah.

- Yeah.

- Okay, that was pretty good backtracking.

- Yeah.

(panel laughs) - On the one hand, on the other hand, right?

- Yeah, right, okay.

We have several questions here about some of the new things that we could grow and we'll go through these real quickly.

Number one, is there a hardy pear variety from Montana?

- Take your pick.

There are many hardy pear varieties.

There's probably at least 30 different pears you could grow in Montana.

- Best peach variety?

- Reliance is good, but if you're growing peaches for most areas of Montana, if you're zone five or colder, don't count on peaches every year.

If you're down, it's odd that the actual banana belt of Montana is on the Canadian border.

Like if you go up by Thompson Falls and up towards Libby, there, you can get peaches every year.

And the only peach orchard in the state is near Plains and they plant mostly Reliance and Contender.

- Okay, raspberries and apricots?

- Raspberries, again, you have a whole bunch of different options.

With raspberries, you're gonna, the main two classes of raspberries are floricane raspberries that are gonna bear on last year's growth, which are, tend to be more cold hardy, but there's many good primocane bearing varieties, which will fruit on this year's growth.

So they're usually a later crop.

In Montana, usually what limits those primocane raspberries is that we just, if you're in a cooler area, higher elevation area, you just don't have enough summer to get much of a late summer, fall crop in those primocane varieties.

- Okay, and one last question before we move on to some others.

This person wants to know what's your favorite wine that's produced in Montana?

- That's like asking which your favorite kids are.

This week is the joint conference of the Montana Grape and Wine Association and the Berry Growers in Missoula.

If anyone's interested in tasting some of this wine, registration is still open.

And if I, so if I gotta pick, I'm gonna say my favorite winery in the state is Tongue River Winery in.

- [Jack] Mile City.

- Mile City.

But mainly because they've been, Bob and Marilyn have been such pioneers and have helped grow the industry across the state and they've been growing not just grapes, but a lot of other fruits that thrive in Montana and teaching other growers and winemakers just how to find success in the state.

- If you can grow and make wine in Mile City, there's no place in Montana that you can't make wine.

- Totally.

- Yes.

- Well.

- I misspoke.

- Bozeman, it would be very difficult to make, to grow grapes in Bozeman.

And it's a great example of the challenges that fruit growers face in Montana with just cold hardiness 'cause we tend to think of it as being winter cold is what kills the fruit, but it really isn't.

It is for some things, but it, that's an incomplete picture.

A lot of the areas in the state, we also deal with spring warmups.

So we get, and then it gets cold again or sudden cold in the fall.

That shoulder season cold is really damaging to a lot of our perennials.

And the other issue we have, especially with grapes, is that our summers are beautiful, cool nights, not too hot, but a plant like grapes needs a long, hot summer.

And so in Eastern Montana, grapes have no problem ripening.

But in Western Montana and, or if you're in Bozeman, you're just gonna get sour grapes because you don't have the heat to sweeten up the grapes.

- Okay, thank you.

Frank, a call from Bozeman.

They say they've been getting a spotted brown stink bug, whatever that is, in their house recently.

What is it and what do you do about it?

- It's most likely the brown marmorated stink bug.

- [Zach] In Bozeman?

- I don't think it, they probably shouldn't have it in Bozeman.

It might be in Billings or.

- [Jack] Okay, yeah.

- 'Cause it's been found in a few areas and it hasn't been found in Bozeman yet.

- All right.

- But it could be here.

It just would depend on if you find it.

But if you find it in your house, vacuum it up and that's really all I can do.

- Just like the boxelder bug.

- Yeah, yeah, it'll be just like a boxelder.

- The best vacuum sweeper is?

(panel laughs) Okay, I don't get an answer to that one.

- The one that's closest.

(panel laughs) - All right, joking aside, from Missoula, the six-year-old Wealthy apple has grown very little, no blossoms, no fruit.

What's wrong with it?

Missoula.

- So Wealthy is a old and quite reliable apple variety.

