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

(upbeat music) - You're watching Montana Ag Live, originating today from the studios of KUSM on the very enchanting campus of Montana State University, and coming to you via your Montana public television system.

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

Very happy to be your host this evening.

We're gonna have an exciting program tonight, and we're gonna learn a whole lot of new things because I am very interested in our guest this evening, 'cause he's talking about potentially a whole new crop for the state of Montana.

We'll get to that in a minute.

Before we do, I wanna introduce this evening's panel.

?Uta McKelvy.

Uta is our plant pathologist.

She's been here several times.

She always brings a great big smile, which is really refreshing, so give us a big smile.

(group laughing) Next, Perry Miller.

Perry is our cropping systems agronomist.

Perry is very well-versed on a lot of the minority, or secondary crops that we have in the state.

They used to be called secondary crops, but today they're major crops anymore, like peas and lentils.

We're gonna talk about winter canola.

We'll get back to Perry in a little bit because it's a fascinating concept to grow a whole new winter hardy crop here in the state of Montana.

Joining us via Zoom tonight, Clain Jones.

Clain is our soil fertility expert.

I have the first question for Clain.

I'm gonna bring that one up because I know it's gonna come in tonight, so we'll deal with that one right away.

Clain is very knowledgeable about all types of fertilizer for all types of plants, so if you have questions about soil fertility needs tonight, it's an excellent chance to get 'em answered.

Abi Saeed, our horticulturalist, and Abi is a wealth of knowledge about all kinds of crops and plants here in the state of Montana.

Answering the phone tonight, Nancy Blake and Judge Bruce Slovel, and glad to be here, aren't ya?

So with that, Perry, tell us a little bit about what you do.

- So I'm a cropping system scientist with MSU, and most of my research focuses on diversification of our wheat-based cropping systems.

So even though I'm playing with secondary crops, as you call 'em, I always do it with a mind to how they're gonna help or enhance the production of wheat or barley.

So I have a long list of legumes, pulse crops.

I think I've grown easily 60 different crops in my career.

So that doesn't mean I'm an expert on 60, so I get, it's a fun job.

I get to play with a lot of different crops.

And up on the screen right now is winter canola, and this is one I'm excited to be talking about tonight because it's one we've played with for a long time, and I saw this in a grower's field a few years ago, and it really caught my attention about what is possible and what I think is gonna be the future for this crop in Montana, but I'm sure we'll be getting back to that.

- So we have regular canola, which is planted in the spring.

When do you plant winter canola?

- Great question.

- You have a good answer.

(Perry laughing) - So right now we have a four-year project with three locations, Bozeman, Packhart, Moccasin, Camp McVeigh at Southern at Huntley, and we're trying to understand, one of the newer developments with winter canola is there's a summer seeding opportunity, and so we're trying to understand better when in the summer to seed that.

So obviously we're targeting Kemp Fallow where you'd have a window there, so it'd be like a really early seeded winter wheat crop if you like.

But if you seed it too early, then it uses a lot of water and uses nutrients, but if you try to wait 'til August, it is Montana, and dry land Montana.

How are you gonna get it established in August?

So if you get very far into September, the plants aren't big enough in most years to be hardy enough to survive the winter.

So that's the whole trick with winter canola, is to get it to survive the winter.

- Is there, what would be the advantage to winter canola over just planting spring canola?

- So I probably didn't call it out when that picture was up on the screen, but if you look, that date was May 16th.

- Wow.

- May 18th, pardon me.

- Oh, it's tonight.

Yeah, coincident with today's date.

And so that thing is in full flower, and the heat and drought isn't gonna hit that field for another six weeks, right?

Usually late June, early July, before you really start getting some major heat and drought stress.

And so think of the yield that gets formed before that heat.

So winter crops have that natural advantage in Montana, and so winter canola is actually a fairly drought-sensitive crop, but if you can get it flowering early and setting seed, I think it's got tremendous yield potential.

Our trial at the Pulse Farm this year, our very first flower was May 1st this year, and that's not the first time we've had a flower on May 1st.

So it's got lots of opportunity to be making pods and making seed before the drought hits.

- Out of curiosity, that's a great-looking field, canola.

Any idea what the yield on that field was?

- So I don't, that is the O'Hara Farm out of Fort Benton, and Mike told me what the yield was on that, but it was, I know it wasn't as good as he was hoping.

I think they were learning some harvesting lessons and whatnot, and that's one of the challenges with winter canola is that it's, the spring canolas now have shatter-resistant traits, genetically inserted in the crop, so they can be very forgiving at harvest.

Winter canola tends to be a little bit, actually quite a bit variable in its maturity, and so you can have dead, ripe plants, and if you have thinner spots that didn't survive the winter as well, they might be green or still flowering, and so how do you harvest that crop at a common stage?

So that is the next, there needs to be a genetic step to get that shatter-tolerance trait into winter canola, and then I think, I actually think it's gonna be a more prominently-grown crop in Montana than spring canola when that happens.

- Okay.

- And that'll probably take 10, 15 years, but I think it's gonna happen.

- I don't disagree with you.

I've seen it around, and when it survives, it's a beautiful crop, there's no doubt about it.

Clain, what about fertility for winter canola?

Is there a difference between fertilizing for winter canola and spring canola?

