- [Announcer 1] "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.

(bright music) - Welcome to another new edition of "Montana Ag Live."

Originating today from the studios of KUSM on the very exciting and green campus of Montana State University, and coming to you over your Montana public television system.

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

Happy to be your host this evening.

And we took a lot of comments and developed a program tonight based on your comments that we need more producers on the program.

And we have one tonight.

And I guarantee you you're gonna learn a lot, and you're gonna enjoy it very much.

So before we get to that, let me introduce the panel this evening.

Perry Miller, cropping systems specialist.

I call 'em cropping systems agronomists.

If you have any questions about some of the crops that we're starting to grow in Montana that we never used to grow or grew at a very low level, Perry can answer it and tell you why, and also tell you about some of the new things that are coming along.

Nate Powell-Palm.

Nate's been here before.

Nate's an organic producer here in the Gallatin Valley.

I like to call him a city slicker.

He was 14 years old when he started producing with one steer.

He's built that into a organic operation that encompasses roughly 1,000 acres.

A lot of good information.

You're gonna get a kick outta some of the things that you're gonna learn from Nate tonight.

A new panel member tonight, Tiziana Oppedisano.

How'd I do?

- Very well.

(panelists laugh) - [Jack] She's an entomologist here.

Originally, she was up at the Triangle Research Center, Western Triangle in Conrad.

She's now based in Bozeman.

And I tell you what, what little I've interacted with her, she knows a heck of a lot more about entomology than the rest of this panel put together, which is not saying much, but that's okay.

Tim Sippel, Tim's our weed scientist.

And Tim, thank you for filling in last week.

You guys did a great job.

And you'll be here next week too.

- Yep.

- Okay.

Answering the phones tonight, Nancy Blake and Carol Pfeiffer.

Did I get that perfect?

I didn't butcher that name.

Nate, tell us a little bit about what you do and your operation.

I think it's called Cold Springs Organics.

- Yes, it is.

Thanks for having me, Jack.

So we're a first-generation, primarily grain operation.

We raise spring wheat, flax, yellow peas, and a bunch of alfalfa.

And then we'll have grazing in there as well for our cattle.

We got kicked off as a 4-H project that went wild.

And so we had a bunch of different iterations where we've tried to figure out how do we make a living, farming in the Gallatin Valley today, not coming from a generational operation.

So today, we raise those grains, we sell 'em to organic buyers, and then recently, we've started milling organic feed.

So taking our feed-grade grains, other grains, and alfalfa from around the state and making feeds so that we can help other producers make viable livestock enterprises.

- Is that feed going into organic beef - Yeah, so primarily poultry.

And then we do a pellet for each of the other species.

So we have a calf pellet, we do a dairy pellet, and then we also do some hog feed.

- Where's that based, you know?

- Yeah, just right on Jackrabbit Lane in Belgrade.

- Right.

- So we're just going past that interstate change.

So as you're headed down towards Four Corners, we're right past the John Deere dealership.

- Okay.

I got a question.

And by the way, you were on a couple years ago, and we had a great time.

And I had a question that came in via email that this person wants to know, what's your favorite crop to grow?

- Oh, I think it would be several different ones, but for very different reasons.

If you want a crop that always comes up and just does a good job, wheat is your friend.

Wheat will always grow.

But if you want a beautiful crop that all of your landlords are just really excited about, flax is the best one.

And if you want one that you can eat consistently, all spring long, peas are gonna be the next best option.

Eat the shoots, eat the green pods, chew on the actual grain.

- So for the organic, yeah.

- Hang on a second here.

When you were lecturing my class, you were all about alfalfa.

What happened to alfalfa?

(panelists laughing) - And I mean, so I would say alfalfa is my favorite to do as the workhorse.

It's like your best employee, who's maybe not the most flashy, but it's going to get rid of all of my Canadian thistle, it's gonna really reduce it.

It's going to give me all of my nitrogen, and it's gonna make the rest of the system run.

- But dandelions like it.

- They do!

- Yeah.

- And this is like the year for dandelions.

- Tell me about it.

We'll get back to some.

Well, one last question.

I know you do a lot of organic production.

How do you find markets for say, organic flax or organic lentils?

What's the trick in finding some markets?

- It is all about community and building out your network with other farmers who are looking to figure out how we market, either individual crops or how we market crops together.

And so when I was thinking, I was thinking about this earlier, of how do you sell your first organic crop.

And it really comes down to identifying buyers and then asking those buyers what they want you to grow, and then growing that.

So almost pre-selling it, because there's a lot of demand out there and just growing into sort of a vacuum is not something I'd recommend if you can avoid it.

It's much better to grow knowing you have a sale at the end of it.

- So everything you pretty much grow is on a contract basis.

- Subcontract, yep.

- Yeah, and that's important.

There's no doubt about it.

I have a question here that came in last week late.

It's an entomology question.

So Tiziana, this is yours.

This person's growing some winter wheat, and he's seeing some sporadic white heads in the wheat.

Is that an insect doing that?

Or any thoughts what might be going on?

- It could be.

It could be.

With the maggot, for example, that's where we are seeing white heads in wheat.

We received actually several calls about that overall here last summer.

And I'm going actually to do a little bit of survey this year.

So basically what could be, it could be this wheat stem maggot, and it's a very, it's a fly, it's the larva of a fly that grows inside the stem.

It's very distinguishable from the most famous wheat stem sawfly.

The larva look kind of different.

And they are stem-boring and they, borers, and they basically cause these white that is bleaching of the head.

Sometimes it's hard to recognize that because they can be confused with some diseases.

So there are some trick to recognize when it's an insects damage caused by the stem maggot or from a disease.

