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[Music] Montana AG lives made possible by can the Department of Agriculture the MSU Extension Service the pack experiment stations of the College of Agriculture the Montana wheat and barley committee the Montana Bankers Association Cashman nursery and landscaping and Gallatin gardener's Club [Music] in regards to mold if the ants are attacking and you're having a hard time [Music] now within an inch and the ovals are takes apart machine and the world really cheap the bumpers in the pasture are [Music] good evening and welcome to Montana AG live coming to you from the studio of PBS at Montana State University I think we all got to a finally experienced spring fever we've got like three days of it and I think we're gonna get a little bit of a recovery from our spring fever with the snow that is potentially coming tomorrow but just everybody knows the drill this is a call-in show call in with any of your interests that you have hopefully the panel tonight can answer them I'll give you an idea of who's on the panel and who your experts are to my immediate left is David Baum Bower he is the director of our plant growth center and helps everybody with their research and the things that they do in the greenhouse to support their programs gene mangled is the weed specialist weed extension specialist at MSU today we have Tim del carro as our special guest he is the Nancy Cameron endowed chair and he is going to be talking with us about beef management today which is a little bit unique for us it's not often that we have a cattle specialist so welcome Tim our anchor today is Mary burrows she's our extension plant pathologist and be ready for with a lot of questions about what to do in this cold wet spring so answering our phones today our barb shaft Cheryl Bennett and Nancy Blake so first him if you could tell us a little bit about your program and what you've got going on at MSU that'd be great okay well I've only been here for about a year and a half and I'm really honored and a bit humbled but I'm an endowed chair that's funded primarily from dollars from obviously the Cameron family but also Montana stock growers and beef into an industry interest and so my positions primarily to do research that hopefully benefits the Montana beef industry okay great and we'll have more questions about that Mary since we're coming off of this cold wet spring this is a question from Manhattan what effect will the delayed planting have on pulse production they grow a lot of peas and lentils out there yeah what's well I don't think it's the huge part well pulses like to be planted probably we March if not even February cuz you want to get them done with bloom before we get the high temperatures in June July so I don't know that many planting decisions will change but they did predict 300,000 acres of chickpea in the state this year and I have a feeling that number will be less not only because of the weather but just because planting gets much more compressed and so trying to get those field operations done in the time that they have it becomes impossible for a single operator or dual operator operation what the acres how about potatoes have you seen any well all of the things that are protecting are affecting potatoes it's basically kind of a domino effect because as they're delayed in their planting with their weed and their Peas it's going to potentially stack all of their work together and could potentially delay potato planting to you know even a little bit even if the weather warms up so you know normally potato planting doesn't occur until around the 1st of May but they've got a lot of work to catch up on before they can get to there between the winter wheat I don't know if it even emerged in the fall because the drought was so severe mm-hmm and a lot of it I mean there are some areas of the state that have a lot of snow mold that they're talking about replanting so I don't know yeah it's yes and I interesting see yeah in some places it snow hasn't even melted yet exactly so Jay in a question from mile City again with the late spring what what kind of effect is that can have on noxious weeds in their control yeah well obviously everything is set back I would say it gives you a little bit more time to get ready to treat your noxious weeds I think one of the one of the things we see when we have particularly later Springs and wetter cooler Springs is it actually is a benefit for our native species most of our noxious weeds came from Eurasian area Mediterranean area where it's typically hotter and drier and they tend to really thrive in warm dry conditions so in my experience the years where we've had you know late late springs and cool wet weather that typically helps our native species be much more competitive against those noxious weeds well it's good to know that we've got some benefit from yeah cold wet spring David a question from levy we're gonna mix things up a little bit they're growing a variety of grapes and they have very poor flavor can amending soil help with the flavor so there are several things to do and obviously growing grapes is a challenge in Montana there are many hardy varieties of grapes but getting a high quality fruit from them depends on a lot of things having the appropriate fertility so if they haven't had a soil test yet they'll need to do a soil test and visit with their extension specialist about appropriate fertilizer applications for grapes in their climate the other thing to think about is you know grapes are pruned early to train the vines but then there's also a a leaf pruning to get more Sun on the grates themselves as they ripen and so the key thing with trying to get a good grape in Montana is getting enough heat on the fruit so that the sugars fully develop and so that it's good to two things it's adequate fertility it's appropriate water management and it's appropriate vine