 Hi, I'm Suzy Thompson and I'm the potato breeder at North Dakota State University. Today we are outside of Larimar, North Dakota on the farm of Carl Hoverson. He and his sons raised potatoes and a myriad of other crops in this area of Grand Forks County and neighboring counties and produce a tremendous amount of irrigated potatoes. Carl and his family have been very supportive of potato research and this is a brand new pivot that's behind us is the second one that they built in support of potato research. Something that is kind of unique in terms of our research efforts in North Dakota is that the majority of research is actually conducted in grower fields rather than at university research sites and I think that allows for a little bit of a different perspective and some more real life and real world scenarios in terms of production. So Carl, tell us a little bit about why potato research is so important to you and your family and feel free to expand that out to the potato industry itself. Hi, potato research is really important to us. We like to have research close to our own location because it gives us an idea of what potato varieties can do in the soils that we produce. So that's why I like to be involved with providing plots that we think are kind of representative soils of the area we're in. We're a process grower for a JR Simplet company and they and all the other companies in this area demand higher quality so in order to do that we need to have the research to find varieties that work well in this area. We can't always rely on varieties that were raised in the West like Idaho or Washington because sometimes they're too long of varieties and here we're looking for varieties that do well under the kind of conditions that we have here and we can see what these conditions are by year by year by watching our test plots and we have a great team at NDSU, they're a second to none I think in the world just finding varieties that work real well and we've got a variety of two right now that are that's looking really promising to go to Russet for instance looks really good for the process industry and we've got several acres of that and that was developed by NDSU and reason to be that we're also doing this is that it's getting to be more and more ahead of the world with for quality for French Rides so the companies are giving us stricter and stricter and higher higher goals to meet for quality and in order to do that we need varieties that are either immune to some of those issues that they have like you could be a hollow heart or a shatter bruising or black spot bruising or or some kind of blights or whatever it is scabs or whatever so we have to we need we need to consistently look for better and better of varieties and that's what they're doing here to be so that we're more profitable so the company that we sell to is more profitable and the and the public ends up with a better quality potato so that's kind of what we're after so it's very important that we have them here so if you wonder why we have why we why in my farm I benefit because this is an essential part of this organization this farm and this and this is kind of a representative of the Simplot grower's area so that's why we want to do it so there are you talked a lot about new varieties and some of the important attributes today during this virtual field day there were many researchers that in addition to the potato breeding program have research trials under the mini pivot but they also have trials in some other fields that are around in Carl and his son's operation so that allows not only the selection of the varieties but it also allows us to learn information that is then shared with all growers about management whether it be seed piece spacing or the correct order of fungicides to apply to prevent early blight late blight black dot whatever the problems might be and so this has been a very fun collaboration and a excellent central location for our northern plains potato growers it's one thing to get a variety that really worked well for us but also remember that all the other support people that that try to find out problems that we have growing them like mop top or you know all the different diseases that are out there so that some and there could be new diseases in the future that we have to deal with so we need a array of different varieties that we can go to so that you know as as time goes on that we we can be prosperous in case something happens or we can't grow them anymore for some reason or some disease or something we need to have a variety of different varieties that we can go to that can make us successful for the long term