So usually when it comes about the stem maggot, the full head is bleached, it's completely white, yes, and while the leaves of the plants can be still green.

And another interesting things that it can be distinguished from scab, for example, disease, is that the head comes out pretty quickly from the plants, let's say, while if it's a disease, it tends to stay more attached to the plants.

We try to split them.

- Okay.

- So yeah.

- Tiziana, in my plots, every once in a while, I'll see what is a wheat stem maggot.

But it never seems to be a big, you know, a big epidemic.

Does it get really bad at any time?

- Really, no.

When I was kind of serving around with growers last year, overall around the Kalispell area, I got more call from that area.

It kinds of show up in as random outbreaks.

We don't have enough research to say if it's connected to a specific weather connection, if it's the amount of water.

What I could say, if it's you think you have this with the maggot, use a sweep net, sweep your plants.

And these flies, these tiny flies are very small, like a fifth of a inch.

It's actually more easy to recognize them compared to other flies because they have very bright yellow color with three distinct black stripes on the dorsal of the thorax and the bright green eyes.

So actually if you think it's that one, just get your sweep net, get out there and see if it's... - I've been around that my whole life.

I don't worry about 'em.

They're very, as Perry pointed out, there's not a lot of it.

Do you ever see that in your wheat?

Well, let me rephrase that.

(panelists laugh) You know, you're an organic producer.

Do you have any insect problems in your wheat?

You like wheat, you told me that.

- I like wheat.

Yep.

- No other grasshoppers?

Yeah.

- Well, in organic, you're required to rotate.

And I think that's our biggest tool that we have, is just spreading out dinner for these different pests so they don't think that they're gonna get the same buffet at five o'clock every day.

And so we haven't really experienced a lot of hard, devastating insect pressure.

During droughts, we'll see grasshoppers.

But to date, fingers crossed, it's been all right.

- You don't take a lot of chickens and turn 'em loose, take care of it?

- Not yet.

- Yeah, not to that yet.

Okay.

Before I forget it, Tim, you know, we're talking organic.

And if you're into organic production, this weed would be really devastating.

It's field bindweed, so you're gonna tell us how you get rid of it in one easy step, right?

- Yeah.

I don't know if I have that super easy step.

You know, a lot of people have actually asked about it on the show this year.

So I went and I dug up a couple chunks of rhizome before the show.

And you can see these are connected to each other.

And there was a real deep section right here that went, you know, it probably goes down 10 feet, I would imagine.

And a lot of people ask about how to manage this in their gardens.

And so what I talk about often is it only takes a thumbnail-sized chunk of this rhizome to grow another plant.

So if you chop this up with the rototiller, you're really making your issue a lot worse.

So in a garden setting, you really want to attack all these small plants, get 'em out of there, get the seedlings out when you can, but then try to take as much of the rhizome out as you can.

In the organic crop field settings, you know, Canada thistle or creeping thistle and field bindweed are the two top ranking reasons why acres are taken out of organic production.

And we did some studies, Pat Carr was involved, Perry was involved, and Nate was involved too and part of a podcast.

And we really looked at the competitiveness of alfalfa.

You know, that one reason to go into alfalfa in organic situations is to get nitrogen, but also the big deep roots of alfalfa are better competitors with field bindweed otherwise.

We looked at how much cultivation does it take to get rid of this, of field bindweed.

Basically three weeks, every three weeks, you need to cultivate for basically two years to really drive that population down to the same extent that alfalfa works on it.

- It's an amazing weed.

- It is.

Yep.

- So do we- - We don't have any good eating.

- Okay, I was- - (laughs) I don't know how to eat field bindweed.

- We've got John Warren.

- Yep, yep.

That is not one I know how to eat.

- Okay.

This is an interesting question from Conrad comes to Bozeman and there are no... - So when you say- - This one doesn't make sense.

I'll have to clarify what that says.

But I do have another question here from Great Falls.

Nate, this person is interested in your feed business.

Can you tell us a little bit more about how that works?

- You betcha.

Yeah.

So as I've told Perry's class twice now, I love alfalfa, and I really, I need it to make all of my other crops work.

But for a few years when it's been wet out, I've had a hard time consistently getting at a price that makes sense.

And so the thing that I found was the big barrier is how much it costs to ship alfalfa.

And so it's a lot less dense.

It's just sort of an inefficient material to move around in the bale form.

And so I was looking at how can we solve that transportation problem?

And in doing so, we looked at pelletizing it.

And so over the last two years, we've been building this plant to pelletize the alfalfa, make it so we can basically treat it like grain, ship it, put it on rail, get it to customers around the country for about half the price it would cost to put it on a truck.

And so that's expanded to realizing that, well, actually, I'll back up with a little story.

So I used to do organic audits around the country going to organic inspections for certified organic operations.

And I would love doing these chicken houses in the Midwest because it would usually be one operator.

He worked like two hours a day, his kids all picked eggs with him, and he made like $200,000 a year.

It was the sickest farming gig, and I'm like, "I want to do that.

I wanna come back and I'm gonna do that and then when I have kids, they're gonna help me with it."

And there was just no commercially viable feed in the state of Montana.

And so we decided we were just gonna tackle that problem.

Maybe we'll be taking farmers one day, but for now we're figuring out how to make cheap, commercially viable of the right form, quality, and quantity ration for all species in our mill.

- Interesting.

I like that concept.

Perry, how's your winter canola doing?

And I have two questions here on that.

- Doing very well.

But first, I had to leave supper to come here and I promised Nora and Leo, I would say hi to them on TV.

So, hi.

(panelists laughing) We've had increasingly better success with winter canola.

We're learning how to establish it better.

