 So Kyla Splickle is the horticulturalist at the Williston Research Extension Center. She graduated from NDSU in 2010 with a BS in Hort and a minor in landscape architecture. Kyla is currently working toward her master's degree in horticulture at NDSU and her responsibilities involve small fruit, vegetables, hops, trees, and flower research at the Williston Research Station, and also vegetable and high tunnel research at the Nesson Valley Irrigation Site. And along with her research duties Kyla has developed and maintained the landscaping around the Williston Research Extension Center. So welcome Kyla, thank you again for presenting and we are listening closely. Okay, well thank you so much Julie. This is a change of topics for me this uh go around as compared to last time but still nonetheless interesting. So what you need to know before you get started when it comes to hops in North Dakota. And now it's not advancing. There we go. So the question that I always get asked is why are hops in demand? And I believe it's largely being driven by the craft brewery market. Currently as of 2013 every state in the United States has a craft brewery. There's also the marketing end that seems to be doing a great job promoting the industry. I pulled this from the North Dakota Department of Egg website. It is the beer and wine trail. If you go to this website below you'd be able to find this for yourself. And they also have a brochure that is also promoting the breweries and the wineries in the state. And the last time I was in Fargo I actually found a craft your perfect tour brochure that had to do with the breweries wineries and distilleries. So today we're going to go over just a brief history lesson. I promise not to bore you. It's actually quite fascinating. The botany of the actual plant because I think it's important to know what you're dealing with. So we'll go over some botanical terms. Plant requirements, what you need to know before you start growing these. And then we'll talk about what we've done here in Williston. I'll show you some pictures of the things that we've done at the Williston Research Center and in our Fargo location as well. And then at the very end we'll go over some pest problems. So the history of hops is actually quite expensive. But we do know that the first written records of cultivated hops was around 736 AD from the Hallertown region in Bavaria, Germany. And so hops were brought to America by the European explorers. They came over on the ships and they also brought lots of plant material. And it is known that the European explorers brought hops to America in 1629. And we know from history lessons that the first permanent settlement was at Jamestown in 1607. And then the Dutch founded New Amsterdam on the Manhattan Island in New York. And so from 1629 until 1808 is when the first commercial hop yard was established in New York. Now we know that cultivated hops were brought to America, but it is widely known and accepted that fossilized hop pollen has been found and indicates that hops, wild hop plants existed in North America and were used medicinally for thousands of years. But today I just wanted to go over when the first cultivated findings happened and how they ended up bringing themselves over to America here for use in beer. So what about North Dakota? Well, North Dakota actually has a very rich beer history that began long before statehood. And if you're really interested in learning about all of that, I'd recommend picking up a copy of the book North Dakota Beer. It's a very short read and it's actually very quite interesting. I'll take you through some of the things that were happening in North Dakota before statehood. Now, some of you might not actually know this and this is a tidbit that I found quite interesting from the book. A couple of these logos may look very familiar to you. North Dakota did indeed have a Milwaukee brewery in North Dakota. It was located in Bismarck. The building no longer exists now, but in 1884, Fred Miller set up a Milwaukee brewing here in North Dakota and it ran till about 1889. And if any of you are familiar with your history, we know what happened in 1889. On November 2nd, North Dakota became a state and we joined the union as a dry state. So prohibition was lifted December 5th, 1933. But what happened between 1890 and 1932? Well, thanks in part to much of our German heritage in our state, the brewing tradition actually continued, albeit illegal. But aside from beer making, it is known that wild hot germ plasm is known to grow in North Dakota and they grow along our river systems in our riparian areas in North Dakota. So I found that actually quite fascinating. All right, so let's go over a few terms very quickly here. When we're talking about beer, we need an alcoholic beverage usually made from malted cereal grains such as barley and it's flavored with hops, brewed by slow fermentation. A hop yard, if I mentioned that term, it's actually a field in which hops are grown, also called a hop field or a hop garden. Hops, they are the female, excuse me, inflorescences are the female flowers of the perennial hot plant, humulus lupulus. The inflorescences are a complete flower head of a plant including the stems, stalks, racks and flowers and the resins are the compounds that are found only in the lupulin glands of the hot plants and it makes up the acid profiles. So hops actually belong to the cannabinaceae family. There are three recognized species, humulus lupulus, humulus yonensis and humulus japonicus. Now the other two species, yonensis and japonicus, are inferior compared to the humulus lupulus. Humulus lupulus is the species that the only species that we care about for the beer making process and the botany of the plant is actually very interesting. They are dioecious, dye meaning to and oikos meaning house, the unisexual having the male and female elements on different individuals of the same species. So this means that you have male plants and female plants and for beer making purposes the female plants