 As we start rolling into the presentations, just a couple of important things. First of all, I want to thank the Sugar Beet Research and Education Board of Minnesota and North Dakota for funding most, if not all of the talks for the rest of the day that you're going to be hearing. So thank you to that group. I also would like to thank Sumitomo Company for sponsoring lunch. I thought I saw Shigeki around. So if you see Shigeki, there he is. Please say thank you. We appreciate that very much. So our first talk is titled, What We Learned About Water Hemp Control from Soul Residual Herbicides in a Season with Limited Rainfall. It's presented by Dr. Tom Peters. As an introduction, everybody has seen the program before. I like to use this as a reference because it represents the complexity of weed management in Sugar Beet. Now, if you focus on the activity that we do early in the season, what's in the May and April and May box here, you can see that these activities are related to soil residual herbicides that need to be incorporated into the soil by rainfall or by the application equipment that we use. This is very important to make these products work properly. Now, in my research or in our research, we have the luxury. We can spray by watching the weather forecast. I know our producers don't have that luxury. They're out making sprays every day. So I think our research from 2021, where even in our research, we had trouble getting activation, I think that'll provide some insights into how herbicides work in a dry season. So before we do that, we're going to do this in two steps. So this is going to be a classroom lecture followed by some results. So there are some basic principles that I want to make sure that we get on the table. So first of all, water hemp is a small seeded broadleaf. It's in the surface one inch of soil. So we need to get our herbicides into the surface one inch. We don't need them two or three inches. We need them from surface to one inch in the soil. And we need to use, like I mentioned, we're using primarily rainfall to get them activated. But here's a really important statement for you. Just because we have rainfall to incorporate a herbicide, it doesn't mean that your worries are over. We also need rainfall to keep the herbicide in solution. And I can argue that there's many examples in 2021 where our herbicide was incorporated into the soil, but it was bound to soil colites. So it was unavailable for uptake by our weed seeds. And then the last thing, not all herbicides are the same. So you're going to see this in the numbers and our research. Some herbicides are bound more than others. And I just need to point that out. OK, so this is a picture that says the same thing that I did on the previous slide. So I want you to see this in green here. And think of those brown things with tails as a water hemp seedling. So they're in the soil solution. And there's herbicide around them. So the herbicide is available for uptake either through the seed, through the roots, or the chutes of water hemp. That's a good situation. That's what we want. Well, at the same time, or under a very dry environmental condition, some of our herbicide might be bound to the soil colloid. And as I mentioned previously, that herbicide it won't be leaching out of the profile, but it's not available for water hemp seedling. And then soil chemists use a term called zorbshin. So our herbicide can move back and forth from the soil solution to the soil colloids. And it does in response to rainfall. So I have another picture. This one is by, this is from Dr. Bob Hartzler, a good friend of mine at Iowa State University. And what I want you to get from this picture is the soil solution is like a sponge. So it grows and it contracts. It grows and it contracts so that when it's very dry, there isn't a lot of herbicide in solution. And that might explain why sometimes we don't get the weed control that we expect. Some chemistry. So herbicides are either absorbed to soil colloids. And there's a term called KOC that measures the affinity for zorbshin to soil. And the second important term is water solubility. So think of water solubility. If you have a pint glass, think of water solubility as the amount of herbicide that you can get into solution in that pint container. So some herbicides are more soluble. You'll get more of them in solutions. Some are less soluble. And then the third term is called water or herbicide halfway. And this term really describes the persistence of herbicides in the soil. So I'm going to use an example here. We talk all the time about our chloroacetamide herbicides. So we'll use them in his example. But I want to go to the bottom first. I want to compare Treflan and dicamba. Treflan is an example of a herbicide that binds tightly to soil. Now it's available in solution, but it has a high affinity for soil colloids, meaning it has a very low water solubility. On the other hand, dicamba has a very, very high water solubility. But the flip side of that, it means that there's very little absorptivity of dicamba. So it can leach out of the soil profile very quickly. So you can see this, this is a balance. It's a balance between absorptivity and water solubility. Now let's look at our chloroacetamide herbicides. And you can see from an absorptivity standpoint, they're very similar. They're very, very similar. But look at water