There's actually limited funding resources to support research in canola of all things, and so it's been a slower track than I would like.

But we've got a study going on now with funded by the Montana Fertilizer Advisory Committee that looks at nitrogen and sulfur applications and different seeding dates at Huntley, Moccasin, and Bozeman.

And we're starting to get an idea of, you know, when is the best seeding date?

Unfortunately, that looks like the last half of August.

So, but, yeah.

- Moisture.

- So last year, we had good rains across the high line in August and there's, I'm hearing stories of some pretty good-looking winter canola up there.

But we've also seeing it's got a pretty wide window.

So we're having success from early July to mid-September, which surprises me 'cause we used to have trouble in mid-September.

The one difference we're doing now is we do grow it in chem-fallows, so we can pretty well assure a secure root seedling or the seedling can root into moisture in that chem-fallow.

I think in the past, when we used to do it as a recrop or into another crop stubble, we often didn't have that subsurface moisture to secure that seedling.

- I was out at the Post Farm yesterday, I drove through, and if that's winter canola that you have out there, - It is.

- it really looks great.

Nate, you grow some canola?

- I don't grow canola, but I do use canola in the feed rations.

- How do you use it?

- So we're using it primarily as a protein source for the poultry.

And so we're looking at a non-soy, since we don't grow soy here, and we were looking at basically having a really good, high-performing protein source that allows us to bring in a little methionine, allows us to have a well-rounded amino acid profile, and make a really strong chicken feed.

- Okay.

So that sounds good.

- So where does your canola, does your canola come into you crushed?

- It comes in crushed, yep.

- It comes in crushed.

And where does that crushed canola come- - Typically, the Midwest.

So we'll receive railcars of canola in, and then we'll be shipping railcars of finished feed out.

- Okay.

- All right.

Question for Tiziana.

This person grows potatoes both commercially and in their garden.

And last year in their garden, they had problems with what they think with lygus bugs.

- Mm-hm.

- Is that an issue in potato production here in the state?

- So we have seen lygus on potatoes.

I wouldn't say that is an issue.

Let's say that has been investigated of in other area like the Pacific Northwest and Washington, Oregon, Idaho.

The beginning, they thought that it could be one of the vector of pathogens on potatoes, but actually that kind of being excluded.

So even though we find the lygus, and typical symptom of lygus, this is a piercing-sucking insect.

So it cause kind of, it feeds, it likes new young leaf.

So it feeds on top of the plants, say kind of the plants (indistinct) a little bit.

And actually, you can see them.

It doesn't really hide during a hot day, they fly around.

But I don't think it's right now a problem in potatoes in Montana.

The only times that we receive call about lygus though, we received some calls about lygus causing damage to sainfoin fields here in Montana and to lentils in Central North Montana from Liberty County or Hill County.

We are seeing some lygus damages on drought crops, but less on potato.

But I can see why that question is... - Okay.

You mentioned sainfoin.

I gotta throw a curve at Nate here.

- Go ahead.

- Now sainfoin basically is a non-bloating alfalfa.

Do you grow any sainfoin?

- We do, yeah.

- How do you keep the deer out of it?

- Oh, I mean I think I asked a seed dealer once.

Do deer like it?

And he said, "No."

And then I lost all crop and he's like, "They love it!"

(panelists laugh) And so it's, yeah, it's one of those things where there's a lot of great reasons to grow it.

I wouldn't say I would bet the farm on growing it because the deer like it so much.

- So the land institute I hear is out trying to make a perennial grain crop out of sainfoin.

Do you know anything about that, Perry?

- I do not.

- Okay.

- I do.

- I mean it makes a nice big, oh, go ahead.

- No, go ahead.

- I just say it does make a nice big seed, so it seems like it gets to something that would be of an edible size.

- I had a field day for them last year and they're basically just saying, "Let's just eat the seeds.

Let's just take those sainfoin seeds and shell 'em, and then turn 'em into something we would roast."

And looks good.

Yeah.

- Interesting.

- High protein.

Yep.

- High protein.

600 pounds an acre or so for yield.

- You mentioned field days and I want to pull up a slide showing where Montana Ag Experiment Station, field days are this year because if you're interested in agriculture, even marginally so, attend one of these field days because you'll learn a lot and we have the discussion ahead of time, which one serves the best lunches, and I think I have to say probably now it's Havre.

Although I myself prefer Moccasin because they have some of the best burger.

But here's- - I'm going with Corvallis.

(panelists laugh) - Oh, yes, true.

Corvallis does serve a nice one.

- So they're all good.

Some are better for personal preferences than others.

How's that for backing up?

- Good.

(laughs) - Okay.

Nate, you have a field day too.

Would you tell us a little bit about that?

- We do, yeah.

The Montana Organic Association is gonna have a cattle and cropping integrated field day in Stanford, Montana at Jess Alger's ranch on June 12th.

So coming right up.

And it's gonna be, Jess is one of the coolest producers.

I feel like you know Jess, and his cows always look great.

He does a great job integrating cattle in a good rotation of crops, and he is just a fun guy to learn from.

So the Montana Organic Association's getting together, and I will argue we're gonna vie for that best lunch, and so we'll report back next year on how good it goes.

- [Tim] Of the winter meetings, the Montana Organic Association does have a great food.

- Yep.

- So if I were to come, what would I expect for food?

I mean, and not that that's my only consideration, but it does play a role.

- We always, I feel like we do lentils really well.

There's always gonna be something involving lentils, but then we'll have a great beef.

Jess raises excellent beef that he'll serve there.

We're going to have awesome salads, we're going to integrate vegetables that are pretty much almost in season now from the high wind tunnel folks.