are the only ones that we care about. Okay and so here is a snapshot indicating on your right the male plant and what you would see if you found a male plant growing say along a river system in North Dakota you'll have a shoot and then the B is the male flower and you'll notice C is a male and female flower. Sometimes these plants will produce munaceous plants. It's not really understood why they do this but nonetheless it will happen and I'll show you some photos later. And then on the left hand side of the screen at the very top we have what looks like the cone. The center would be the sprig or the backbone of the cone. The shoot looks very much similar to a male plant. You wouldn't be able to tell them apart in that regard. And then we have those papillated stigmas B which is the burst stage the cone. This is an up close photo of what that burst stage looks like. You've got those papillated stigmas and when those start to form that would receive pollen from a male plant if you had a male plant nearby. And it's not really agreed upon whether that's good or bad. I think initially researchers were saying it was not a good thing to have a male plant nearby and now I've heard varying opinions about whether what it does is it you pollinate the flower and then you end up getting seeds and do the seeds take away from the cone and the quality of beer making. And I'm really not sure because I don't know a whole lot about the brew process but for now they're basically considering that you should just keep your female plant separate if you find a male plant nearby go ahead and rogue it out because you don't want those seeds. But so those papillated stigmas would receive the seed and then they would continue growing. But without that the plants, the stigmas begin to senesce. They start to turn brown like the photo on the right. And at this point the bracts are starting to form on the cone. And then we get a little bit farther along in the development. You can see that those bracts right there are fleshy. They're soft. You can hold it in your hand and squish it down kind of like the petal on a flower. They're not hard. I have had people ask me if or they were surprised to know that when I say cone they were thinking pine cone a hard cone but they're actually fleshy and soft. So here's a couple pictures on the right hand side. This is a photo of what you would find if you had a male pop plant. Those are the male flowers. And on the left hand side is what I consider a monacious plant. And again it's not really understood why the plants will sometimes revert to a monacious flower. This is a picture that I took from my hop yard here in Williston for some reason. This one crops up every year. And this is another picture where you've got male and female flowers on the same plant. It's just a very bizarre phenomenon but it does happen. This is generally not going to make a good cone for beer making. And so it's recommended that you go ahead and roll these out if you find them in your hop yard. Now if you don't care about the brew making process then it doesn't matter at all. But I just found this quite interesting. Thought I would share. So going back to that photo of the center of the cone. That center is called the strig. And I have circled here the parts to the cone. You've got the bract. G is the bract there. And then J and I are showing you what it would look like if you had a pollinated the seed is J and it would be tucked up in there. So if we took a cross section of a hop cone this is what it would look like. I like this example because it shows you if you had taken a hop and cut it straight down the center you would see that strig running down the backbone. And how all those bracules join together right at the strig and all that yellow looks like pollen but it's actually the lupulin glands. That is a very important component to a hop cone when you are making beer. Okay so you see how they just aggregate right there in the middle. This is an up close photo that I've taken. And it's noticeable. It's a noticeable facet that you will see if you ever have dealt with hops before. This is what you're smelling and so and how they aggregate together. So the lupulin glands are an important facet when it comes to growing hops. You want to try and protect those as much as you possibly can. Their chemistry is quite complex but we do know that they are made up of soft resins and hard resins. And the soft resins are comprised of your alpha acids and your beta acids. Now your alpha acids consist of humulone, cohumulone, and ad humulone. The beta acids are lupulone, co-lupulone, and ad lupulone. So during the brew process the chemical structure of these components is broken down and reconstituted and that's what gives the beer its bitterness. So these two the alpha acid and the beta acids impart the bitterness to the beer. Now the other component that makes up the soft resin are the essential oils. Okay now the essential oils impart the aroma and flavor to the beer. And they represent about 1.5% of the weight of the dried cones. And these are very complex compounds and they are comprised of more than 200 components. So less is understood about the nature of the essential oils when it comes to beer making. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about these today but if you do want some serious reading on hops especially in-depth on the chemistry side I would encourage you to check out this book. It's just called Pops by R.A. Neve and this book went through a lot of chemistry. Really good pictures but it's a black and white picture but it's a little bit more of a thick read but if you're interested in that I would encourage you to check that out as a reference material. So plant stages of production I want to go through this and how it pertains to the botany of the plant. So first a few more glossary terms and then we'll go through each of these stages today. So a perennial. A perennial is a plant in which the vegetative structures live year after year. Pops are perennial plants. Rhizome is a horizontal underground stem. Pops produce rhizomes. A vine is the climbing stem of the hop and no I did not spell that wrong it is taxonomically referred to as a vine because it does not have tendrils like a vine does like a grapevine. Trichome is from the Greek word trichose meaning hair and outgrowth of the epidermis such as hair scale water or water vesicle and tropism the turning of all or part of an organism in a particular direction in response to an external stimulus. Now hops utilize tropism to grow. They are very very fascinating in fact it's one of the most fascinating things about hops. Charles Darwin himself actually studied the hot vine while ill in bed he watched a hot plant growing on his windowsill and noted that the tip of the vine completed a revolution in two hours. That was an excerpt from one of his books The Movement and Habits of Climbing Plants in 1882. So they grow in a clockwise direction around anything within reach and they use phototropism and thigmotropism. They use light and touch as a means for growing. Trichomes. Trichomes are of in my opinion particular monstrosity when dealing with hot plants. They are sharp. Notice their anvil-like shape. They contain miniscule amounts of chemistry and it will cause skin irritation and burning and in some cases a very serious allergic reaction. The plants are covered with them. You'll take a look at that diagram in the center. You see it's running all the way down. There are trichomes running all the way down the stem of the plant. These things are wicked and I can't say that enough. If you've ever dealt with a hot plant before you know what I'm talking about and if you haven't well it's not it's not the same as anything I've ever dealt with. You know many plant species have trichomes like cucumbers and they'll kind of scratch your skin. But these trichomes are quite different. But they are a means of protection for the plant and that's what they're there for and they also aid in climbing so that the plant can grow. So the first plant production stage we have is dormancy. I want to start at dormancy and then go through. This is on the right hand side of your screen a picture of what the root system looks like for a hot plant. Okay so between September to March we have that killing frost in the fall. Before that happens the plants are translocating nutrients from the shoots down into their storage roots. And then at that killing frost in September we have all of the above ground shoots die back to the ground because we're dealing with a perennial here. And the buds for next year have already been formed and they're in the resting phase. We can see that in this photograph here the soil level you've got your buds that are going to become a new shoot and then you'll have old and new roots. Hops produce rhizomaceous roots and you can divide them very similarly to how you would divide a perennial in your landscaping and they will send up many shoots. And you can see that here in the spring growth photograph. The resting buds in the very first illustration and you can see all of those shoots there are many many shoots that will come up. And this is the time if you are planting new plants in your yard this is the time to plant new hot plants and if you already planted them this is when you will start seeing those spring shoots emerging depending on our spring anytime from March through May. And it is at this point in the growth that there is an increasing day length and increasing temperatures. So the increasing day length and increasing temperatures are what signal this plant to start sending up the shoots. So if you have a field of hops this is the best time to start getting an early control of your weeds. This is the time to think about your fertilizer applications. This will be the time that you are stringing your trellis and irrigating and training and we'll go through some of those as well. Training when the shoots are emerging from the ground they need to be trained onto something to grow otherwise they will grow onto themselves and anything that's near them they'll trail on the ground and it can be it can be quite overwhelming how many shoots come up and if you don't catch this on time you'll have a mess to try to untangle all these binds and it's just not it's just not a good thing and if you train them too late then you're not achieving your maximum yield. It is generally recommended to train approximately three three to four binds per string so you'll go in and you'll select the best most healthy looking binds and train them and you train them in a clockwise direction. If you try to go counterclockwise the plants they don't stop growing but you can tell that the plant is confused and it won't grow properly it won't grow up. It'll try to unravel itself and reroute itself in a counter in a clockwise direction. I get asked that question a lot what happens if you do it backwards well the plant will try to correct itself and then you're setting it back a little bit. So the above ground growth these plants truly are amazing they will grow 18 to 25 feet in a season and that's up to one foot per day okay so here's a photo of our hops when they reach the top wire and they have already sent out their laterals the laterals are the shoots that come out from where the leaf nodes are the laterals contain the hop cones so when the hops are in their burst stage the flowering stage that comes out of the laterals. So hops have two different growth periods they have a vegetative growth and they have a reproductive growth. So the vegetative growth is typically happening May through June and then when we hit that summer solstice you're familiar with this you know that the days are getting shorter after June 21st. The days are getting shorter and that signals the plant to transition from its vegetative stage to its reproductive stage and the reproductive stage happens from about July to August. So at this point at June 21st your hop plants should be all the way to the top of your trellis. At this point the