solubility. The one that stands out is outlook. And what do we say about outlook? It's very easy to get outlook activated. And it's the reason why growers often use outlook first in their lay-by-programs. And the one that's at the other extreme is warrant, acetylchlor. And I usually state on this one is I would prefer that you wait and use it later in the season, because I want to make sure that there's some herbicide that's in the soil available for weed control. So the numbers kind of back what we talk about a lot. I don't want you to pay much attention to half-life. Half-life is done, is measured according to the parameters of the experiment. So I'm not exactly sure the parameters for how the data was developed for Esmitolachlor, but we don't see a half-life of 124 days in Minnesota and North Dakota. There's a couple of other metrics that I want to make sure that you're aware of. And this has more to do with persistence in the soil. So the first one is CEC. And in our environments, the component of CEC that matters the most is organic matter. The second is soil pH. And this is very important. At a lower pH, the herbicide will bind to the hydrogen atoms, and it'll also bind to the negatively charged soil colloid. So in a sense, at a negative pH, our herbicide will be unavailable in the soil. Now, at higher pHs, there isn't as much binding and our herbicide will be available in the water solution. So an example with Atrazine at high pHs means that it's readily available and it's one of the reasons why at high pHs we sometimes talk about the herbicide rate or the likelihood of carryover from occurring. And then finally, soil moisture. And this is really important, because as I've been mentioning, we need soil moisture to move herbicide off the soil colloid and into solution. Okay, so let's use some data. And I'm going to contrast two locations that we had, one in Blumkest. And this is a location that we did in collaboration with the Southern men research team, and then one of our locations at Moorhead. So look at the data, especially the 30-year average data at Blumkest. It was very, very dry in April, May, June, July. We finally got some rain in August. And if we went on, you'd see we got rain in September and October as well. Moorhead was a little more hit and miss. So we had some rain in April. We missed out in May. We had rain in June. We missed out in July. Okay. And I've presented the rainfall data here temporally on the graph. So you can see both sites were very dry in April and early and in May. And you can see the Moorhead rain. And other than rain event in late May, we didn't really have any rain until the end of June at our Blumkest location. And if you size that rain event to sugar beet, no, we were at eight to 10 leaves. So you can see we had very, very little rain to get the pre or the early lay by treatments activated at Blumkest. So how's that going to affect weed control? So I want to start with Moorhead. So for the statisticians out there, this was a factorial, a factorial experiment. There were two factors. The first factor was pre-emergence herbicide. And that's on top. Below is the post-emergence or the lay by treatment. So that's down below. I'm not going to read these treatments. You've seen them before, but I want to compare factor A to factor B. Okay. And the arrow here indicates when we had a significant rainfall event. So you can see that we had rain to activate before I did my evaluations. So one other note that's important here, none doesn't mean that there was no herbicide. It means that there was no pre-emergence herbicide. And all the data is averaged across all the factor B entries where we didn't have any pre herbicide. So what the data says is that in an environment where we had rain, the herbicides made a difference. We had statistically better weed control from ethodual or at the fumazate by itself as compared to no pre herbicide. So that makes sense, right? Down below, looking at the end season data, again, really no difference between our chloroacetamide programs, but significantly better weed control as compared to relying on the post-only program. Okay. And of course herbicide resistance also is nested within that. Okay. So that makes sense because it rained at Moorhead. What about at Bloom-Kest where it didn't rain? So the arrow indicates up on top that we did get a little bit of rain that timed after the pre-emergence sprays and before my evaluations. The arrow on the bottom means that we went quite a ways into the season on the post sprays before it rained. So on top, the differences are a lot smaller here, but there still are differences that favor soil-applied herbicides. Look on the bottom. They're very, very similar. You know, in many respects, there's not a lot of differences even between the glyphosate-only programs because that herbicide was laying on the soil surface. I think if you look at the numeric numbers only, you'll see that outlook stands out. It's a little higher. And again, I think that's attributed to water solubility, the story we've used. Well, it finally rained and guess what happened? You can see the benefits of the soil-applied herbicides. Okay. Next example I want to use. This one is withethafumazate. So this happened to be at the Fargo Airport. And this is a picture that I took in early July. And you can say, what a mess. I'm sure glad I don't have to evaluate