And also, how much fertilizer does canola require compared to, say, wheat?

- At this point, we don't think there's major differences in nutrient needs between the two, but honestly, there hasn't been a lot of research done.

Harry, in this current study, looking at different seeding dates is also looking at nitrogen rates and whether or not sulfur makes a difference or not.

But in general, we like to apply somewhere around three to three and a half pounds of nitrogen per bushel of canola, which is very similar to spring wheat crops.

And sulfur is the biggest, canola is the biggest need, or the biggest crop that needs the most sulfur of any crop that we grow here in Montana.

By far, it needs two to maybe three times as much sulfur as a lot of our standard cereals and pulse crops.

- Now, Clain, I think you told me there's something like a seven to one ratio between nitrogen and sulfur as a generality with winter canola or with canola in general, sorry, not just winter canola.

- Yeah, let's consider the amount of fertilizer or nitrogen that you need in a crop divided by the amount of sulfur that you need would be called the nitrogen to sulfur ratio.

And yes, that's somewhere around seven to one for canola and some other oil seeds.

A typical cereal might need somewhere around 17 to one.

So what that means is that the canola needs far more sulfur than our cereal crops do.

- Okay, thank you.

Switching over to anybody who wants to answer this question from Billings, does springing Roundup glyphosate on garden plants affect earthworms in the soil?

- I would, I'm not 100% sure, and I would wanna look that up, but I would wager that probably not because it binds really, really closely to soil particles.

So it wouldn't leach anywhere.

And it's usually gonna stay on the plant material at the surface as well.

So I would wager it probably doesn't have an impact.

- Well, visually, when I work in the garden and I do spray Roundup once early in the spring to get rid of a lot of the weeds before I till it.

And boy, I tell you afterwards, there's still plenty of worms there.

- I spot spray my garden very, very sparsely with just to control some edge weeds, but I have lots of worms.

- Yeah, they're usually well protected in the soil.

- I think Roundup is pretty safe in that regard.

No doubt about it.

Uta from Bozeman, good question.

We've had prolonged cold, wet weather.

They've planted a bunch of their garden plant seeds and they're concerned about whether or not they're gonna rot in the ground.

- Yeah, I think that is a valid concern.

Yeah, so I think they named these big factors that are on my mind too.

So cold soils, lots of moisture are conditions that are very conducive for what we call these seed and seedling rots, specifically perfume and to some degree rhizoctonia as well.

And so, yep, that's the concern.

And I think if the seed is already planted, we just have to sit it out and hope that the soil warms up quickly once it stops raining.

Maybe if that turns out to be an issue this year, looking ahead, think about taking measures to improve the soil so that it drains easier so you don't have a lot of that sitting moisture.

It's probably not really something that home gardeners consider, but seed treatments are really helpful in protecting the seed as well.

Yeah.

- Okay, thank you.

Yeah, I'm a little concerned.

I haven't been able to plant a lot yet.

It's been just too wet.

Barry, I know you're behind.

- Nope, I planted mine and it's looking good.

- Well, you're lucky.

- Yeah, but do you dare wish for it to stop raining?

- Yeah, no, but I'm not gonna mud it in either.

It crossed over.

Okay, an alternate crop question via Facebook.

Are there any experiments growing Kernza in Montana?

- Yes, yeah.

We actually have one at the post farm where we've seeded a couple of lines of Kernza, trying to get it established for grass seed production.

It's taking a while to grow in.

I think we're gonna get a seed crop this year, and this will be, I guess, the third year of the stand.

So it's, and that's consistent with at least one farmer's experience up in the Haber area, too, where it takes, you know, I don't know what's going on with the crop.

It's not an easy one to grow, I'll say that, 'cause I've grown, as I said, I've grown a lot of crops, and this has been the most challenging one so far.

- What is it, and what do you use it for?

- So Kernza is a perennial wheat.

It's a hybrid between the perennial grass called intermediate wheatgrass and bread wheat.

And I think in the case of Kernza, they started with the grass and intergrassed wheat genes into it.

There's another program at Washington State where they did the opposite, started with winter wheat and intergrassed intermediate wheatgrass genes into it.

And so it's gaining some popularity due to favorable marketing.

I was at MAP Brewing here recently, and they've got a Kernza-based brew that you can buy, and it was, I think it was 50 cents more because there's some little royalty on it or something, but hey, I was willing to pay the 50 cents.

It was actually pretty good.

- Is it better than the Lennol beer that we tried?

- It's similar.

(laughs) - Nice answer.

Okay, thank you for that question.

That's an interesting one.

Clain, this is a good question.

Fertilizer costs they anticipate are gonna be much higher this year, especially for potash.

Can you avoid using potash for a year or two until the tariff situation is settled?

- Yeah, that is a really good question.

One nice thing about both potassium and phosphorus is that you can bank them.

They don't leave the soil.

They stick well to the soil.

So if you happen to have potash, which is 0060, meaning it has no nitrogen, no phosphorus, and 60% potassium.

If you happen to have some this year, that's great if you can buy some before prices potentially go up.

You might be able to bank that potassium just expecting prices may go up.

It's hard to know the future right now.

- Okay, thank you.

Any idea how much the cost of potash may have gone up?

- Yes.

- Or phosphorus.

- Okay, how are you?