So we just get the whole community to bring whatever they're currently growing.

It's always tasty.

- I got to go to a field day on Jess' place, I'll guess 10 years ago, and he was still one of the guys that was using black medic in the ley system, and it looked like it was working.

- Yeah.

- And you're right.

He had the fattest, shiniest cattle I have ever seen.

I mean those were some happy cattle.

- All grass-fed, it's just like, and he's just done such a good job with managing parasites.

He is excellent, excellent producer.

- Okay.

Interesting question, that's a good question.

He came from the Highwood area.

They said Montana's had a couple major wind events this year, which has caused some erosion to the point that they closed some highways.

I happened to be out of town when that happened, but I saw pictures of it.

Is that a major issue that's starting to come back?

When I first got here 50 years ago or so, we had a lot of erosion.

Don't see as much today.

What's happening?

- It does seem to becoming a bigger problem.

I don't know if it's because of, you know, we were just in a three-year drought cycle.

But again, you know, this wind event just happened, and there's unfortunately, you know, one of the crops I've promoted or one of the class of crops I've promoted, pulse crops.

We're finding out that their residues, you know, especially depending how they're harvested, they decompose pretty quickly.

And so they can leave that soil in a really vulnerable state, especially if it's been a drought limited, you know, so biomass limited kind of year.

And so some of these worst events are actually happening in pulse doubles, and so we'd like to do some research to understand, because I think there's a pretty common sense solution there that would involve the use of stripper headers to leave cereal crop full height, and seeding pulses into that cereal stubble seems to do a really amazing job of not only increasing the pulse crop productivity, but also bomb-proofing it a little bit from these wind erosion events.

- Hmm.

I saw pictures of it, it was amazing.

- I think it also happened right after harvest or right after planting went in and we hadn't had much rain.

And so with the hoe drill, you make a fair amount of soil disturbance out there.

So I think there was a lot of open furrows and bare ground that really took off.

But then, yeah.

- Okay, thank you.

That's a good answer.

For Perry, you recently developed small black seeded fava beans.

How well is it doing and is it being used?

I did not know about this.

- I wonder where that question came from.

- It doesn't say.

- Okay.

Yeah.

So it's called Felix, and I understand from the, you know, so there's a commercial partner on that and they are having better success in Europe marketing as a green manure crop.

And the fact that it's black or dark seeded, it's got high tannin content in the seed so it doesn't need to be treated to get it, you know, out of the soil reliably.

And yeah, and faba beans have a higher set point for nitrogen fixation than most other annual legumes.

And so I, yeah, I guess it's doing well.

Yeah, I mean I get a little weed check every once in a while, so I know they're selling some of it.

(laughs) - So faba bean in Central Europe into Sweden, it's a big fodder production, it's used for feed.

Usually chopped and silage relatively early.

So Nate, have you ever tried incorporating faba bean or anything?

- I have not.

- Oh, okay.

- But I have also not done silage yet and I'm really hoping too soon.

- Okay, so when you go harvest for your feed mill, oh, you're just taking the grain and then it gets chopped up.

Are people, or for your alfalfa pellets, do you chop it and silage it or is it- - No, it's just dry hay put through a hammermill, yeah.

- Dry hay.

Okay.

Interesting.

- Is there- - Oh, I was gonna say fava bean is a fairly moisture-loving crop compared to some of the annual legumes.

So it's not gonna have a real general fit in semi-arid regions like this but... - Okay.

- And lygus bugs like fava beans.

- Oh, do they?

Yeah.

- [Tiziana] Mm-hm.

- I've been around long enough to remember in the early 1980s, there was somebody that was promoting fava beans here in the state, and we had several growers here in the Gallatin Valley grew a lot of fava beans, and found out they did not have a contract and there was no market for 'em, so they rotted in the bins.

- Oh, boy.

- So hopefully, yeah, that's changed a little bit.

All right, from Helena.

This person has a lot of aphids in her tomatoes.

The leaves are starting to curl up.

I hope they don't freeze tonight.

It's supposed to get down to the low 30s.

What do you do about aphids and tomatoes?

- Whew.

I don't get too many aphids on my tomatoes actually.

Wash 'em with some soapy water.

- Yeah, absolutely.

That would be a good place to start.

Soapy water will work.

There are some, neem oil can be used.

Then it really depends how bad is the pressure on the tomatoes.

I will recommend first knowing what aphids you have.

There are many, many types of aphids out there.

Some of them can transmit diseases, others cannot.

You wanna definitely bring a sample to your extension agents and ask more question about the specific aphids, where it come from, and what it would be the best way for your specific case.

- I found with the soapy water in aphids, you really have to get the underside of that leaf too.

You almost have to turn the leaf over and spray each side with soapy water.

It can be difficult.

And I think with neem oil too, you don't want to get neem oil on any developing fruit.

It can be pretty toxic.

- Definitely, it will, grow stage of the plant that is.

- [Perry] So you could just hold the plant upside down and treat it.

- Yeah, there you go.

- So I'm wondering though, could it be flea beetles that they're actually calling about?

Because I am seeing some flea beetle damage in my tomatoes.

- I wanted to ask Tiziana that, like do I need to worry about flea beetles on potatoes or on tomatoes?

I see they punched some holes in leaves, but... - Yeah, they are around definitely.

We still don't know many species of flea beetles we have out there.

We've seen them in potatoes.

They don't really cause big damage to our farms.

They tend to stay more across the borders.

Also that one, it depends how far they go into your field, do you wanna think about what to do.

But yeah.

- Are flea beetles mostly early season?

Am I wrong in thinking or I just get on different issues, but do they kind of dissipate as the season goes on, flea beetles, are they mostly an early season?