management and pruning so that you can get sugar development we had a sample come in from near Laurel where just some photos last week and he was concerned about pot the abortion of the grapes so they were just falling off but he hadn't pruned it in years and years so that was the first thing we recommended so getting back to the great thing in the flavor isn't there a term is it French I am NOT a French speaker but Terra terroir that's the concept that the the land in the climate impart the characteristics so that's why you know talk about a chardonnay grown in Napa County versus someplace else and that's it's the influence of the of the site and the climate impact of flavor on it so hard to know what a Montana are well I've actually heard of it talked about even with potatoes that you know the different soils and climates and you know some people will claim that organic versus conventionally produced will have have different flavors and you'll hear that same term now like I think it just gives us something new and interesting to talk about with potatoes so you've always got a you know keep that topic crash so Tim can you tell us a little bit about sustainable beef production systems yeah it's interesting a beef cat or a bit like grapes in that in Montana sustainable systems are our ones where the ranchers actually pick the right breed and the right management philosophies to match those cows to the environment that they have and which makes it different than a lot of our other animal production because they're they pretty much provide the environment for optimal production and in our case in Montana it's its ranchers look at their resources go this type of cow this breed this timing of calving and all that fits the environment and the resources that we have the other challenge we have Montana's is typically our growing seasons and here with all these economists then you know you know it's it's 120 days or less for most of our beef cattle producers which means about two-thirds of the year they're trying to manage their cattle in a way that that's utilizing the forage base that's not actively growing and in many cases is below the requirements of their cows and so they're they have to come up with with supplementation strategies and things like that to optimize the use of these low quality forages ok great the tomb so is you know for a while there you heard a lot about grass-fed beef is it's a little thing is that market developing or is it yeah you know when they entered interesting things in the beef cattle industry is 25 years ago you know almost all of beef cattle is marketed as a commodity it was just pounds of beef now it's somewhere it's approaching 50% of beef cattle are lovely trama branded which means there's a label on that with some sort of promise could be grass-fed it could could be antibiotic-free it could be you know whole host of things so so yeah there's a bunch of different marketing niches that we're seeing more and more of great Mary a question from Glasgow what effect will spring flooding have on disease issues well I think it goes back to the original question I answer tonight which is going to delay planting from the disease perspective we're gonna very cool wet soils so we'll have a high risk of Pythium root rot which may affect crop establishment and depending on the crop it'll bounce right back out of that after it loses some stand the flooding can move plant pathogens and I know weeds weed the seeds as well so we do have a phantom ICC's root rot in some areas so that is a water mold and it will move with water just like the Pythian will so and there's a lot of water moving in north central and yeah but I know there's there's some weed species that came into that area a few years ago and they think it was from the floods yeah I know in 2011 when there were you know like the mussel shell what did there was a lot of concerns about like salt cedar Russian olive moving along the river further down the rivers Phragmites is an invasive perennial grass that's showing up in more and more places around Montana and that could potentially move because it likes riparian areas yeah David this person from Laurel got tulips for a gift and they are blooming now in the pot and the card shop of the card says that they can plant it when and how should I plant them so after you get done enjoying the blooms you want to cut the flower stem off and then I probably treat it as a house plant for this the rest of this year and then let it dry down and let the foliage kind of dry off that all back and then you can plant the ball this fall you would normally do it you need to grow it for a while so that the foliage will put energy back into the bulb and/or produce a bobblehead so but I think I'd wait to plant it into the fall I have a follow-up question for David so with tulips that are growing out in your yard I've been told that you should let them grow you know once the petals fall off the flowers let them continue to grow and dry up to the point where you can actually just pull the the stems and leaves away is that yeah because then the bulb is is cured enough and that connection you know the water moving vessels asylum is cured off and so the Bob will be dormant and ready to go through the winter time so don't go out there and clip them off once the the stage have something else that's going to come up yeah work on that there you go my problem is I have too many things that are coming up around it and then they kind of start to choke each other out after I need to do a major serious tough love treatment on my perennial beds for sure Jane back to you from Billings they have a place in hemlock growing in their shrubs and willows on the edge of their property how can they control that yeah so poison hemlock is one of the most poisonous plants in North America actually so it's not a plant you want to handle a lot if if you do handle it like if you're trying