laterals will start to develop and this is when the cones develop. So at this point you cannot increase the number of cones that you'll have. From this point on it's best to just maintain the best plant health that you can to maximize cone weight and quality. So taking care of the hop cones themselves after this point is very important. And here we have just an illustration of what takes place as the hop cones are maturing. You rotate if you were to go out and look at them on a weekly basis. This is what you would see. So at the time of harvest you've got mid-August to late September and it really depends on the variety that you have chosen and it depends on the cone's moisture content. And there are several methods to harvesting pops and the most common way is to cut your binds down and then transport them to a stationary picking machine. There's other methods like mobile harvesters and hand picking. I put question marks there because hand picking is quite labor intensive. And here you can see we were cutting ours down. We were using a tree pruner and that seemed to work really well for us. But you have to consider the fact that this is the easiest method for harvesting. If you cut the top of the bind down and then cut the plant at the base and take it somewhere to harvest the cones. So every year you have to you have to restring your trellis and you have to retrain your plants. This is a photo of a mobile harvester that we purchased for our hop research. It's mobile meaning that you can pull it out to your hop yard but it's stationary in the fact that it sits right there where you put it. You hook it up to your tractor. It is PTO driven. The mechanics are PTO and then there's also some hydraulics involved. So everything about that would be stationary but it's mobile because you can you can bring the harvester out to your field per se. And then from that point we go back into the dormancy stage and the phases start all over again. So this would be from the end of August through that first hard freeze that we get which in our case is about late September early October. And then we go through that autumnal equinox. The days have started getting shorter since June 21st but this is when they are around the same time as the nighttime hours. So the plant starts sensing that and that's the point where it starts translocating nutrients into the storage roots preparing itself for winter. Okay so at this point in your field it would be good to take care of any perennial weed issues because guess what the perennial weeds are doing the same thing. Okay so it's good to spray with a systemic herbicide. The plant the weed will be taking you know the this the chemical into its root system and that is the most effective way to get rid of perennial weeds but you need to take care that you don't spray your hot plants because they're doing the exact same thing. It's also important to keep irrigating the hops until you have the hard freeze. The plants are still photosynthesizing they're still growing. They will still continue to grow their shoots will continue to grow even after you've cut off that main you know vine that you went and harvested they'll still keep growing so it's important to keep irrigating and then make sure that you prevent any crown damage if you're driving around your hop yard just take care that the the crowns still need to be protected because they're going to be putting energy into those buds the resting buds for next year and at this point if you wanted to divide any of your hops now is the time to you know divide out a few rhizomes if you were going to transplant them somewhere else. All right so so far we have covered about half of the presentation we've talked about the history botany and the chemistry so now I want to talk about the growth requirements and I want to take you through what we've done here in Williston and then we'll talk about some pest issues. So the growth requirements because hops are day-length sensitive they do grow best between the 34th and 50th latitudes north or south the closer you get to the equator the harder it is to grow because these plants will not switch into their reproductive phase because of the day length so people ask me all the time do hops grow here and I think it has a lot to do with our winters that's always the question what zone are we in and how will they over winter but these plants are if you want them to be successful especially if you're growing them for hops to make beer or to sell for beer making um they grow best in this latitude so yes they do grow here the soil preference is right around the six to seven and a half for the pH and they are very heavy fertilizer users and this is because of that rapid growth so the first year they take about 75 pounds of nitrogen per acre this is the year that they're establishing themselves you probably um sometimes I get asked if you should harvest the plants that first year and I would suggest not it's a good idea to let them grow and um you're not taking any energy away from them if you just let them grow if they do produce cones that first year that's great um but just know that you'll have to start over again in the spring with some new with new shoots and then I would harvest that year the second year's um cones uh we harvested ours the first year it really wasn't that big a deal but the subsequent years do require more nitrogen about 100 to 150 pounds of nitrogen per acre that's a lot of nitrogen to be putting down uh we did a split application of three different applications of urea the soil out here in williston is relatively high in potassium or excuse me phosphorus and so we um we just went with urea but I would get your soil tested first so that you know exactly what nutrients you are lacking so that you can plan accordingly now irrigation um is one of those uh things they because of the rapid growth and our temperatures that we can get here in the summertime they do require a lot of irrigation and um it has been calculated that they require about 16 gallons per