- They are an early season.

In some crops like canola oil seed crops, they are a major pest actually.

And they are a major pest at the very beginning when the plants are germinated out there.

And if you don't control well at that time, actually you can propagate multiple generation over the season in your field and they can actually move to your neighbors and to other crops.

They can be more generalistic insects that specific on a crop.

So definitely managing flea beetles during the season, it's key for no propagating.

- That brings up a question I have for Perry.

Your winter canola, do you have flea beetle issues with winter canola?

- We haven't had much of an issue with the winter canola, but I'm doing some spring canola next to it to compare the yield for spring canola to, and so there, the seed treat on the spring canola has worked better than I thought, but it's now it's starting to break loose, especially on the last seeding date.

So I think we've got a reservoir of flea beetles on the winter canola that's grown up, and then when they see those delicious little seedlings... So that's not a situation you would see on a farm, I don't think, it's just because we've got, you know, different plot treatments next to each other.

So yeah, it hasn't been a major issue.

- Okay, thank you.

Question from, I say Eastern Montana, as for Nate.

They wanna know if you made any use of Growth Through Agriculture funds from the Montana Department of Agriculture?

- Sure have.

Yeah.

So we received a 2022 and 2023 grant from the Growth Through Agriculture program.

Our entire operation actually started from a junior ag loan.

So I think of like just the role that Montana has in investing in farms, especially value-added propositions, is just awesome.

- You know, I find it fascinating.

Last time I, yeah, I had you on here, you said you own no land, but yet you farm a thousand acres.

How do you get leases on a thousand acres of farm ground mainly here in the Gallatin Valley without owning any?

I mean, I'm impressed that you've got that done.

- Well, since last time, I actually did buy a little land.

- Congratulations.

- So we own a little now.

We have about 70 irrigated acres that we own.

But generally, so it was, I started needing land.

So I'll kind of back up a little bit.

I am not a city slicker, Jack.

I grew up on 10 good acres, but I described myself as a dirt farmer without much dirt.

And so I had to constantly be looking out where am I gonna get some dirt if I wanna actually make a career outta farming.

And so I just started looking around the Gallatin Valley and seeing that there's actually a lot of good ground that isn't being actively farmed, mostly because it's been subdivided to the point that it's not super feasible for big equipment to manage.

So that was my niche.

I dove right in there with smaller equipment and gobbled up as many 20s and 40s and 100s as I could to put together our current operation.

So my sort of like high-level story was that in sophomore year of college, I drove around, I looked at all of the ground that seemed like it wasn't being actively farmed and didn't look like, it looked like it could be organic, that it hadn't been sprayed in a while.

And I just sent out about 90 cold call letters saying, "I see your land doesn't look like it has a farmer on it.

Do you want a farmer?"

And this is what I do.

And I got about a dozen back and that was like my first four or 500 acres right there.

- Pretty amazing.

So you have to be out of pesticides or fertilizers for three years.

- Yes.

- So if you go into ground that hasn't been farmed at all, say pasture or grass, whatever it was, how do you meet that three-year requirement there?

Or do you have to?

- You do, and so you're basically getting a land history of what's been done and having the owner or the operator of that land legally attest that the last date of prohibited substance application.

- I wanna tell a little story on Nate.

So this, Tim mentioned this, this organic project related to weeds that Pat Carr and myself were involved, and as part of that, I had to have an on-farm location, and Nate had one of these, you know, 20 or I dunno, 40-acre parcels out of Belgrade.

It wasn't good soil in that particular one, but he was kind enough to let us have a spot in this field, and we, man, but it was in a grass field that would, or had come outta grass maybe the year before or something.

- That's right.

- And so there was a lot of perennial grass still in there and I'm like, we tilled and tilled and tilled to prep our plots.

And while we're doing this, one day I see him come in, till, and then right behind, the seeder comes in, and I'm like, "What kind of deal," you know.

His stand was way better than ours.

All we did was wake up every weed that was in that soil seed bank, and his operation just quick and dirty and it really worked.

So we looked the fools on that one.

- Okay.

Good information.

- Can I ask, well, so I remember those fields, Perry.

- Yeah.

- There's a lot of quackgrass in those fields.

Does quackgrass, is that a problematic weed for you, Nate?

Is it something that you have to try to manage, or do you just kinda look past it a little bit?

- A little bit of both.

I'll just try to get that tillage event done and seeded as fast as possible so that we can get the wheat competing as soon as possible and hit that vulnerable stage where I've hurt the quackgrass and all the other grasses there.

But it gets better over time.

Like if the year three and four after we've come out of sod or out of whatever hay crop we had, usually it gets better.

- Okay, this person from Winifred wants to know the benefits of chickpeas, and does it provide the soil some additional benefits?

Perry, you want to jump on that or Nate?

- Certainly, any annual legume has the likelihood of leaving some nitrogen behind in the soil.

So it's cycling non-fertilizer, I guess nonchemical nitrogen to the next crop.

But it's usually just a pretty small amount.

I mean, if I was growing chickpeas, I would be more interested in the value of the chickpea crop itself because it's a pretty valuable crop and you know, there would be maybe a nice little side benefit for the nitrogen that it would provide, but that wouldn't be my main interest with chickpeas.

- Nate, you grow a lot of pulse crop.

- Mm-hm.

- Is there enough nitrogen, say, what do you follow the pulse crops with, wheat or?

- Usually with flax.

Yeah.

- Flax.

- So we follow the alfalfa with wheat, and that gets the biggest, most available amount of nitrogen.

It's gonna be our heaviest feeder, but then our like triticale or flax or other lighter feeders can follow pulse crop and do pretty well.