- Didn't hear me.

Clain, are you there?

- Yes, I'm here.

Looked like you were looking at somebody to your side.

No, I think it will depend very much directly on whatever the tariff, the final tariff ends up being.

I've heard as much as maybe $100 per ton, but probably to be determined.

- So with potash, Clain, why are the tariffs a concern?

- Yeah, because the bulk of North America's potassium comes from Canada, as you likely know, Perry.

And so that's why it likely potassium prices could go up here shortly.

- So on that note, Clain, where do we get our nitrogen nowadays?

- You know, I'm less familiar with that.

My impression is a bulk of it still gets made overseas, but I know some gets made in Canada, some gets made in the US, but I think the bulk still gets made in places that tend to have a lot of oil, off gas, a lot of natural gas.

Natural gas is needed to make nitrogen.

So any place where natural gas is getting emitted, it's basically a free by-product.

And that happens a lot of times with oil.

So I think a lot of it does come from the Middle East, but I'm not exactly positive.

- Okay, thank you.

From Boulder, this caller has juniper trees infected with cedar apple rust.

Perfect time for cedar apple rust.

Can I use the juniper wood for wood chips, mulch, or should the juniper wood be destroyed and discarded?

- I've been looking for the rust this week and I couldn't find it in my neighborhood.

I didn't get very far, but I think I would avoid using the infected branches of the galls.

Just prune those out.

And then if you wanna wood chip the rest of your juniper, go ahead, but I would not use the infected tissue.

If you wanna dispose of it, I would recommend the garbage, don't compost.

- Yeah, compost will work or put it in the garbage can.

- I guess I would be careful with the composting 'cause, you know, you're taking your chances, so I'd probably throw it in the trash.

- All right, question for Abi.

This person has a 60-year-old crab apple that has been declining for a few years.

This year, only about a fourth of it came back.

What could have happened and what should they do?

Get a good, clean chainsaw.

- Yeah, I agree, yeah.

For 60 years, you're reaching the end of the lifespan for a lot of our crab apple trees, a lot of our ornamental crab apples, usually 60 years would be like a good ending point, especially if you've seen this decline year after year.

It's probably time to maybe remove that tree, replace it with a new tree you really enjoy and maybe start a new tree planting tradition in the spring.

- On that topic, I think this is something Clain called to my attention the other day on campus.

What's going on with the apple trees and the blossoms this year?

I've never seen a blossom set like what's going on this spring.

I've got plum trees at home.

If every one of those blossoms makes a plum, I'm in big trouble.

- Oh, call me, I'll come.

- Yeah, I'll come over too.

But I think one of the things that's going on is we've had a really, really warm spring leading up to May and so there's been probably a lot of bud development and we've also not seen really cold temperatures interrupting that, so we haven't seen a lot of that damage that we've seen the past few years on the buds 'cause those buds are much more sensitive than those, those flower buds are much more sensitive than the leaf and stem buds.

And so we haven't seen those really cold temperatures that would kill those, so we're seeing a really amazing flowering season all around the state, I think.

- And I would say it's been five years, like I remember in 2020 was the last time when I got to harvest like a bucket of, sorry, a bucket of plums from like a neighborhood tree, so like fingers crossed.

- I think I'm in the same spot.

- My freezer is running out of plums.

- Yeah, we've had a pretty rough five years for a lot of our early flowering trees.

- Not to temper everything, but it can still freeze.

- It can, it sure can.

- Okay, back to Clain, and this is a question I wanted to ask early on and I'll get to it now.

And we'll have two or three other people call it in, so we're gonna answer it one time.

Clain, when is a good time to fertilize a lawn and what is the best fertilizer to use?

- I wouldn't, you know, it might not be the best fertilizer to use, but best times are generally late May, sometime in late June or early July.

And then if you don't have really say core soils where you're gonna lose a lot of the nitrogen over fall, I would say somewhere around late September, early October, helps that with that last burst of grass production going into winter.

As far as best fertilizer, you know, there's a lot of range out there on the markets from organic products to synthetic, more Really you want the fertilizer to match your soil results.

And so if you don't know what's in the soil, it's really hard to know what to add.

And that's why I strongly advocate soil testing before you start applying fertilizer.

- Okay.

- And Clain, is it feasible to use enough compost to fertilize your turf grass at this time of year?

What would you suggest for something like that?

- You know, compost tend to have relatively low available nitrogen.

So I think it would be challenging to meet all of the, you know, a healthy turf's nitrogen needs with just compost, unless you had a really thick layer.

You might have to supplement that.

If you wanna go organic, you might supplement that with a high nitrogen products such as say feather meal, fish meal, blood meal, canola meal.

So there are products out there that are high in nitrogen and a lot of that can release in the first year.

- Clain, you mentioned soil testing.

- Yeah.

- Do they send those samples to you?

What do they do?

- Right, so what I would do is reach out to your extension county extension agent.

Most of them own a soil auger or a soil probe that they're usually willing to loan out.

A lot of them have connections with a laboratory, a preferred lab, and some of them will do the mailing for you.

Once the results come back, I'm really happy to talk those over the phone with you and tell you what they mean and maybe how much amendment or fertilizer to add.

- Okay, thank you.

And no more fertilizer questions for launch this evening.

And for that matter, the phones are kind of quiet this evening.