to dig it out kind of depends on how much poison hemlock they have but if you are handling it make sure you're wearing gloves and long sleeves and then wash your hands and arms before you eat anything but actually right now is a great time to control poison hemlock because it's just starting to emerge from the ground and you know it's it's maybe a couple inches tall but those those basil leaves and Rosie are there on the ground and there's not much else growing around it yet so it's a good time it's highly visible if you can you know dig it out but it's look a little bit dangerous because it's poisonous but products that contain like met sulphur on work or even to 40 will work well on those rosettes and again now's a good time to treat it because it's one of the only things that's green in the understory so is poison hemlock poisonous just ingested or is it also does it have skin I believe all toxins yeah I believe you have to ingest it but it's very easy if you've handled it and then you know you don't think to wash your hands before you I don't know eat something or you know if kids are around things go in their mouth so yeah it's it's one of you know the most toxic plants that that we have growing in Montana it's not native there is a there is a native water hemlock that looks very similar to poison hemlock it grows in similar habitats and that is also highly toxic if it says hemlock it's bad yeah yes it is I think is that from Snow White or something out or I can't remember one of the fairy tales how do you as a Shakespeare Shakespeare thank you thank you some Disney Shakespeare exactly Tim a very timely question from Great Falls are there enough fat cattle in Montana for a beef processing plant in Great Falls a very good question Curley in Montana we have about one and a half million head of producing beef cows and so I guess the answer we're also or number six state in the u.s. in terms of cow calf numbers what the Montana beef industry actually lacks though is feedlots hacking capacity most of Montana cattle gets shipped to two there are parts of the country for them and so the answer is yeah it probably could come in handy and could open up markets for our producers but there would be some infrastructure and businesses that would need to be developed well before you can have a packing plant you'd probably have to have a feedlot the reason is it's cheaper to ship the cows of the corn than to strip the corn into the cows um that's part of it but there's off there's also a lot of interest in Montana right now about marketing a Montana beef product and and I think the fact that were forged based systems or cattle are in a much more natural environment than perhaps other parts of the country but there's interest in that kind of thing and I think you know you don't want to open up a lot of concern but you take concerns like brucellosis and things like that and the ability to perhaps harmless cattle here in this state that could be beneficial to us Tim where where do most of our cattle get shipped to for finishing and then packing yeah all over we have some cattle go west and you know Treasure Valley area Simplot some of those feeders Agra beef beef north northwest and so they'd be going into Idaho and and Eastern Washington but they don't have a lot of cattle that go into the Midwest to come to Colorado Nebraska Kansas those great a question for Mary from Scobie our neighbor has been our neighbor has had diet or fo fanna my my sees root rot diagnosed in their Peas what can we do to avoid it I think mainly just good craft rotation and sanitation practices so if you do think that you your field might have some wash the equipment after moving it through that field in Canada they found that the Phantom ICC's was most concentrated near the field entry where the soil falls off of the equipment as it enters to the field and then it'll spread from there and it is getting around and once we start looking for it more we're probably gonna find it everywhere but it's something to be aware of okay thank you okay David something that's on everybody's mind from Bozeman they're itching to plant seeds in their garden what is safe to plant now so now it's a great time to get carrots in the ground radishes turnips any of the like leafy brassicas the Asian greens would be good kale that kind of stuff if you're concerned about Frost having a piece of floating row cover is it's amazing stuff it really does extend your season d amatically and the key with row cover is to fasten it to the ground enough so it doesn't blow away so yeah so any of those kind of cool season greens are good carrots would be good you want a hold up piece would be good you want to hold off on things like corn and and green beans into the soil warms up so that's one of the keys is that air temperature warms up but the soil still pretty cold and so a lot of these warmer season plants aren't going to germinate until the soil temperature warms up okay so David I was cleaning up my garden a little bit this afternoon and I was concerned about the soil being too wet to to really be working it yet do you have any comments or suggestions I'm like how do you know when the the soils not too wet to be working it right so you're not compacting it yeah you shouldn't claim to your tools and there shouldn't be mud and it really shouldn't cling too much the school of tools so this is another reason that's kind of nice to have a raised bed Lisa portion of your garden or raised bed because they tend to have better drainage the soil tends to warm up a little faster he gives you that we just can't help yourself to get out and start planting exactly you can do that go there first go there first so and then if you've cleaned things up in the fall then you might not actually have to do any you know very deep tillage in the spring just break the crust up with a rake and and spinach is another one you should put in the