- You know, you have a picture of flax, don't you?

Can we pull that beautiful blue picture of flax up?

Because a lot of people really don't know what flax looks like, and we will get into what it's used for here in a little bit.

But while that picture's coming up, what do you do with flax?

- Yeah, so it's got two uses.

Historically, like say 100 years ago, flax was an incredible fiber that we used much like we're talking about hemp today, that you're gonna make rope out of it, you're gonna make clothes out of it, you're going to use it to make different industrial parts.

And so we actually raised flax for seed to go to the West Coast, and then be grown out for that fiber.

There's a company out there that's starting to get into manufacturing flax for fiber.

But we also raise flax just for food.

And I think about like right now, if we think about there's a protein craze, if everyone wants more and more protein in their food, there's coming a fiber craze, I swear, where everyone's gonna need to get more and more fiber, and I just think flax is an awesome way to do it.

You can put it in everything.

- Yeah, flax is an egg substitute, right, for most vegan meals - Yep.

Exactly.

- because it has a little bit of stickiness to it.

- Mm-hm.

- Yeah.

Are you growing any hemp?

- [Nate] I've not gone on the hemp train.

- You know, I got stuck with some hemp seeds when Wheat Montana had a bunch of their products there one night when we were doing entrepreneur.

I was the last person to get to choose.

I took the hemp seeds.

Once or twice on a salad, and I've had enough of.

I'm not knocking 'em, some people do like 'em, there's no doubt about it.

- Well, I love them.

Yeah, I have 'em with my breakfast almost every day.

- Huh.

That impresses me.

(panelists laugh) I like bacon and eggs.

Okay, Perry.

This person would like to know, and it's from Chester.

Are you working on any new crops that interest you?

- Yeah, we're always working on things that are, I'll tell you about... It's hard to know what to do with these real small market potential niche crops because there's a few things that could grow well in Montana, but it's hard to know what that commercial angle will ever be.

But there's, you know, maybe it would be a commercial opportunity for one or two growers.

So we've got a, we used to do a demonstration trial and we had this one crop that actually my research associate at the time, Jeff Holmes, put in the mix called niger or ramtil.

And we had 20 different plots flowering at the same time and 90% of the insects were in this niger plot.

I mean, extremely attractive to pollinators.

And then I did some reading about it and so it's got some interesting oil properties, almost nutraceutical kind of properties.

And so I've got some selections of, you know, niger plants that are early and so would maybe be a... But what do I do with that now, right?

If anybody's listening and they've got any interest, I do have some seed that I could get you started.

So we get, you know, different things like that.

We've done some work with cowpeas recently with Zach Miller over at Corvallis and Peggy Lamb at Havre.

And really a drought-hardy, heat-tolerant crop that doesn't- (cross talk drowns out Jack) Well, it actually is pretty high value, but it's, you know, there's a marketing scheme that doesn't include Montana right now.

Is there a potential for a crop like that?

And so through that exercise, we actually found some very early maturing lines, but they don't look, they don't have the exact black-eyed pea look that a cowpea needs to have to be commercially marketable.

So what do we do with that, you know?

So we're sitting on a little pile of seed that probably is useful maybe.

- Yeah.

- So those are some of the sideline things we do, yeah.

- Okay, Nate.

Have you jumped into anything unusual in your cold springs operation that you think might work down the line?

- Oh, we tried growing vegetable seed.

We had this one, this seed house that received our flax.

Really loved it, and they're like, "Could you grow some cabbage seed for us?"

And we're like, "Let's try it."

No, we couldn't.

But, well I think the, you know, there's, I think that the crops in Montana can grow really well are so extraordinary when it comes to a food perspective.

Like our ability to grow chickpeas and lentils, we're surviving any apocalypse way better than any other state.

- Mm.

- Like the food, the crops that we can actually grow and eat is so exceptional that part of me is just like, "How do we get more people eating those crops that we're really good at rather than necessarily finding new and novel crops?"

- Interesting.

Question, throw this to Tim here.

Someone mentioned that blue stem is hard to control once it has farmed bulblets or babies or whatever you want to call it.

Would spraying small patches with 30% vinegar be effective at that stage?

And I'm gonna let Nate find out.

- So are we talking about the grass, little blue stem?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

I think that would be very hard because little blue stem, once the bunches form, you can't kill them with much of anything, even really chemical herbicides.

It has been something that is increased in Eastern Montana and it's often on the back slopes on the leeward side that we're getting more and more little blue stem that's showing up in the summer and in the later part of the year.

And it is reducing forage quality a little bit because cattle don't like it very much.

I don't think you could kill it with vinegar, but I think maybe think about some grazing time, leave those C3 grasses up maybe a little longer.

The little blue stems of warm season really late in the year.

- If you use 30% vinegar, is that okay organically?

- Totally.

Yep.

- But the price of 30% vinegar is... - That's right.

- If anybody's never looked at it, it's a little more expensive than your 5% vinegar that you buy through a grocery store.

- And if you did it too long, I'd imagine you'd run into some soil acidification issues over and over.

- I think you're probably right.

Question for Tiziana.

This person is curious about alfalfa weevils.

Do they need to control it or are there methods that you could reduce the population without using insecticides?

- Yeah, so this is about the time to actually do active monitoring on alfalfa weevil.

The larvae by now, they're growing in the field, and the best method is exactly knowing how many of them you have in your field and how they are distributed.

So based on that, there are several threshold.

We know in recent years, there have been several studies showing how in Montana, there have been insecticides resistance towards certain insecticides, certain pyrethroids specifically.

So definitely, we want to reduce the phenomenon to keep happening, so rotating insecticides.