It's a rainy night out there.

So get on the phone.

If you have some questions, call them in and we'll make our best effort to answer them.

I've got a question for you to hear in a minute, but before we do that, this person from Hysham would like to know, is there a difference in quality between winter canola and spring canola?

- Yeah, that's a good question.

You're talking about the seed, the product.

Yeah, typically the winter canola is a much higher quality because the seed is developing in a cooler time of the year, the way the fatty acids form in the actual seed.

I think you end up with a longer proportion of long chain fatty acids and an overall higher oil content and just larger seed.

A lot of times our winter canolas, and I grow both winter and spring canola in our research, the little bit that we do.

And a lot of times my seed weight is almost two X for winter canola.

And my oil content can run close to 50%.

And for spring canola, sometimes it's just high thirties, low forties.

So I'm getting a way better quality seed consistently with winter canola.

- So before I go to the pea question for you to, what makes canola oil in many respects more desirable than say soybean oil or corn oil?

- I don't know if I can answer that, Jack.

- Well, you can guess.

- I mean, I know it's certainly, it has some perceived health benefits that maybe soybean oil and corn oil don't.

And I know it has to do with saturation levels.

And so, but at the same time, polyunsaturates can be an issue in canola.

And so I guess I don't even know that it is healthier, but I know there certainly is a perception.

So I really can't answer that.

I'm sorry.

- I had another question for you, might make you uncomfortable too.

So like you talked about the yield and the oil yield.

Do you find a difference in the composition of the oil between spring and winter canola?

And then along those lines, I was also wondering if like high summer temperatures or heat stress affect the oil composition as well?

- So again, that's definitely a question outside of my expertise, but I know that there is a general relationship that with the stronger, the abiotic stress, something about the fatty acid chain development shortens.

And so you end up with a higher proportion of shorter chain fatty acids.

Now, is that a problem?

I don't actually know if that's a big problem, but I think it's the higher, the longer chain fatty acids are considered more valuable, but I actually don't know if the marketplace cares about that, but there is an effect.

The way the oil composition is formed is affected by temperature and drought stress.

I just know from the little bit I've read in the literature, but that's certainly not my expertise.

- Okay, well, let's switch over to peas.

You brought in some samples and I know we've had a couple of questions last week and this week about peas that are yellow and kind of patchy and not growing as well.

And I think you brought some in to illustrate what might be going on.

- Yeah, so this is an example of a pea.

So we've gotten like several requests like this, this week through the diagnostic lab.

So since this seems to be a widespread issue, I wanted to talk about, so these are field peas and they came in with this like bleaching and necrosis for one on the center of the leaves and then others have also the leaf edges kind of burned off.

And you can also see that this is affecting the older leaves and the younger growth seems to be doing better.

And so initially I thought that this might've been cold injury, frost damage, 'cause it has been too cold for my taste anyway.

But turns out that this is actually herbicide injury on peas and fairly common.

Yeah, these are pictures of the same plants that I took earlier this week in the lab.

So this herbicide injury is caused by group 14 herbicides, which are photosystem or photosynthesis inhibitors.

And so specifically we identified two that cause this damage.

So one is sulfentrazone and the other is saflufenacil.

These are herbicides that are applied pre-plant or pre-emergence.

And so what happens is usually they're sitting in the top layer of the soil and are sitting there pretty tightly.

But if a timely rain comes, they can wash out and deeper into the soil, hit the root zone.

And so then they're absorbed by the pea plants and cause injury to those plants.

And so I'm not the herbicide or weed person.

So I hope Tim is not getting all itchy on his couch right now.

If not, he can come back next week and correct me.

So this is something that happens with timely rains.

The plants should grow out of it.

But I had a conversation with Perry earlier where he indicated that they grow out of it but they might not entirely recover.

So there's obviously a cost to that injury, but yeah.

- So we've been talking about canola.

Let's talk about peas a little bit.

How many acres of peas?

I mean, that used to be quote, a minor crop or an nonexistent crop when I first moved out here.

Today, how many acres of peas and how successful are we with peas?

- So we have three pulse crops that are at a pretty large scale in Montana.

Peas, lentils and chickpeas.

And farmers use them somewhat interchangeably depending on what the market is.

So the peas might fluctuate somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 acres a year in Montana.

Maybe even a little bit higher than that depending on where the markets are at.

Right now, lentils are pretty attractive.

So the lentil numbers are up and maybe, instead of growing peas, they're growing lentils in that same rotational spot.

So it's a pretty substantial crop for us, yeah.

- Montana is leading the nation in pea and lentil and chickpea production, certainly in organic acres.

- It's interesting.

I've been around here longer than I like to think.

But when I first came out here, all we had was basically wheat, barley and alfalfa.

And now you drive around the state and I would look at something and say, what is that crop?

So on that note, this person from, where is he from?

Doesn't say where he's from.

Would like to know if we can grow quinoa or quinoa.

- I don't know.

So I have grown quinoa.

It's a tricky crop to grow.

And so I know there was a producer in the Willis Hall area that was trying to get it figured out because there's several land races that respond with our day length conditions and in different ways.

And I know Mac Burgess actually did some work at the Hort Farm with quinoa.

And so it's a tricky one.