It would be, so if it's not fruiting, one, it may just be on a larger rootstock.

So all, most fruit and all apples are grafted onto a rootstock.

And that will determine the size of the plant, but also how precocious, how early it bears fruit.

And so if you're, if you have a tree that's grafted onto a standard size apple tree, it can take six to seven years to flower and produce fruit.

Other issues that can lead to lack of fruit production are cold winters.

We've had some really challenging winters in Montana but in the last couple years.

But the Wealthy has done fine in the Bitterroot and Missoula area.

Micronutrient deficiencies can also cause lack of fruiting.

So if it continues, you can do foliar tests for boron and other micronutrients that are important in flower formation.

- Okay.

- Could it be related to pollinators?

- Well, if they don't see blossoms and if they're in, if you're in a urban setting, you probably have a crab apple that can pollinate your tree somewhere.

Bees move around a lot.

If you're out on the, if you're the only person on that section of land and that's just the one apple variety, often apples do need a different variety to cross-pollinate.

- I agree with you there, okay.

Eric, this person from Scobey is somewhat concerned that we might be losing our spring wheat export market due to tariffs and they may be replaced by Canada exporting to some of our partners.

What do you think about that?

- Yeah, you know, a lot of our spring wheat heads out to the port and goes to Asia Pacific region.

You know, our biggest customers, Japan and South Korea, we haven't really seen a whole lot of, you know, trade conflict with those two countries.

China will sort of go in and out of buying our products.

They were a big buyer recently.

Obviously, we have some trade conflicts there.

But you know, I think our traditional partners are still very active on the global market.

Mexico does buy a lot of wheat, probably not from Montana but from other parts of the US.

But if that wheat is leaving the market, you know, then it does affect even if our product doesn't go into that same country, you know, it affects global demand, global supply.

So I guess I'm not concerned about, you know, the long-term viability of the wheat markets because of, you know, what's going on with trade right now.

- Okay, good answer, thank you.

That was a better answer than the banana.

- Was it, wow.

(panel laughs) - It's more of his wheelhouse.

- Yeah, right, gimme another random question, right?

Another random answer.

- Okay, I just had to say that.

From Billings, a caller wants to know what happened to McIntosh apples in Montana?

Do we still grow 'em?

- We do.

I mean, and it's a great example of a variety that sort of found a new lease on life.

The McIntosh was one of the primary apples that were planted in the Bitterroot and other areas in Montana.

It's a great apple.

It's also an apple that thrives with cool nights.

It develops really good texture and flavor.

And so if you try to grow a McIntosh in Washington, it turns out kind of mushy and bland and McIntosh and McIntosh cider has found a ready market now in Washington, Oregon because they can't grow a great McIntosh there and we can here in Montana.

But to get back to what happened with those McIntosh, at the time, in the sort of the end of the apple boom was caused by many different factors through the '20s and '30s.

One was growers couldn't get reliable transportation to markets, so they're shipping to Chicago, Boston, New York, getting, the middlemen were getting premium prices for those apples.

And the folks in Montana sometimes didn't get paid.

Two, initially the Bitterroot apples or Montana apples were known as the apples you could eat in the dark because they weren't full of worms.

But those pests eventually got to Montana.

So often you have this pest honeymoon when you first move a crop into an area.

And that was over for us.

The other major factor that happened was through the New Deal and the development of irrigation projects that's a easier place to grow apples and it's an easier place to ship globally 'cause they can put their apples on a ship on the Columbia and ship anywhere in the world.

We didn't have that advantage.

- A quick question kind of as a follow-up.

This person was interested in talking about expanding or starting an acreage.

They wanna know how many apple trees per acre?

- That's a good question.

So hold, again gets back to rootstocks.

Old apple orchards, where you have trees on standard-sized rootstocks, those trees are gonna be 25, 30 feet tall, planted 20 to 30 feet apart.

That's your classic, old-style orchard.

Now with dwarfing rootstock, you can plant trees a foot and a half, two feet apart in a row on a dwarfing rootstock.