What we could do to actually not even get to the point of doing a first insecticides application is knowing how many you have and when they show up.

So by this time, a good alternative could be doing a early harvest of the first cuttings for the crop that is gonna happen, I believe anytime soon.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

(laughs) So that one will definitely reduce drastically the population of alfalfa weevil if done in time.

- Okay.

Thank you.

- So yeah.

- So okay.

Did I do a bad job?

Okay, on Friday afternoon at the Post Farm, we have a couple organic alfalfa plots and we cut 'em really late last year.

That was not good practices for us.

We got a lot of cheatgrass in it.

So what did I do this year?

Those cheatgrass heads were starting to come up.

So I cut 'em off on Friday afternoon.

I cut it high, I cut it like three inches high.

Is that good?

And I know I have a lot of alfalfa weevils.

So you're telling me I did a good job of reducing my cheatgrass seed and my alfalfa weevils?

- Well, you might have done a good job if your alfalfa was at a good stage.

(laughs) - Okay.

- You know, Nate, alfalfa, you grow it.

- Yeah.

- In this valley, I see a lot of alfalfa that is been in 7, 8, 9, 10 years, and primarily dandelions now rather than alfalfa.

How long do you keep your alfalfa in for?

- [Nate] Four years.

- [Jack] And is it still pretty productive at four years?

- It is, I could probably do it for like five or six, but we wanna be able to move over to our annual rotation after those four years.

- And how many acres of alfalfa do you basically grow?

I'm curious.

- Yeah, probably about like 500, so it's about half of our rotation.

- And when you harvest it, is it small bales, large bales?

- Large bales.

- And this goes to your pelleting operation directly?

- It will, yep.

This year.

So this is our first say, full production year.

Typically, it was just going out on semis to area ranches and dairies.

And so we're gonna be putting all through pellets this year.

- Amazing.

- So alfalfa is a wonderful rotational crop, right, for both conventional and organic?

- Absolutely.

Yeah.

- But we don't know from a research perspective exactly what is sort of the minimum threshold.

Like how many years, you know, if I did it two, three years, is that enough to capture some of these nitrogen benefits, get, you know, soil improvement properties?

You know- - It's not enough for the creeping thistle.

The creeping thistle really starts to fall off after the first year of little seedling alfalfa.

- No, no.

- You're not getting anything.

Then the second year, your stand gets better.

You see that competition.

In the second full year of its life, you really start to see the Canada thistle population growth rate go down.

So it starts to decline.

- So that's a total of three years then?

- That's the three, yeah.

And then when you're getting into the third and fourth, then you're getting those added benefits.

It keeps wearing the thistle down.

- The other thing I was gonna say about alfalfa is just the work that you and Dr.

Jones have done on soil acidification mitigation with alfalfa.

Like I love it for organic, it does incredible work, but I think of like from a policy point of view, if we had some way to incentivize all wheat farmers in Montana to just put it in like once every 10 years, I think we would just see really cool soil health benefits for managing this growing issue of soil acidification on wheat farms.

- Have you had that issue here in the valley on any of the farms that you're working on?

- I have not just because I only grow wheat every now and then and I don't use any conventional fertilizer, which is kind of the driving force for the acidification.

- Perry... No, go ahead.

- It's hard to get alfalfa to establish sometimes.

What are the tricks of the trade of actually getting alfalfa established?

- Oh, just like, yeah.

So what I do is I'll plant it underneath a cash crop, and so I'll put it underneath my wheat or a barley or usually one of those two, spring wheat or spring barley.

And so if it doesn't come up, then I'm just gonna take the weed off and I'll till it in and I'll try again next year.

And so I usually just like try to aim for a good rain year, really, and then have enough different fields where I'm not super, I'm not gonna put too many acres in into given year.

- My issue has been the opposite.

How do I get out of alfalfa?

- Oh, that's a good question.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

- Because it tolerates a certain amount of tillage.

It seems like a lot of the crowns still survive, and so, you know, they're there to, I guess infect or infest your next crop.

- They are.

- Yeah, even chemically, it can be a tough one to get out of.

So, but I still, I love its rotational aspects so... - I'm more curious about this pellet.

Is that for rabbits?

- It's for everything.

And so I've been thinking about like the role of nutrition in the Montana cattle herd and how every time we have a major drought, we just see this massive depopulation, folks selling off their herd, and it's why we get such low numbers creeping over time.

And so my thought is that if we're able to store alfalfa like we could store grain, we're going to be able to have three or four years of inventory that we can hold on having good condition and be able to supplement our cattle herd so we don't have to depopulate during a drought.

So it's for everything, any ruminant can use it.

- Price-wise, a ton of alfalfa in large bales, I don't know the market, they say 200 a ton, 175.

- Yeah.

- Pellets, how expensive?

There's a processing cost involved.

- Yeah, so we're typically looking at, and I would say, I want you to think about that.

$175 a ton in the stack plus the shipping.

And so being able to reduce that amount of the cost of shipping is where we're realizing sort of a parity.

But typically, it's gonna be at about 80 to $100 a ton.

- [Jack] That's not bad.

- Yeah, and then you get some of that back when you're able to more effectively ship it off.

And then you can sort of target feed it.

So if you only need two pounds of alfalfa to keep cows going on dry grass, then you're gonna be able to feed that in a much more specific application than if you're just rolling bales out.

- So do you grow or raise organic beef too?

- Mm-hm, mm-hm.

- Do you need to feed organic alfalfa and organic corn or whatever you're finishing 'em on grass to qualify for organic?

- To make an organic steak, that animal has to have been fed certified organic feed from the last third of gestation.