plant per week so if you had a one acre hop yard with approximately 900 plants that would be 15 000 gallons of water during the hottest months now I've been asked do I have to irrigate no you don't have to irrigate the plant isn't going to just die if you don't irrigate but if you want to maintain the healthiest most robust plant that you can I would recommend irrigating at least during the hot parts july and august so keep that in mind and this is also a really easy way to fur to gate if you wanted to add fertilizer to your water that's a really easy way of making sure that you can tailor then the fertilizer needs to these plants without being wasteful a urea will leach very quickly and so it's you you have to get that incorporated sometimes that's hard if you don't get any rainfall so having an irrigation system helps um incorporate that so that the plants can take up that nitrogen right away so this is an overview of where I am the Williston research extension center the red arrow is pointing to where my hop yard is we are at 48 latitude and just above that is us highway number two so if you were coming into Williston um and traveling on highway two we're about a half a mile from or close to the Montana border and you'll notice that um my hop yard is nestled very nicely in a row very well established shelter belts it's very well protected and this is a diagram showing you the 50th the parallels and every little red dot represents um a hop you know hop growing I'm not quite sure who put this together but um you'll notice that Washington Oregon and Idaho those red dots in those states represent the largest growing region in um the United States and the export a vast amount of the hops but then you'll also notice that the hops are becoming more and more popular in the Great Lakes region Minnesota Wisconsin Michigan and New York so there's been a resurgence in that area um and so there's there's been research done in Ohio and then we're getting you know closer and closer to the equator uh as we go south Virginia North Carolina the hops you know they're they're doing research on them and I know that there's been talk about coming out with varieties that may do better in those areas so it is promising what's happening in the hop research with genetics and even just you know growing them in different regions so considerations when you're choosing a site to grow a hop yard if you're going to go with something more commercial um it has to have full sun these plants utilize the rotation of the sun as part of their means for you know growing up there up the trellis protection from the wind is a is a high recommendation although not necessarily required that just protects your plants in North Dakota we know that the winds low and that wind can be so harmful to a plant especially when the plant is 20 feet in the air um you'll also have to take into consideration how hard the wind can be on your trellis structure last year was the first year that I actually had um structural failure my top wire actually came unhitched at one of the connections and so I had hops on the ground and that's not something that you really want to deal with in the middle of the summer considering the space to build your trellis um think about the equipment access if you're going to be tilling in between your rows or mowing or getting a tractor out there for any reason think about the spacing it's generally recommended to give yourself about 12 to 15 between rows and that generally has a lot to do with your equipment size and then having irrigation access do you have access to an adequate supply of irrigation to keep these things watered when you first plant them you need to water them in and get them established it's all about the health of the plant because as you'll see when we get farther along here these things are susceptible to a lot of problems a lot of diseases and insects okay so um another good reference material that i've included here is called the hopgar's handbook um the folks that wrote this are out of the um new england area i think new york this is an excellent book because she goes through the history there's a lot of historical tidbits there there are a lot of illustrations in this book colored illustrations different methods for setting up a trellis um and i just i thought it was a great reference material and even if you were going to grow hops for ornamental they show you different trellising techniques or ideas that you could use if you wanted to grow a hop and have it growing on something so i would definitely recommend finding a copy of this book and reading it and here we are at the williston research extension center this is what the hops look like when i first started here they were grown um as a demonstration she had six she had uh the previous horticulturalists had six varieties and they were growing on these pbs um and so for demonstration purposes this was perfectly fine but um the tbs themselves were probably only six feet tall and that's only a you know a quarter of what these things need to grow on and so this is what it started looking like oh about mid season um and the hops this was just a mess there was just no there was just no easy way of harvesting hop cones from this type of structure if you're going to have them growing as a demonstration that's great but um i the first time i cut these down i brought them inside because it was hot out and i was going to try harvesting and my arms were so scratched up it looked like i had gotten in a fight with a cat and i was having i mean my skin was inflamed and red and it was just not it was not good at all and i was one i was asking myself why why had i done this um and then i i'm not sure what the answer to that is because then i was asked to write a grant and do some research on hops and i said yes so here we are we ended up writing a specialty crop block grant so that we could do a variety trial and set up a hop yard in a way that would be manageable and i uh co-opt that with dr harlene headerman valenti and fargo and