ground now - they're all fairly shallow seated so they don't have to go in for half-inch so right okay back to Tim what do you see right now as significant challenges for the beef industry well I think the the obvious challenges is is just take a look at the last two years I've been here for a year and a half and I've seen one of the worst droughts we've ever had and I've seen a really really hard winter and and I think that sort of I think sort of a good example the challenge that they have a lot of people don't know you know when you have a significant drought you lose a lot of the range forages and so those producers struggle in with just quantity of forage for the cattle and then all the fires that we had that destroyed a lot of the crop and then we had an exceptionally long winter and when you know for beef cattle for every degree below 32 degrees Fahrenheit you can increase energy needs by about 1% so when we have extended periods time of like zero or colder which certainly eastern and northern Montana experienced that then they go through a lot of hay and a lot of stress and so that that's kind of you know one of the big problems we touched on marketing and markets for Montana cattle I think that's big and I think finally most of our producers are dependent on rangelands and long-term rangeland productivity it's really important you know pipe throat I think invasive weeds and invasive plants are a big challenge for us and Jane that's that's your research yeah yeah actually I brought some numbers with me tonight Tim cuz I knew you were gonna be on but Kate fuller in the AG economics department Matt Rinella at Mile City with Fort Keogh and Stacy Davis and I did a survey a couple years ago where we surveyed livestock producers and we asked them you know how much are you spending on controlling noxious weeds and then we use some other data we had from the field to calculate about how much forage was being lost due to noxious weed weeds and our numbers estimated that livestock producers are losing about a dollar 33 per acre per year now the average size of a pasture in our study was a little over five thousand acres so if you do the math that was about sixty seven hundred dollars per year being lost to noxious weeds and then you know you start looking you amplify that up across the entire state and all the livestock producers it can be a pretty substantial loss you know I don't know Jane just from my perspective it looks like Montana range lands are pretty resilient in pretty good shape but I but I still see a lot of invasive yeah cheatgrass in particular yeah that's really taking over regions yah-tchi so Tim and I were both in Oregon for a while together and my experience in Montana suggests the rangeland is quite a bit more resilient more productive than those Great Basin systems and they seem if it seems that if we can adequately we control the noxious weeds our native species come back quite well encouraging that is good so Mary from Great Falls this producer saw your egg alert on fungicides for wheat last week and the fungicide I used wasn't on the table why so that list comes out of a collaborative effort of one of these regional committees NCA 184 and a person that Kansas aardwolf puts that together and it's not meant have every single fungicide on it they try to represent what's new new chemistry's what's used heavily throughout the Great Plains and in into the West on wheat and East Coast people and Canadian people comment on it too so and then we try to make it fit on one page not everything's gonna be on there they just kind of represent that mode of action and you can extrapolate right exactly and it's always one of those things if that is your fungicide that you want to use read the label absolutely and then also look at what the active ingredient is and see if there are other products that have the same active ingredient and if you want to know more about fungicides American phyto pathological Society has a fungicides for field crops book and I don't get a kickback but it is a really good introductory level not intro intro but a pretty good for somebody who uses fungicides to learn about the modes of action and how they're applied and sprayer calibration and all that good stuff so I recommend it ok David and question just came in from Bozeman they saw garlic cloves at the local garden center is now a good time to plant garlic you can we typically would recommend any plant garlic in the fall so it has a chance to get a root system established and take off earlier but it it's not too late right and I would say if you're gonna plant it this year definitely plant it now as quickly as possible I've done it both ways it yields significantly better if you plant it in the fall but you can get decent garlic if you plant it in the spring so yeah get it in as soon as you can get in the ground like tonight like tonight that's pretty cool so mine is still under snow if the garlic should be about right now there's no movement yeah yeah yeah it's still a little cold so Tim a question from Shoto is it feasible to ship cattle to Canada to fatten and then slaughter them no that's a good question I suppose that's possibility we actually in the beef industry we actually ship more cattle from Canada into the States because we have a bit more infrastructure but but you certainly could do that it's probably all depends on markets and and the US dollar versus Canadian dollar are there any major trade barriers now right now we we still can ship like our you have a veterinary certification of health you know whenever you cross borders but but it's possible are there any specific diseases that need to be tested for in order for them to cross the border you know you just have to a certificate of health and I guess I'm not sure I would check my local veterinary okay yeah in the potato world if we shipped to Canada we've got a few diseases that we actually have to to