And you'll get production in three years and you're planting over 1,000 trees an acre.

- [Jack] Expensive to start.

- Expensive to start, but you don't have to be on a ladder to prune, to pick, you can spray.

And really the industry's gone that, gone to this high density trellis orchard because you can grow a pretty dessert apple.

And the labor in terms of picking is so much less.

You don't have people running up and down ladders and the total production per acre is so much higher.

- And OHSA likes it better.

- [Frank] Yeah.

- [Eric] Question.

- Yes.

- With apples, I mean what are the end markets that, I mean you mentioned cider, you mentioned, you know, dessert apples.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Are those kind of the primary markets that you're, these are feeding into or what?

- Yeah, primarily.

- Okay.

- And in Montana too, for cider it's both fresh cider and hard cider.

We have I think almost 10 different sort of, going the path of microbreweries in the state.

- Yeah.

- These small local cideries that can use apples.

- I'm also wondering, you mentioned those miniature rootstocks or dwarf?

- Yeah, dwarfing rootstocks.

- And the regular ones.

Does that affect the hardiness of the apples?

Like, or is one more?

- So that's a common misconception is that dwarfing rootstocks are not as cold hardy and standard rootstocks are quite cold hardy.

But it's just like varieties.

There is a genetic component but it's not as simple as like dwarfs will wilt in the cold and standard sizes will make it through the winter.

We just went through the coldest, the record cold last January in Western Montana and we were almost 35 below at the research farm.

And I was lucky enough to have a rootstock trial in the ground of just semi-dwarf and dwarfing rootstocks.

And some of those, all of them survived, other rootstock varieties, all of them died, so.

- Okay, interesting.

I have a comment here and I like comments and I'll read this one from Helena.

This caller has a friend who has grown apricots consistently right near the Capitol with great luck.

Is Helena a little more protected?

And the guys here in Bozeman that I know I've had apricot maybe one in 10 years.

- Yeah, so in town you have these, so you have these little spots where maybe it's on a more protected area or surrounded by structures that soak up the heat and buffer it a little bit.

So you can get away with, if you have a magic spot, you can get away with more than you can in other places.

But the, it is true that a lot of the way we think about cold hardiness with like USDA Cold Hardiness Zones, it's a, that's just the average minimum winter temperature.

It doesn't directly relate to what you can get away with for fruit.

So for example, Billings is a zone four and the Bitterroot is a zone five.

But we have pretty much exactly the same risk of getting a 35 to 40 below degree cold, which is where we see a lot of the injury in our fruit trees, so.

- (indistinct), Frank, sore subjects for people in the state, grasshoppers.

From Fallon, Montana.

They want your expertise on saying how many we're gonna have this year.

- It was another high count last year.

So there is a lot of red in the projection map.

And I would say it depends on again how the spring, it's been high for the past few years.

So that population's been building up, it's been knocked down but it still hasn't been knocked down that much.

We've had some kind of cool, wet springs to keep it from getting too overpopulated in the summertime.

So it really depends on how the spring will be.

You're still gonna have a lot of grasshoppers out there.

But if it's gonna be a serious problem, depends on how the spring will go.

But that population has been building up for the past three years.

So we're gonna be quite high.

- Interesting.

Do they cause problems for our wineries out at Tongue River?

I know grasshoppers like fruit.

- Yeah, if you're, if your orchard or vineyard is sitting, is the only green spot left in a sea of wheat that's drying up, they're gonna be a problem.

Especially in Eastern Montana.

But I've also seen, we've had a few bad years even in Western Montana and it's the only time I've seen an apple orchard that looked like they were celebrating sad Christmas 'cause in the fall, there were no leaves on the trees anymore.

It was just apples hanging there.

They defoliated the whole thing.

- Okay, I'm not sure we can answer this question.

It came from Corvallis and I'll throw it out.

What is an effective way for a person to protect their dogs and livestock against the black tick with Lyme disease?

I know about dogs, I don't know about livestock and humans.