And it's one of those, sometimes these minor acre crops are somewhat protected by, I don't know what you call it, corporate intelligence or something.

Like they don't wanna share the information about how to produce these things.

And quinoa is in that class.

I know there's a company in Saskatchewan that produces quinoa.

They don't tell anybody anything about how to do it.

And maybe because it's a small enough market, it would be very easy to flood it.

And so they keep those secrets.

And there's another group in Colorado.

Again, they keep their secrets pretty close to their chest.

So it can grow.

And certainly, I mean, Montana's got many different climates.

So I'm sure there's places where it would fit well, but it's a tricky one.

- You wouldn't wanna grow it if you didn't have a contract here.

- For sure not.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- And that's many of them.

- And even if you had a contract.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- Makes good sense.

Clain, interesting question.

This person fertilized their tomatoes here in Bozeman last year, and they got a ton of foliage, but very few tomatoes.

Did they do something wrong?

- Tomatoes are really classic for that exact observation that if you put a fair amount of nitrogen on, they put their energy into leaves and stems and not many flowers.

And so the best fertilization for tomatoes might not be very high nitrogen.

And again, that comes back to soil sampling.

It's hard to know what's in your soil if you don't have it tested, but at least on tomatoes, I would back off on the nitrogen.

Would you agree with that, Abi?

- Yeah, I would agree with that.

Yeah.

- Okay, thanks, Clain.

Another question here for Abi.

Is it too late to prune your apples and similar type plum trees, so forth and so on?

- Yeah, I would say it's too late now, especially when we have a really wet spring that can increase the likelihood of the pathogens getting in through those open pruning wounds.

So I would say it's too late.

Maybe plan your pruning this year based on the branches that look healthy and then wait until they're dormant in the fall or the late winter to prune.

- Okay, excellent answer.

I agree.

Facebook comment.

This person, this is a good one for you, Perry.

I had some canola last year that was 80% hail damage, started regrowing in the fall, 99% winter killed.

I had another field that was canola in '23, that was chemfouled in '24 and had some real late canola volunteer.

Thought it would be froze out.

It never did.

It started blooming two weeks ago.

I finally sprayed out the crop.

Could they have left that?

- So they're talking about winter canola, right?

I couldn't quite follow.

I think that's- - It didn't specifically say, but I assume it was winter canola.

- So winter canola has a really strong ability to compensate with branching.

And so I've been almost shocked at the low densities that we're still getting pretty high yields from.

And it's actually a little bit of a problem with our crop insurance, because they're requiring farmers to have densities at the spring canola level.

And in winter canola, it seems like 10% or less of the stand still gives you a really high yield potential.

And so we need to compile that data and share it with risk management agency and maybe get them to rethink that.

So I guess I don't know, without visiting the field, I couldn't really say whether it was a mistake to spray it out or not, but it's pretty ratty looking stands can turn into a pretty nice yield.

But again, that's where you'd want that shatter, that anti-shatter pod genes that are supposedly coming soon.

- Okay.

- So that you could actually manage that harvest.

- So you've mentioned this might be coming, this might be coming.

Who's doing the breeding work to develop winter canola lines?

We're not here at MSU, I know.

- No.

- So who's actually working on developing winter canola in the United States or Canada?

- I think at the moment, there's only one winter canola breeding program in the US and it's a public program that's hosted at Kansas State and I think shared with Oklahoma State because there is a fair note of winter canola production down there in the Central Plains.

There used to be a program at the University of Idaho too, and I don't know if that, I know that breeder retired and I don't know if that ever continued or not, but I know that the Kansas program is still going.

And they send us material all around, actually they send material all around the USA for testing.

And we've tested several of their lines here in Bozeman.

I know that the Creston facility up near Kalispell has tested a lot of those lines for winter hardiness and they kind of like that test because we can give them a little harder test than a lot of areas.

So there's public, but scope out a little bit and winter canola is the standard type of canola that's grown in Europe, in Northern Europe, especially.

And so there's lots of private breeding efforts there.

And so I know some farmers in Montana have brought in varieties from these Northern European sources and they claim that they're getting as good or maybe better than some of the results that they're getting with the Kansas State material.

So there's a fair bit of activity and it's, to us, winter canola seems strange.

To Northern Europe, that's what canola is.

They don't grow spring canola, they just grow winter canola.

- So for a lot of people, canola used to be called rapeseed or rapeseed led to canola.

What's the difference?

- So it was rapeseed and there was a concern.

There was some sort of a nutritional I think maybe it was France that had an issue with urucic acid, which is like a 22 carbon chain fatty, really long fatty acid.

And it was associated with some sort of disease.

And so it turned out the rapeseed was really well adapted to cool sub-humid areas.

And so it was ideal for the Northern parts of the Canadian prairie.

So it was a crop that really wanted to grow and produce 'cause it was so well adapted.

And so there's even a debate about which breeder was the first one to develop these double zero lines, but they bred out urucic acid.

And I think that was the LA.

So canola stands, C-A-N is Canada.

The LA was low acid or low urucic acid.

And then rapeseed also had that hot taste that mustard has.

That's called glucosinolates.

And so people, there was some concern about having that sort of hot taste in the oil.

And so that was bred out also.

So it was called a double zero canola.

And that was, so Canada was C-A-N, zero was a zero glucosinolates.