test for and so it's interesting that you know with beef and animals that actually kind of cohabitate together that you can just get a general bill of health some of them that's good 9 I do do this Canada growth very many potatoes oh yeah they do they don't they have a significant industry in north of us and Alberta and Saskatchewan they have a significant seed potato industry so there are actually a number of seed potatoes that come into the United States in the Columbia Basin and they're probably our main competitors so yeah in the potato industry so marry from plenty wood they had Fusarium head blight last our two years ago what are the chances for this disease to rear its ugly head again um I would say it depends on the weather Fusarium head blight needs high humidity and temperatures at flowering of the crop and durham in particular has a very long flowering window so it's about two to three weeks so as they get more corn in the area and that's not a trend i see decreasing they're gonna have work these in your head but that's a trend we've seen everywhere wheat has grown is once you get corn in the area it produces more inoculum on the regional scale because the corn residue doesn't degrade and the Fusarium that infects wheat also is there to degrade the corn stubble so as you get more corn you get more headblade the circle of life the circle of life and you know there's it's just something those growers are gonna have to be aware of and manage at this point okay David from Dylan and this is one of those really tough ones this person lives in Clark Kanyon at 5800 and feet are there any trees that are viable for this area all I have is sagebrush so I would think there are a number of trees that garden center in Dylan or in Butte would be able to recommend particular varieties but there's a lot of zone to trees that are used in the landscape part of the challenge probably would be soil quality and irrigation right and so sending a soil sample off getting an idea if you know what it is if you know it's really difficult to amend soil if these are if you're trying to grow a large shade trees so those would be things that I would think about but yeah there's some number of trees that are pretty Hardy a lot of the ashes our super hardy willows Aspen's right if you have enough water but do you have - yeah that's probably the limiting factor right not so much the elevation no it is they could try to get their sagebrush to grow taller you know what and I've transplanted sagebrush into my garden and that the best way to kill it is with it yeah yeah you try to treat it like everything else and it doesn't like it it doesn't like pampering so Tim can you tell us a little bit about your current and future research and what you've got going on now at MSU okay well I think it would be exactly one and a half years the first Amazo that I've been here but we've actually got a number of projects started one of the things we're looking at is is you know is working with with those branches that are wanting to extend the length of time the cattle graze in other words reduce the amount of winter feeds that they they feed and in extend grazing which means they're going to be using following winter rangelands more which I think's healthier long term in terms of just rangeland health but in order to do that they have to come up with supplementation strategies and in particular they they you know they they want a first and foremost only supplement when they need to but then figure out the best way to get the right nutrients to the right cattle at the right time and and so we're looking at you know the other problem is a lot of our ranches they can't afford multiple pastors so they run you know all of their cattle together in one big group which means they'll have cows from 1 year of age all the way up to 10 or 12 years of age and so we go in and we and we try to look at well what's the best way to supplement you know you know there's simple things like alfalfa hay but that only works at the if you have access to cattle there's some ranchers that their cattle are literally you know an hour drive away and so in most cases it may be what we call self fed supplements which are supplements that you can put out and they can only eat so much per day and so it's spread out over time and so we're looking at all those different kinds of strategies with the goal of you know what's the the most important nutrient that they need in most cases is protein that they need with these dormant range forages and probably the thing that's unique about our research is we've taken one step further most of our projects have GPS collars on cows so we know where they are in the landscape and we use GIS mapping to see you know how far do they travel from water how well do they use slopes aspects and we sort of superimposed well what's the best supplement to get them to use a landscape best in addition to digest this relatively low quality forage so it's got multiple components to so when you talk about the self ed supplements are those like some of the liquid yeah they could be a link it could be a salt limited you know sometimes we just put salt in the feed and run it up to like 25 percent and and so they'd only need a couple pounds of but there's a lot of variation on that in fact we just finished a study at the northern AG Research Center that was a two-year study the first year we supplement 270 cows this last winter 300 headed cows and what we found actually really surprised us when I got really cold and then have her trust me it can get really cold actually the young cows were eating more that salt limited supplement than the older cows but then when the temperature warmed up the young cows went out and grazed and the old cow started anymore so you know we're learning those kinds of things and the idea is so that we can help the ranching community in Montana you know you know be more precise and