Yeah, I'm told it takes 24 hours after a tick inserts its fangs into you before it transmits the disease.

- With Lyme disease you have 48 hours.

- [Jack] 48 hours.

- Yeah you have, so yeah, I'd say just.

- [Jack] Check.

- Check.

- [Zach] Yeah.

- Insecticide sprays are good.

Long socks, pants, sleeves, check again.

- All right, for dogs there's a product called Bravecto and it's a Merck product that's a preventative.

And again if a tick latches onto a dog, that insecticide or I'd call it a, what's a, it's not an insecticide, what would you call it?

- Miticide - (indistinct), yeah.

Paricide.

- Yeah.

- It will get that tick before it transfers the disease.

So anyway, that's the best we can do it.

Frank, you got more?

- Yeah, and when you take off the tick, you really want to be careful not to squeeze the body 'cause then you can cause some backwash, almost and.

- [Zach] Really?

- Squeeze it into your body.

- [Zach] It's a pleasant mental image.

- Yeah, you really want to use some fine point tweezers or forceps and grab it right by the skin and kind of wiggle it out.

And because you, because it, they are barbed.

They are barbed microscopic that keep it really inside that skin.

So you really wanna just wiggle it out and try to pull that out as much as you can.

And it might hurt, but you really don't wanna squeeze that body too much.

- So the old time, they said take a match, a hot match and put it on a tick and it backs out.

Is that true?

- You could do that, but the risk of burning is probably high.

- [Jack] Okay.

- [Zach] Right.

(panel laughs) - I don't want the fire.

- Really?

- I just want, you'll have to weigh the risk.

- Yeah.

- But it will, it'll.

- It'll back out or kill it.

- Don't get rid of the tick.

- Yeah, it's probably not a good deal.

Okay.

Missoula, comment, they love this program but besides that, they highly recommend a trip to Apple Valley in Victorville in California if you like apples and want to gain more knowledge about 'em.

Have you been there?

- No, no.

We have plenty of great orchards in Montana that I would encourage people to visit if, we help those orchards.

We put together a mtapples.org website if you're interested in finding information on growing apples or information on orchards in the state or in your area and cideries, those are all listed on that mtapples.org.

- Okay, I knew this question would come in, this happens to be one that the economist can probably answer very fluidly.

Why are cattle numbers still decreasing?

- [Eric] Oh, that's a good one.

- Yeah, I thought it would be.

- Yeah.

(panel laughs) Actually, you know they went up this last year.

- Did they?

- Well at least for Montana.

- [Jack] Okay.

- Nationwide, they're still going down but yeah, the inventory numbers as of January 1 from 2025, 1% up.

So after three years of dropping.

Yeah, why are they dropping?

Cattle prices are high so it is usually you would see that kind of a response.

Really it's, you know, ranchers haven't been willing to expand their herd.

You know, they have to forego all that revenue that they could sell cattle for right now where it's 2.80 a pound, they've gotta take their chances in a couple of years down the road.

And so what we've seen is, you know, they're just not willing to do that right now.

All the signs are there for some rebuilding, though.

At some point we're gonna have to see some more rebuilding.

- Okay.

- And until then, prices will stay kinda where they are.

- Are beef prices still rising?

- They've kind of, they're pretty flat right now.

- Okay, and our beef export market is in no danger with tariffs?

- So our major partners there, Canada, Mexico, a bit of a problem.

South Korea, Japan, less of a problem although I think we're, you know, looking for other markets to sell our products into.

Besides, you know, Japan is having a slight decrease in population.

So we sell most of our beef domestically.

Domestic demand has been pretty steady.

But yeah, exports are where we're gonna see any kind of growth.

- Okay, comment from Billings.

We had some more information on the black-legged tick.

They said it's most commonly referred to as the deer tick, which I think we mentioned early on.

And they claim it needs a white-tailed deer or mice as a host.

They mentioned that it is not originated in Montana, is more of an issue east of Montana, in Minnesota and the rest of.

The caller from Corvallis, probably not high tick country I would not believe.