And then the LA was a low acid.

And so that's how canola came about.

- Okay, did not know that.

- Interesting side story.

Where I grew up in Northern Saskatchewan, there's a really productive farming area called Tisdale and they grew a lot of rapeseed and also a really big honeybee area.

One of our biggest honeybee producer areas or honey producing areas.

And the big billboard coming into Tisdale said, "Land of rape and honey."

And it was there for many, many years.

It's not there anymore.

'Cause you can imagine, but they were very proud of the rapeseed they grow and the honey they produced and yeah.

- I have another question for you, Perry.

It's maybe just in your experience.

So like when I think about canola, what comes to mind is like one of the pest issues are flea beetles in canola.

And so from my understanding, the critical stages like canola emerging, being at the seedling and early growth stage, and that's where the flea beetles hit and can pretty much decimate it.

So now I'm wondering with like winter canola that I assume is like a lot more advanced.

Like does time of spring when flea beetles are emerging and you're like, you're not an entomologist.

You might not know, but in your experience, do you feel like one, like winter canola might escape the flea beetles?

- It does.

In my experience, we haven't had a major issue with flea beetles, although they really proliferate.

Like by the time it gets to the pod stage and winter canola and they've had a chance to, I guess, grow their population, the seedling stays the previous fall and then they get going again in the spring.

So there's a lot of beetles there.

And so if we try to grow winter or spring canola next to winter canola, that's not very good.

It's very intense flea beetle pressure.

And that actually happened to us again this year.

We planted some spring canola as a check just to see what the yield would be.

And it's pretty decimated by flea beetles.

- Okay, thank you.

- The bigger problem with winter canola, what we're talking insects is grasshoppers.

Because it's a lot of times, if it's late summer, early fall, it's the only green thing out there.

And so that actually is a very significant issue.

- All right, thank you.

Good question, Uta.

Uta, you brought some wheat in.

And why don't you bring that up?

Before we get to that, I'm gonna throw a question to Clain.

And this actually came from Malta and they're growing Bobcat winter wheat up there.

And it's showing a lot of spotting.

Some people say it's tan spot.

Uta can comment on that.

That's a fungus disease.

Other people say it's chloride deficiency.

Clain, what do you think?

- You know, it could be either tan spot and chloride deficiency look fairly similar.

But Bobcat is highly susceptible to chloride deficiency, unfortunately.

It's a great yield in winter wheat, but it also, for some genetic reason, is very intolerant to low chloride.

And so since its release about five years ago, I believe, we have been seeing it in some years, this thing called physiological leaf spot, which is chloride deficiency.

And it shows up as small dots that do look like disease, especially on the flag leaf.

What we are trying to figure out and Sue, the winter wheat breeder, are trying to figure out is whether this chloride deficiency is substantial enough that it's actually hurting yield.

Last year at the post farm, west of Bozeman, we saw a fairly minor leaf spot.

When we applied chloride, it completely got rid of it.

So chloride does get rid of this problem.

We did not see a yield difference between those two.

This year with all the rains and rains leach chloride, we expect to see more of this chloride deficiency.

So it'll be very interesting if we do see a yield difference between chloride treated Bobcat and non-chloride treated Bobcat.

- Clain, do you use potassium chloride to treat it or what do you use?

- Yeah, so there are a number of fertilizers that have chloride in them, but pretty much by far the cheapest is potassium chloride.

So farmers that are using potassium often applied with their seed, we don't see this chloride deficiency nearly as much as in fields that have had no potash applied to them.

- Okay, thank you.

- Maybe I can chime in 'cause- - Sure.

- So let's see.

So I just wanna say that differentiating between, oh, I'm like hiding behind the wheat.

Differentiating between fungal and physiological leaf spot is really tricky.

So I just want our listeners or viewers to know that they should consult with their local extension agent and/or reach out to the Schutter Diagnostic Lab to help with that diagnosis.

And then I have actually some factors that you could consider to decide if it's more likely physiological or so like a tan spot or so on.

So fungal leaf spots are more likely when we have a lot of cooler and wet weather.

It needs that moisture and the pathogen spreads with rain splash.

So if you live in an area where it's been pretty dry, hardly any rain, it's less likely to be fungal leaf spot.

It's more likely to be physiological leaf spot.

If you grow a cereal intensive rotation, you have a lot of cereal residue in your field.

That is a factor that would promote fungal leaf spot as well, especially if you see these like black dots and pimples on your residue, which are the overwintering structures of these fungal leaf spots.

And if you have had fungal leaf spot in the field before, it could mean that a fungal leaf spot is more likely.

But in any case, I would recommend just making sure somebody who knows the difference diagnoses that so that you know whether you should spray a fungicide or not.

- And on that note, I recognize that wheat, that has wheat streak mosaic virus.

- Yes, I try to hide my big smile behind this plant.

So this is something else quite like a little bit unexpected for me that it occurred already, but in thinking about it, maybe not so much.

So this is an example of winter wheat that has wheat streak mosaic virus.

As the name suggests, it's a virus disease.

The symptoms that are very characteristic are that yellow streaking and modeling that you hopefully see here on the foliage.

We probably can't get that on camera, but if you look closer at a plant that looks suspicious, you might see that the leaf edges are rolling inward.

You're probably not getting that, okay.