strategic how they usually supplement some okay great thank you gene from Big Sandy I think this person is wanting to maybe get some lemons out of lemonade there you have a reservoir boy full of water surrounded by Canada thistle and I think the reservoir is really really flooded so they're wondering if the Canadian Canadian thistle will die as the water in the reservoir evaporates I'm sorry but I don't think it will okay yeah I mean we'll probably set it back you know this year they probably won't have as much Canada thistle in that area but I it just has such an extensive root system that I think it'll start coming back however it might be a good year to you know I mean there's opportunity for integrated weed management here the flooding followed by once those waters recede the plant is stressed it might be a good time to try a herbicide application so okay that's making lemonade that's right exactly exactly so this is a question that I'm just going to throw out to everybody because we don't have an entomologist here but maybe somebody can address it this is from Conrad and they're wondering if the late spring is going to affect tick populations in pasture land since you're a range weed specialist who know anything about ticks or I don't all I know is I live out between Belgrade and and we pulled a lot of ticks off our dogs in the last couple already already yeah right and I would just say I mean they might be like everything else and they're affected by degree de accumulation so maybe they'll be a little bit later but I'm sure you can be assured that they will I've talked to a couple entomologist this spring and they always say when you have a weather a winter like this you get wonky problems so exactly Mary Iowan yeah yeah so so Mary there's been some news and there was this there's been some news this week about you getting a special scholarship to do some work and you tell us a little bit about that so I'll be skipping with your next venture I'll be going to the South Australian Research & Development Institute in Adelaide working with Jenny Davidson on sport wrapping networks and this is part of the Fulbright Scholar Award so there'll be four months with my family in Adelaide so might instead of skiing next year my kids will be surfing I'm just it's just my dream you know like why not [Laughter] Elian winter will probably be a little bit more yeah and those who know me know I like wine oh you're right across the street from the wine Institute so this is a question that's going to cross between David and Tim and it's from Forsythe is it okay to plant strawberries in a crystal it's tub so crystal wicks is a right it's a plastic tubs that right and it's used to contain an animal it's a protein so important supplement is there anything in there that would affect I can't think of really anything protein supplement you feed it to cattle so yeah in many cases they'll have a non-protein nitrogen in there a zapper as protein source but that be a fertilizer for right so it's a black tub black plastic tub drill some drainage holes some drainage holes exactly maybe put some gravel or something in the bottom is drainage holes it's a Dave I see a lot of those like metal tubs those neato Stuart deals worked pretty well for ya I've often wondered do they get too hot yeah I think about them sitting in the intense summer sun and just the heating on the soil how big is this tub there's five gallon yeah well they don't come in a hundred pound size or 252 they're big oh yeah they're pretty good-sized go for it yeah exactly it's a cheap way to get a raised bed yeah yeah yeah so it might you know the roots might die off on this edge but there's a large volume of soil right and if you were planting something like tomatoes or something it might be good that the soil warms up a little bit so okay Jane a question from Helena prostrate knotweed is taking over their lawn he's sprayed to 4d but it keeps coming back how do you get rid of it permanently well yeah unfortunately there are very few weeds that we get rid of permanently it's more like keeping them at a level that you can it's tolerable so my guess is if you have a lot of that not weed there's not a lot of other stuff growing there right so it might be that this person needs to do a combination of some pulling you can actually hand pull that it's not fun but it does have a root that's coming down from the center of it it's not usually very deep I would do a combination of pulling herbicides and then I would think about seeding again yeah where we get it all the time is we constantly just have it on the edge of our gravel driveway yeah and where it's really compacted yeah I always just kind of go along the edge with a little bit of Roundup you know where it starts to creep into the gravel and because at that point there isn't any grass anyway right and if the person has grass growing there it may be that they need to do some more careful irrigating and and fertilizing to make the grass more competitive Tim a general question about organic beef production in Montana and so could you talk a little bit about how much there is and also what you need to do to become certified to market your organically yeah well and basically there are some organic beef production there's probably more what we termed natural beef but to be certified organic obviously you know all the pasture all the feed for the most part is raised organically it's no herbicides whatever fertilizer is it has to be a natural form of fertilizer they can still vaccinate but for the most part they don't do you know any of the antibiotics any of the growth promotants and things like that yeah there's folks doing that and doing it fairly well B bar b bar ranch at a big timber is doing that and there's a few others thank you i'm jane i see you've got some some weeds yes I always bring weeds all right yeah so I like to use this opportunity of being on the show to