so they had set up a hop yard at apsiraca so that we could conduct some research here so these are the varieties that i chose for williston uh i used the six varieties that that the previous horticulturalists had growing here and then i expanded that to include six more varieties and i chose them based off of their brew usage i did do a lot of research on hop varieties there are hundreds of hop varieties out there but that is typically the question that i get asked what variety should i grow and it really depends on what you're going to be doing with your end product if you're going to be making beer maybe you need to do a little research on the varieties and what kind of beer do you want to make and then make your selections there are a lot of varieties out there and most of them do well for us here i did choose one that was a uk variety there's a breeding program over in london and they have come out with a lot of hop cultivars and of course the germans they have their noble varieties or what they call them and that would be the spalt select now that one wasn't as well adapted for us here in um our northern climate it has not done well for me so if you want to do a little more research into the varieties i would recommend checking out this book hop variety handbook it is a it's a small book it's a short read and it gets right down into the nitty gritty about um what the hops are used for what are the typical brews what their alpha acid beta acids are it's written by a brewer so it's very short and sweet and to the point um but i found it useful when i was looking up information about each of my okay so we planted ours in 2014 it was in the fall we utilize um field grade hop plants on the right hand side photo you'll see this is what the rhizome looks like if it's dormant the plant in the middle is a field grade and then you've got a hop start we utilized actual hop plants that way we knew if there was any virus expression or anything wrong with the plant we'd see it right away a dormant crown or a dormant rhizome can carry viruses that you might not know about until you've got the plants planted and then you'll start seeing those issues there so i usually recommend to people to get field grade hop plants somewhere from a supplier here we are setting our hop trial up we had to rent a cherry picker so um it's very convenient if you have one of these because you are going to be getting up and down that trail is a lot but they are very expensive so that's something to take into consideration if you're setting up a hop yard we utilize telephone poles that were being removed from the property at the research center so we got them from free there was no cost to that but if you're going to go with an organic type of hop yard you would not be able to use these because of the way they've been pressure treated with chemicals um now here we are again we're putting up that top wire i'm going to admit this thing was fun to drive i really wish we owned one but we don't and so um but it was really handy when we were putting up that top wire so every year you're going to string your hop plants and then you need to anchor them at the ground level somehow so that that plant can grow up so we purchased this um applicator tool the uh the the picture on the right hand side is the applicator and the two wires are the clips that you can use to what you do is you put that w clip at the end of the applicator you step that down into the ground right at the crown of the plant and that anchors in your twine now you'll see i'm using bailing twine in this photo but i would not recommend using bailing twine uh i would recommend using coir coir is produced through with uh coconut husk the fiber of the coconut it is very durable it's um very robust i guess the plant can cling to it very well it's thick and it's not going to break i found that bailing twine is designed to break down in the elements and so after a season i was having my hop um twine the twine was actually breaking because it was meant to break down so i don't recommend bailing twine i would recommend some sort of coir material or sisal like a landscape rope so that's a cost that you have to figure in every year because you are going to be cutting this down every year when you're harvesting so here we are we've strung our hops and this is again a close up of it twining around the way it the way it grows and this is uh one of my summer interns she was training or weeding uh and so by June 16th this is what our hopyard looked like in 2015 and remember that summer solstice is coming up these plants should have been to the top of the trellis nonetheless um and then the reason for this is that we were finishing our hop yard construction before prior to June and so we were still finishing that before we got our hop plants trained but nonetheless these plants still produced uh the photo on the right is a picture from august and we had cones but we also had plants that were still in the birth stage so they were still going through that reproductive phase trying as hard as they could to produce uh we had a fairly decent crop by august 19th um in 2015 this is a couple pictures of our harvester uh we purchased that from hop harvester llc it's called the the hopster 5p and it's meant to do five acres maximum of or a minimum of five acres i believe and so you feed the hop vine in the hop machine itself is stationary but you hook it up to those hydraulics and the chain pulls it into the machine and then there's a series of pickers going uh very quickly very fast rotations and they are picking off the cones and you'll end up with a lot of leaf debris so at the end there we are um there i am picking the hop cones off there was a sidearm that ended up in the bucket you kind of have to sort through that and a couple snapshots of our end product so hops have to be dried they have a certain moisture content that they need to be brought down to so again going back to that fleshy cone it's it's fleshy it's wet it needs to be dried if you don't dry these they