Anyway, so the virus is transmitted by a tiny little mite, wheat curl mite, which causes, like the name suggests, that leaf rolling.

And so it's a viral disease.

So since this crop is infected, there's nothing we can do.

So we'll just have to deal with this.

What happened is probably disinfection, especially given how severe it is in this plant at this growth stage, it happened last fall.

And so right now I know growers and myself, I would also get itchy to do something about this, but there's nothing really to do.

And so my recommendation here is just let it be.

You might wanna go and spray it out, but that would be very unneighborly or just increase the risk for your neighbors who are potentially growing a healthier looking crop or a spring crop, because killing the wheat with these wheat curl mites all over will make the vector that carries the virus leave the wheat and find a new host.

And so with our spring sown spring wheats and barleys, et cetera, around, they would be at risk to becoming infected.

The earlier a crop gets infected with disease, the more severe the impact on yield is going to be.

And so we wanna be good neighbors and not perpetuate this.

So I would recommend to wait at least until jointing or even boot stage of that spring sown crop that would be at risk before you spray out this crop.

You could try and take it to harvest.

It probably wouldn't be a great harvest.

So at this point, the recommendation would also be to just minimize inputs, to minimize economic loss or financial loss.

So don't add any more fertilizer, irrigation if it's an irrigated crop, et cetera.

And then just know that this disease can go on basically all the cereal crops we grow.

So wheat, spring, winter wheat, barley, rye, if you grow that, even corn, it lives in the weedy grasses that we have in and outside the field as well.

So it's something to look out for.

And the best way to really break this disease cycle is to take very good care of managing the green bridge after harvest and before planting of the next crop, because that's where these mites will sit in over summer.

- Okay, how far can the mites fly?

- That's a much debated question.

You can, I mean, these mites are super tiny, so it'll be very hard to track them, but at least several miles.

- Oh, okay.

- Yeah, so they can- - They form a little spinner and they get into the wind.

And if it's not real cool, they can move in cool weather, but if it's real hot, they don't survive very well.

- So they desiccate very quickly.

- Yeah, they do.

Yeah, but they find ways to survive no matter what, so yeah.

- Let's move on to dandelions, because every week we have, what do we do to get rid of dandelions?

There's plenty of them around, but you brought in kind of a special dandelion.

So you might show people what it is and how you might control them.

- Yeah, Uta actually brought me this present today.

And you've probably noticed things like this if you're out on your hike or in your lawn and things like that.

And you may even intentionally be growing these in your veggie garden.

But if you've ever seen flowers that look like they have multi heads or like really wide kind of expanded looking stems that look like they're large kind of groups of plants grouped together, this is fasciation, which is not to be confused with fascination, although it is fascinating.

I find it very fascinating.

So this is what happens when you usually have something that impacts the growing tip of the plants.

And so it could be any kind of thing.

So many different things can impact it.

It could be environmental issues, injury from chemicals, feeding injury, mechanical injury.

It can be cold temperature, UV.

It can be pathogens like disease causing organisms, insect feeding.

So pretty much everything can cause this.

But there are also some genetic factors that can cause this.

Basically, this is just a very interesting anomaly to observe.

It's not gonna really do anything to the rest of your plants.

It's not going to be transmitted from a plant to plant.

So I just enjoy this as interesting kind of biology and action in your landscape.

And if you grow beefsteak tomatoes, for example, or if you've seen those extra wide strawberries, those are also fasciated fruit.

And so we sometimes find those desirable.

Sometimes we find those flowers desirable.

So like celosia, we grow the coxcomb celosia that has the cool little fasciated flowers and also witch's brooms on trees.

That's also a kind of fasciation.

So I encourage you next time, if you see kind of a double or triple headed flower or something with like an extra wide stem to just enjoy the fascinating fasciation.

- There's plenty of dandelions around to enjoy.

And actually we've talked about in the past, the best time to control dandelions is in the fall just prior.

So we're not gonna try to control them in the spring.

It really doesn't work very well.

A couple of housekeeping things.

I promised I'd check with Steve Van Tassel on how effective Juicy Fruit and bubble gum was in controlling brown squirrels.

It does not work.

It's a lifestale.

He says, if you have more than a dozen ground squirrels, you can't get enough gum to them anyway.

So the other thing I wanna give a shout out to Montana Style Growers Foundation.

I was on a tour last Monday in Polson with the G&G Lifestyle Company, Greg and Lynn Gardner and the Cathay Cattle Company with Wacey and Brittany Cathay.

What a great operation.

What a wonderful job the Stock Growers Foundation does in promoting sustainable ranching.

They really did a great job.

If you're up in that area and you run into these people, thank them for the good work they do.

And by the way, I'll probably get in trouble for saying this, but I've always been out of Nebraska and I always liked kind of corn-fed beef.

They had grass-fed beef at their banquet there.

And honestly, that brisket is the best I've ever tasted.

And what I found out is you can finish cattle properly on grass.

You just can't feed 'em and throw 'em into a butcher shop.

You gotta finish 'em on grass.

And that beef was absolutely delightful.

So thank you for the invitation.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself up there.

We don't have weed scientists on.

We'll get to these in two weeks.

Codling moth, time to spray or is it too late?

- I would check the, so there's a website called Utah Pests and that has a tracker which tells you based on your weather station when the ideal timing to spray for codling moth is.