kind of bring people's attention to new invaders and I have one of them with me tonight this is it's an annual grass it's called bent inada and it's a lot like cheatgrass it grows like cheatgrass it germinates in the fall and then over winters as a seedling and then this is actually stems from last year's growth and it's a very it's not palatable it tends to displace other species one way that you can tell it apart from cheatgrass I mean there's lots of ways but one thing that's very obvious is this is a very open airy looking grass it's and it's kind of wiry it's also called wire grass but you can see how the stems that hold the seeds come off of that main stem at almost 90 degree angles and there's it has these dark kind of purple red nodes so this this grass just earlier this year the Department of Ag was asking counties and other agencies for estimates of event inada in Montana and with believed we have about 55,000 acres and it's spreading fast we know it's in nine counties most of those are in western and south-central Montana the farthest East we've found it is Carbon County which is Red Lodge however they we do know they have it around Sheridan Wyoming then so that's what it looks like in the light in the middle of the summer I might also brought some little seedlings that I went out and dug right before coming to the show tonight if we can zoom in on those this is what it looks like right now it's really teeny tiny little seedling it's a much finer leaf than cheatgrass but there are places in the galaxy Valley at least where venta nada and cheatgrass are growing together but this is what it looks like out there right now you kind of wonder how this little thing can be so as competitive as it is but it's definitely a species that were trying to address earlier in its invasion process then later I know Tim was in northeastern Oregon for a while and it's a big problem there yeah I think gene probably one of the biggest concerns that that we saw I think west of the Continental Divide there's probably more of this but it's it's one that I think 10-15 years ago no one ever even talked about it and it's expanding rapidly what concerns us from a livestock standpoint is is we can actually graze cheatgrass and we can kind of target that at various times and and help control it with you know this is really high in silicates which is is it's hard for grazing animals to eat and it's probably the least palpable now these invasive annuals that we saw so we're sort of at a loss yeah nothing not even we'll eat it not even sheep and rodents you know I know I get and we're seeing a form you know actually monocultures yeah it's so it's it's a problem on rangeland in Idaho and Eastern Washington it's also a problem in like timothy hay and they've seen their hay producers there have taken some pretty big losses due to this vent inada so be on the lookout for it this summer if you think you see something you know please get it to your county or your Extension Office or the weed district office and if they don't know what it is they'll get it into the Scudder diagnostic lab and then we're about two weeks away from having a fact she extension fact sheet for this plant too that has a lot of pictures on it okay is that one in your app too for the grass idea um I'd have to check I don't know we've been adding additional species to the app and I'm not sure if we have I think vent inada is in there but like Tim said this plant 10-15 years ago nobody really knew what it was and even in Montana it we first saw it three to five years ago and it was being sent in that you know people were like what is this I thought it was cheatgrass but it's not mm-hmm yes so yes so I'm pretty sure it's on the app that's the the app it's called Montana grasses and that was developed here at MSU working with high country apps out of Bozeman but we have over 200 species of the most common Montana grasses on that app so so they're a great follow-up question just came in from Winston they have two acres of bare ground around a home that's being built gee gret cheatgrass has started invading and out competing the grass they are seeding how can they control cheatgrass until desirable grasses get a stuff yeah that's a great question so this spring I would suggest mowing that area cheatgrass is going to mature faster than those little seedlings that are coming in so set the mower deck kind of high and mow those tops off to get rid of the seeds if you have access to irrigation irrigate because cheatgrass makes its living by competing for water when water is limited right so if you can get some irrigation on that area to help get those other grasses established and deter the cheatgrass that would be great too okay Mary from Laurel these people as the snow have has started to go off they've noticed a mold on their lawns what is it and do they need to do anything about it snow mold there's not a whole lot you can do about it now in the fall you would cut the grass short to deter snow mold we've had a very long winter so right now just break out the dead stuff and if you need to reseed when it gets a little warmer and actually snow mold is a good control for cheatgrass acceptable the snow mold we're making emanate again yeah actually I have some research plots out by Belgrade and there was cheatgrass out there last fall and this spring I can't find any cheatgrass in that field and I'm suspicious that it's due to the long weed this time over high cheatgrass increased in the world in the wheat as well yes because they created a little bit more of a humid environment around it was a alternate host for so mold yeah they must really like cheatgrass yeah so well interesting that is it risky ecology so David when is a good time to plant tomatoes this is from Bozeman is it better to buy seeds or starter plants so you need to be beyond your frost free date so and that varies across the valley but early June's