- I mean, no, I mean the Rocky Mountain Lab in Hamilton was started because of the epidemics of the spotted tick fever that were really causing big impacts in the West.

So it was started there and they also did this pioneering work on Lyme disease.

Big, yeah, especially on the west side of the Bitterroot in the spring, it's big tick country but I don't think we have deer ticks in the area.

But Frank, are other native ticks competent vectors for Lyme disease?

- [Frank] No, no.

- Yeah.

- They'll carry other things that are similar.

- [Zach] Right.

- Okay, thank you.

Enough on ticks for now.

Uta, you had something.

(panel laughs) - [Zach] I could go on.

- I know you could.

(panel laughs) Uta, you had a quick show and tell.

we Don't have a lot of time left.

Cedar apple rot's the galls that you see on junipers.

- Yeah.

- [Jack] It's one of the things that made me interested in plant pathology.

- Yeah, same.

- [Jack] Quickly explain.

- Same here.

Yeah, maybe you can pull the picture up again.

So that's something you might be observing in the next few weeks as we're getting into spring weather.

So this is a rust disease that has two hosts, as the name suggests.

It's junipers and cedars that, where the rust will produce these galls that you can see.

And in the springtime, when we have that wet weather, they will produce these orange kind of fingers that are actually spore masses that will travel to then the other hosts which are apples and crabapples and sometimes even hawthorn, where you will see these yellowish spots and sometimes like gall-like or finger-like structures on the other side of the, on the lower side of the leaf.

And so if that's something, so it's mostly like a cosmetic disease on both the apple and then the juniper or cedar.

But if you wanted to manage that, well, A, it's like you don't wanna plant apples and junipers like really close to one another 'cause you just ping-pong that disease.

You could prune out those branches that have the galls and if you're really concerned about your apples, when you see those orange fingers producing, you could spray a fungicide to protect your apples from infection.

I dunno it's economical.

- We don't see much on apples around here for, and I've never understood why other than it's drier than a lot of areas.

Have you seen any cedar apple rust out in your apples?

- Occasionally, you also see it a lot on serviceberries or juneberries - Serviceberry, yeah.

- And that's where you get, it's still minor but you'll, if you're grow, there are some commercial varieties of serviceberry or juneberry that are really delicious that you'll get more fruit loss, but it's still pretty minor with cedar apple rust.

- Okay, (indistinct) interesting and I don't think we can answer this one.

It's from Billings.

The caller wants to know who to contact in Extension or the Experiment Station that would have old records about her family members who worked at the Huntley station in the 1920s.

I will ask around and I'll see if I can find any information on it.

- I would start at the MSU Southern Ag Research Center.

- Exactly.

- Because they would have those records there.

- And that's over in Huntley?

- Huntley, yes.

- Okay, quick question.

Wheat prices gonna go up, yes or no?

- Probably not.

They look pretty flat right now.

The forecast looking out six months, a year, two years, they're all about $6 right now.

That's about kind of where we are right now.

- Okay, Frank, anything quick you'd like to add about watching for insects this year?

We got about 10, 15 seconds.

- I don't have anything more.

(panel laughs) - Okay, nothing more.

- Wear insecticide when you go out recreating.

(blues guitar music) - Okay folks, we're coming down the end of another program.

I wanna thank everybody for being here.

Zach, it's good to have you come over.

- [Zach] Yeah.

- It's always fun to learn a lot about something we don't know a lot about and that's fruit trees in this state.

We didn't get to (indistinct).

That's a new thing.

- Yeah.

- We'll bring that up another time.

Next week, we have President Cruzado on the program and we're happy to talk about everything she learned this year.

With that, thanks for watching, goodnight.

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

(blues guitar music continues) - [Narrator 2] "Montana AG Live" is made possible by the Montana Department of Agriculture, MSU Extension, the MSU Ag Experiment Station of the College of Agriculture, the Montana Wheat & Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery and Landscaping, the Gallatin Gardeners Club and the Montana Federation of Garden Clubs.

(gentle music)