So I'd either reach out to your county or reservation extension agent and ask them if it's the right time or look at that Utah Pest Tracker because that's gonna tell you location specifically if it's the right time to apply.

- Okay, thank you.

Mention Nebraska.

We do have a caller who grew up in Nebraska and asks, "Clain, why in the Midwest "do they use so much ammonium knifed into the soil "and we don't do that here in Montana?"

Is that true?

- Yes, that's what I understand.

We use almost no anhydrous now.

We used to represent a fairly high percentage of our nitrogen use.

My understanding, and I don't know if this is correct, but anhydrous ammonia almost always comes by train and the Midwest has a lot more access to lines.

Montana has almost none.

And so I think that's part of it.

Urea is super easy to handle, works great on our cereal crops.

There might be other reasons than just the transportation issue.

- Okay, thank you.

Perry, this question comes from Great Falls.

They would like to know if there is a checkoff system that supports canola research.

- I think of my responses, I've used the word playing a couple of times because there is no research support for canola in Montana.

Like for actually pulse crops, there's actually quite a good bit of support, but canola doesn't have any.

And so we've been, you know, you try and find a little bit of money here and there to do research.

And as a result, we're probably way behind where we should be relative to knowing about how to, especially grow winter canola, but any type of canola in Montana.

'Cause we just haven't had the resources to really study.

I mean, we're asking basic questions about seeding date and nitrogen and sulfur fertility.

And luckily we have the Montana Fertilizer Advisory Group that funded that piece.

But so it's been a challenge.

And there is a checkoff, there's another opportunity for a checkoff to occur.

And there'll be a vote this June that the Montana Department of Agriculture will be contacting all canola growers to see whether they would support this checkoff.

And this is the third time that they've put this checkoff in front of growers.

And it's missed twice, very close, but didn't make it.

You know, it's producer's money.

They can do what they see fit, but there's a lot of research that doesn't get done if there isn't some basic amount of money to do that research.

So I think it's been kind of a failing in Montana that we don't have much for oilseed support.

- We talked about tariff effects on fertilizer.

I think a lot of our canola is contracted in Canada and some of our other specialty crops are contracted in Canada.

You think we're gonna be able to continue to grow those crops, especially this year and in face of these tariffs?

- No, I think Clain said earlier something about an uncertain future.

I mean, that's, I mean, clearly, I would think it can't help.

So I, you know, but at what extent those tariffs are gonna take place, if they take place, you know.

So I would, we are pretty, Montana's pretty heavily tied to the Canadian marketplace, especially with these, you know, specialty crops.

So I think I don't see how it could help.

- All right, are we still growing some camelina in the state?

And that mainly goes to Canada, I think.

- Yeah, you had told me.

I heard that the plant in Great Falls is also looking to source camelina seeds.

So I don't, yeah.

- We do have a new plant in Great Falls.

- Yeah, they've repurposed, and I don't, I'm far from an expert on this, but they've repurposed that big oil processing facility in Great Falls to part of it to be a bio-based plant.

And I've seen some of the projections for the canola that they would need to have to, you know, to supply that plant.

And it's a pretty significant number.

It's more canola than we'll grow in the short term, for sure.

But it could backstop a really nice market in Montana in the future.

- So we're kind of getting down on time.

And this question came in a couple of weeks ago, and we haven't gotten to it.

Uta, this person buys chickpeas in a bag, a one pound bag, they're nice big round chickpeas.

They buy them in bulk, they're little tiny chickpeas, and some of them are black.

Why the difference?

- You know, my guess, it's like a grading difference.

I think chickpeas are graded based on size for one.

And so I think the bigger or higher quality and would be backed and then maybe what's left or falling through the grade is what they would put in bulk.

The black spots are likely disease issues.

So it could be ascochyta shouldn't have an impact like it's still safe to consume.

- Is it a black spot or is it a black chickpea?

'Cause there is- - They said a black- - 'Cause there is actually a strain of jet black chickpeas.

They look, yeah, so it, yeah.

- What they say is that in the bulk, there's an occasional seed that is black.

And I think that would probably be disease.

- It's not as clean a seed lot, right?

- No.

- So it didn't get graded as high.

- Okay, Clain, quickly, this person wants to know, do they need to fertilize peas?

There's some misconceptions with that in the marketplace.

- Yeah, so peas need phosphorus, they need potassium, they need sulfur, just like any crop needs.

But they likely do not need any nitrogen because there's this great process called nitrogen fixation where bacteria form nodules on the roots of peas and take nitrogen out of there and put it in the plant.

- Okay, yeah, I've been told that you do need to use a starter fertilizer at times.

So good answer.

Folks, we're down to the end of the year and we run out of time too rapidly.

And I would like to thank Perry for coming in.

It's always a pleasure to have Perry here.

He's knowledgeable about so many of our specialty crops here in the state.

The goodbye music has just started.

So we're gonna get out of here in just a minute.

Uta, thank you.

Abi, Clain, thanks for joining us via Zoom.

We'll be back in two weeks.

Next week is Memorial Day.

They're letting us have the day off.

Two weeks, we're gonna have Noah Davis, beef cattle in Montana.

He's an animal and rain science grad student.

Join us, have a good week and good night.

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