will mold right away uh so we use these bins we cut out the bottom of the bin and we just put um insect screening in there and then we drew we we blew air over these ambient air there was no heat added and that was just to dry these cones down this is a couple pictures of the way fargo had their trial set up they set theirs up in a v fashion so they had two lines dropping down from the guide wire this is a typical setup you'll see in the pacific northwest that way you can train four to eight binds rather than just three like we were doing with one string so you're maximizing your yields this way but you're also increasing your labor another snapshot they had done some things with different mulching trials uh doctor haderman valentine's research um graduate student did some research on that um so moving along quickly to the economics um what you need to know before you get started pops are labor intensive you need to factor in the pesticides and fertilizers the equipment you know if you're going to rent equipment like we did or if you have equipment if you're going to purchase a harvester um the infrastructure you'll have to restring that coir every year um you you it's not feasible to think about hand harvesting especially if you're going to have uh even 150 plants that's a lot to hand harvest it's time consuming and time is of the essence here when you've got hot plants that need to be dried and need to be processed or utilized after harvest so there's post harvest handling that's involved here too and then we have a lot of disease and insects here so try to cover that in the next 10 minutes this is just a snapshot of the things that can happen downy mildew powdery mildew you've got different wilts that can happen there's a whole host of viruses that these plants are susceptible to and then um the insect issues you'll end up with aphids flea beetles Japanese beetles a leaf hoppers spider mites and that photo there is a leopard optrin larva it's a looper like a cabbage looper only it's a hop looper so the biggest issue that i have found is the two-spotted spider mite and you'll end up with some years that's worse than others um these things do over winter in your soil and they can go through their uh larval to adult stage quite quickly depending on the temperature if you've ever had to deal with spider mites you know that these things can be just impossible to deal with and when you're dealing with a plant that's 20 feet in the air that's something that you're going to need to take into consideration they produce these little webs on the undersides of the leaves that helps protect them in their colonies so they can continue laying eggs and reproducing like crazy meanwhile you're wondering what in the world is going on uh leaf hoppers leaf hoppers can be a problem uh i noticed in last two years i had some problems you'll see the edges of the leaf that's called hopper burn and they damage the edges of your leaves these weren't a major problem for me but i wanted to point it out that this is an issue um bind wilts were a big deal for us you have two different types of wilts actually there's three different types but the fusarium canker is one where you'll end up with a canker at the base of the plant and you can also end up with verticillium wilt which is on the right hand side picture a characteristic of that is a very swollen bind unusually large um the fusarium you'll notice right at the point where the plant you know broke at the very base the plant has that callus material it's kind of it's kind of bulbous and odd shaped that's fusarium canker uh it's very difficult to treat there really is no uh spray for it even though it is a fungal infection a lot of what i have read in the literature is a management so whether you're taking care not to damage your crown um making sure that the plants have enough irrigation and a fertilizer those sorts of things is what need to be done to take care of fusarium powdery mildew versus downy mildew i mentioned earlier at the beginning of this presentation that new york was the first place for the first commercial hop yard but after the 1800s this disease powdery mildew completely wiped out all production in the new england states and so that is when production moved out to the pacific northwest where it is dry and hot in the yakama valley so the causal agents between these two um mildews are different the symptoms of powdery mildew will be very similar to what you'd find if you had powdery mildew on your roses okay you'll have that powdery white colony on the leaves the stems the buds the cones favorable weather is um when you have rapid plant growth in the spring and then mild temperatures high humidity cloudy weather so i didn't see a lot of powdery mildew out west but i would suspect that you'd see this a lot in the east side of the state just because of the moisture and the and the humidity um the potosfera genus is the same as what you would find on your rose powdery mildew but it's a different species here the macularis so then we have the downy mildew which is quite it's one of the most important diseases especially in the wet humid regions um the symptoms for this disease are quite it's difficult to identify this but you'll have a newly emerging basil spike it'll be a stunted spike growing in the spring the leaves will be stunted they'll be pale and downward curling leaves the environment that savers this is a mild to warm temperature with prolonged leaf wetness so when you've got a lot of rain and the leaf is wet couple pictures of what these diseases look like you've got downy mildew on the right you'll see angular leaf lesions it is quite different than powdery mildew but they're these diseases can be easy to confuse because they're both they're both mildews so i've included the um life cycle on these um and pointing out just a few differences powdery mildew has two different life forms they two different reproductive forms excuse me they have the sexual reproduction and asexual reproduction and whenever there's been a