fine Memorial Day weekends probably as early as you'd want to do it I'd want to have some season extension fabric or whatever I can protect you can start your own seedlings you have not really quite enough time this year but a lot of gardeners do but I would recommend buying established seedlings bigger isn't necessarily better you want a nice balanced seedling and work the soil up and feed it and keep it watered and hope we have some heat I haven't say Dave you've mentioned season extension a couple times and you are kind of the local expert on it I would have to say can you tell us a little bit about the research that you have going on at the horticultural farm at MSU so I'm working on six different species three leafy greens and three root crops planted in spring and fall and in high tunnel so unheated greenhouses they don't have any kind of automated environmental control and then a lot of growers in Montana use this technology these high tunnel technologies and they also use additional protection with row cover so we're trying to figure out when is a good planting day does it make sense to use row cover when would you pull it off try to figure out what that kind of optimum times because there's a fair amount of labor associated with pulling the row cover on and fastening it down and opening it up and so it's a there's this balance point between light and temperature the row cover helps keep it warmer at night but if you leave it on during the day it's blocking sunlight so you're not getting as much photosynthesis potentially but that's kind of interesting so I've been harvesting I cut lettuce today and you know we've had this these were planted on March 13 no supplemental heat the last couple spring as a road car hasn't been all that interesting yes it is can I pull one year out independently interesting yeah I bet that really would be so Tim a question from Thompson Falls how do you increase protein levels in cattle in areas where cattle have not traditionally been raised so this is from Thompson Falls so this is far northwestern Montana well basically that that's where we use supplements to go in in and really what we took what we talked about as we look at what the vegetation is like and and and if they're talking about a late fall winter or even early spring grace for the onset of green forage most that forage is going to be you know 7% crude protein or less beef cows depending on where they're at in the production will range anywhere from seven to about 12 percent requirements and so yeah you know we just sort of look at what's available what the cows need and then we try to meet that with a supplemental protein source if that gets out to a question so this is kind of an interesting one and it goes to from animal feed to potential compost and it's from Hamilton they're feeding a pellet mixture of wheat wheat middlings and alfalfa meal and timothy hay to an older horse which doesn't get it all eaten the horse has few teeth would it be alright to use this leftover feed as garden compost well if you truly compost the material sure yeah absolutely if you compost it and work it in yeah probably should get things cooking pretty good provide a good a murder what is wheat middlings I am Not sure and I might it's basically screenings off wheat oh okay a lot of weed seed that's why I would compost it first and got it get it really hot horses are cecal digesta so there will be even if they have no teeth there be some digestion and lower GI tract but there still be a lot of permeable material Minh it'd probably make good compost yeah yeah I would think so so this is one that I'm gonna throw out to the whole crowd it's from Billings how do you control or eliminate Drosophila fruit flies on raspberries hmm and then keep them from laying eggs Laurie crew zenyk yeah that's a glacial no more right yeah at the scatter diagnostic lab yes and I didn't realize that Drosophila was a big problem on raspberry ah small fruits yeah we got a new tease oh really the spotted wing Drosophila Oh a number of years ago it exploded the u.s. I think 2013 okay I'd be surprised if it was in buildings but you know we could probably check the species for him okay David well actually I guess this could be gene - this is a question from superior they have aliens and they have taken over how can they be removed don't want to injure other plants but can't seem to get rid of them so the onion family onion family Monica monocots I mean you could use a grass herbicide and it wouldn't hurt any of the broad leads yeah exactly and I have alliums two in the bit the biggest thing that you have to be really conscious of is getting all of the seed heads off yeah yeah so Tim we've just left ourselves with a tiny bit of time is there anything that we didn't get to Oh guys well I've only been here for a year and a half and so we have a lot of projects underway I think I have six grad students right now and a handful of others that I'm on the committee for and so I think you know feel free to invite me back and with those six graduate students you're gonna have a lot of new and interesting findings absolutely absolutely so we're pretty excited about that enough to keep you very busy so okay well thank you so much for being here tonight and thank you all for tuning in tonight on our first three days of official spring finally please tune in next week next week we're gonna have claim Jones who have used scene here a number of times and he's going to be talking about the changes in Montana's high pH soils to acid pH which is a very interesting topic and something we're all looking forward to thank you and we'll see you here again next week [Music] Montana Aglaia was made possible by the Montana Department of Agriculture the MSU Extension Service the MSU AG Experiment stations of the College of Agriculture the Montana we can barley committee the Montana Bankers Association Cashman nursery and landscaping