So when it was a six-month-old fetus, it's had to start eating organic all the way through when you slaughter it.

- Hmm.

That's pretty complicated when you really get down to it.

Market for organic beef, is there a good market for... - Good market, yep.

We have a great operation.

B Bar Ranch in Montana, who's finishing out a lot of organic animals, buying a lot of calves, putting 'em on their excellent pastures, and I think they have the capacity to or the demand to double their numbers.

And so there's a lot of strong interest around the state and around the region.

- Okay.

- Is the B Bar, are they limited in processing capacity?

- I think it's more that they've just been limited in getting enough calves of having enough cow calf producers raising those calves to grow.

They've got a great relationship with Pioneer Meats and Big Timber, and they've got just a lot of cool projects going on with how they're doing that.

But I think it's mostly just getting enough animals into the pipeline.

- Regenerative agriculture, I've had three or four questions here.

Are you practicing regenerative agriculture?

And Perry, you guys can all jump in on this.

- Yeah, I would say every single organic farmer is practicing regenerative agriculture.

- And Perry, have you got projects working on regenerative agriculture?

- You know, we have, so you're probably familiar with it, the recent farm bill that there's now an incentive for producers to collect some payments for adopting regenerative ag practices.

We have been trying very hard, we've written three grants now trying to get funding to do some regenerative ag research in cooperation with some farmers that are doing this.

And so it would be really fun to do.

I mean, it challenges some of the conventional thinking about how you would manage your crops.

But I'm really curious about it.

I mean there's some good farmers that are experimenting with this practice or with practices that fall into the regenerative ag rim, and I would really love to know more about it, but we've struggled to get any funding support to do it.

Yeah.

- You know, a lot of the ranchers in the state now, I'm not a beef producer, but I've been to several of their tours and so forth.

A lot of the successful ranchers today are definitely into the regenerative phase of agricultural cattle production, and they're very good at it and they appear to be quite profitable.

So I think there's potential down the line.

Hope you get some funding for it, no doubt about that.

- Well, yeah.

Sooner than later.

But are you taking a regenerative ag certification with, I mean I know, I mean I understand your comment that organic is in large part compliant with regenerative agriculture, but there is an opportunity for organic farmers to even try and get a more premium price, I guess so... - I think when I look at the certifications out there, organic pulls all of the weight of any of the regen certifications, but consumers actually know what it is.

And I think that's a big problem that like everybody on this panel knows regen and all producers are talking about regen, but consumers just have like no understanding of what we would be looking at for a premium or why we do it.

- To be a little bit honest, I don't always know what regenerative ag is meant or when people refer to regenerative ag, I'm like, "I want to hear about the exact practices that maybe are associated with it."

It's the buzzword of the day, of the year, maybe the decade.

- Question from Fort Benton for Nate.

Good question.

What kind of binder do you use to get your alfalfa pellets?

Do you- - We don't use a binder actually, it's just pressure.

So we're grinding it, and then we're putting it through a hammermill, and then we're just putting it through a 3/8-inch pellet dye.

So it's just pure alfalfa or it's gonna be pure grain for the pellets.

- How big are your pellets?

- So we're doing 3/8 inch and then we're also doing, we're gonna be doing half-inch cake pellets.

- Okay.

So I've got everybody off tonight without any trick questions, but I have one for Perry.

Okay, so this caller has an issue with birds on her deck and wants to know how to get rid of 'em and I think they're probably magpies because young magpies have a tendency to congregate.

They're protective species.

Perry, how would you get rid of 'em?

(Jack laughs) - I don't have any magic solutions.

- We have a border collie that's trained and you open the back door, he runs out and chases the magpie.

- And I have three bird dogs in the yard.

So you can imagine the pressure that they're under, yeah.

- Well, there you go.

- She said she's tried a cat, but the cat is inefficient now.

You can always try more than one cat, but... So we have all kinds of questions here.

Nate, do you see organic agriculture growing in Montana?

- Sure do, just purely by the numbers that we're getting more and more interested in it.

We've got about, we are the biggest certified organic wheat-growing state in the country.

We're the number two organic pulse growing state in the country.

And when we look at the sort of the trajectory, organic is one of the very few bright spots in agriculture right now that there's, you know, just a lot of grain sitting on a lot of farms on the conventional side that isn't moving or is not moving for a price that makes anybody any money, and the demand continues to outstrip the supply in organic.

- Yeah.

- And that's interesting because there's, more than a few years ago, an ag economist here at MSU said eventually, your supply is gonna exceed your demand and your price is gonna come down and be very close to that.

But that doesn't seem to have happened.

- I think it's one of those, like those fallacies in like classic economics around food supply is that if you just keep marketing and keep the demand growing, hopefully you'll be able to keep the demand outstripping the supply, and I think like there will come a day.

But organic is only 6% of the food market right now.

So I think we have a little while before we're gonna be tapping up that ceiling.

- Yeah, I've been around some organic producers and it's not always been that favorable, but I like what you're doing.

Folks, we're getting down to the last minute here.

I wanna lead into next week's program that Tim's gonna moderate.

I was at a conference last week, Conservation for a Continent, and Zippy Duvall, who's the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, says that the number one concern right now is mental health in producers and especially grain producers, corn producers.

And we're gonna have Alison Brennan on next week to address those issues here in Montana.

So if you're at all interested in, even if you're not interested, I think you'll learn a lot from Alison because she really does a great job in ensuring mental health.

Increased production costs leading to a lot of suicides in the United States.

So watch that.

I want to thank the panel, especially Nate, for being here.

Perry, Tiziana, Tim, glad you're here.

Join us next week.

Have a good week and good night, everybody.

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