sexual reproduction the plant the the disease itself will overwinter in the chasmothesia which is basically the overwintering structure the spores germinate in the spring and then they infect the new growth and then infection continues asexually as it goes from uh the plant itself will form colonies and then those canidia foras will reinfect the plant as it moves along now downy mildew seems to be a little bit more systemic uh but downy mildew will actually overwinter in the bud and the crown and that's where you'll end up getting that basil spike that looks deformed coming out of the plant that means that this overwintered in the plant itself it overwintered in the in the bud so looking for that basil spike is very important um if i back up here powdery mildew will send up a flag shoot which will have that mycelial growth on it the powdery silvery looking growth on it that's what you'll identify there you want to rogue these out as soon as you possibly can so that it doesn't continue reinfecting so a couple pictures we had a couple viruses out in our hop yard i didn't have them identified so i don't know exactly what they were but just a couple pictures of what you'll find the viruses can be quite difficult to spot and then you could end up with a lot of different cone disorders a couple pictures that we had when we ended up with a lot of rain in august this is what you'll end up with we had altern area cone disorder it ruins the quality of the cone you can't make the year out of that and so this is something that you have to sometimes you have no control over it especially when it's raining late late in the summer which we don't typically get out here in williston but um there's various molds and um powdery mildew can infect the cones themselves you can get gray mold downy mildew will definitely cause problems in the cones themselves uh and so i just wanted to touch briefly on the beneficial insects keeping in mind if you're going to have a spray regimen you don't want to just go all out and start spraying everything because you have these beneficial insects that need these need to build up their populations especially in the spring the spring when your plant is emerging and you're training it that's when you should hopefully have these predatory mites and their populations can be growing so that they can help take care of those spider mites okay and then lady beetles uh they kind of come into play between training and flowering um it's good to know what your predatory bugs look like because these bugs are helpful you want them in your hop yard you want to encourage their growth uh any way that you can so that you don't have to spray you know insecticides all the time and i haven't done any spraying insecticides on my hops i don't have the equipment for it uh so i usually just let them go and see what happens in some years it's hard especially with the spider mites depending on how dry it is um but that's something to keep in mind when you are dealing with hops and the insect problems so with that i'd like to just put a little plug out there for our field days if you'd like to come see these hops in person and touch them for yourself please come to our williston field day it's july uh 10th this year there's been a time change we have a three p.m field day this year the horticulture tour starts at four p.m and we are about half a mile west of williston on the intersection of highway two and eighty five and then our following field day after that the next day is our nesting valley irrigated tour and that's where the high tunnel is located please join us for that and with that i guess i'll open it up to questions hey we have time for a couple of questions because we are close to three o'clock so yeah question uh go ahead and type it in the chat box okay i see one question here is there a market for selling hops in north dakota um good question um not that i really know of per se it what i've been telling folks is if you are really interested in growing and you know if you have a brewer lined up to buy your hops that's really who's driving the market um so really it's up to the breweries is kind of what i've been telling folks they're the ones driving the market and i i mean i know that there are a few hop yards in production that are selling their hops so i know that there is a market you just have to kind of find find out where that's at for you specifically in your region in your area can you pin a bind node to the ground to root uh hops are actually very difficult no they don't produce a lot of adventitious roots like you would think um a vining crop would and i have tried rooting them and it doesn't work very well it's just easier to go ahead and divide the plant and get um get a rhizome if you have part of that root that works best for transplanting these things for rooting them i should say um are those hop growers she knows about in the wilson area um i'm not really sure what the question is there the hop growers that i was referring to i know of one near kerington osley's sunny side acres they have been growing hops for a few years um there's a few near biz mark that i know of i'm sure and there's a one in there was one in my not um i think jamie good at the department of ag has a better idea of where exactly the hop growers are located i don't know of anyone specifically in williston growing hops for production anyways i've seen i've seen hops growing on people's houses as ornamentals um i have a tendency of of um driving around and looking at people's houses and i i have spotted hot plants on people's porches it does grow well here all right i think i will draw us to a close so thank you everyone for participating and i'm sure kyla would take your questions if you dropped her an email absolutely and thank you kyla this was really an interesting talk i knew nothing about hops so i know a lot more now thank you oh it's a fascinating topic thanks for inviting me and thanks to all of you for participating and we hope to see you next week to learn about apples okay