that. But I tried to stumble my way through. And after a while, I started to see something that was really interesting. There were some plots where the weeds came later. Okay. In the picture on the left, it's big and small weeds. On the picture on the right, it's weeds that came in later on. So what happened? Well, let's talk about the experiment. This was an experiment to compare PPI and pre-applications. Okay. And early means my, you know, germination and emergence of the first flush of weeds. Late is the germination and emergence of the later flush of weeds. We planted into really, really dry conditions. We got a little bit of rain the end of May. So what happened here? What I think happened is that we incorporated the PPI treatment, but that herbicide was bound to the soil. So it wasn't providing any weed control. So we didn't get any weed control from the PPI treatment until after we got the later rain. And it actually did pretty good on the subsequent flush. On the pre-emergence treatment, that maybe small rain event might have incorporated and provided some weed control on the surface. And then you can see we probably lost most of the rest of the ethyl. So one thing I want to say about ethyl is if you're going to incorporate it, keep it shallow and use four to five pints. The other thing is, is ethyl takes more water to get activated. And finally, I've seen this in the literature and now I'm seeing it in my own data, ethyl photo degrades. So Todd, I know we're running short a summary. Let's get to the program. I think using the soil residual program is a little bit like investing money. You can't time herbicide applications to rain events. You're going to miss them and then you're going to regret it. So the real key message here is to stay to the program. One other slide I want to show, and this is my last one. I'm not going to put it on the slide. I'm not going to put it on the slide. I'm Todd. There's going to be a number of presenters from my team that follow. And we're not going to put it on the acknowledgement slide in those, but there's a lot of people that we need to acknowledge. And you can read these. I'm not going to. Our students are really critical to make this happen. And the next month is our next speaker. So we're going to have a second speaker. If you would like to add his name there too. So with that title stop and if we have a chance, I'll take any questions. Otherwise I'll be around all day. I think of the interest of time. We'll keep moving. Okay. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Our next speaker. Our next talk is titled. Sugar Beet Tolerance and water him control from ultra blazer All right, good morning, everyone. And thank you for being here. We'll just jump right in. So I'll start by talking about amaranthus species escapes, specifically waterhemp. It's our most important weed control challenge on 79% of acreage according to the Sugar Bee Grower Survey that we conduct annually. Some other amaranthus species include redrick pigweed, pallor amaranth, and polymer amaranth. Waterhemp control from glyphosate alone reduced recoverable sucrose 16% to 27%. So we've measured these losses from these escape waterhemp plants and our other experiments. So our best program right now is in Sugar Bee to layer soil residual herbicides. But we also really promote managing waterhemp across crop sequences because sugar beets don't have a lot of great post options. And the layered soil residual is our best. What we do have for these escape waterhemp control methods is applying glyphosate mixtures with ethode and stinger very early post. So the window isn't very big to use that option. We have interocultivation or the weed zapper, which are some methods that are coming back. They're kind of being innovated. There's a picture of the weed zapper down here at the bottom. Another option that we're looking at is liberty applied with a red ball-hooded sprayer. That's under a 24C. And we have a picture down here of what that looks like where the hoods run between the sugar beet rows and control weeds within the rows. And then lastly, ultra blazer posts. And we just got this this past summer under section 18. And that's kind of where my talk will be placed. So Emma Burt has done a lot of work looking at ultra blazer. It was her thesis work. And so I just kind of want to summarize her past couple of years looking at that and what we know. So we found out that ultra blazer must be timed to greater than six leaf sugar beet. Any ultra blazer put on the beets before then causes significant necrosis and stature reduction. And then another thing we learned is that sugar beet tolerance and or water hemp control is influenced by both adjuvant type and herbicide mixture with ultra blazer. So we have to be careful what we put in the tank with it. We can't just put anything. So that led into some work that we did in the winter, kind of looking at what are options with ultra blazer. And we started looking at esmitolachlor or chlorocetamide with glyphosate and ultra blazer. And what we found in the greenhouse was that growth reduction and fresh weight was similar to that ultra blazer plus glyphosate. So that kind of got us to thinking, how can we incorporate that into our weed management program today? So what we have right now is a pre. We just chose Ethyl plus Esmitolachlor, an early post of glyphosate, Ethyl and a chlorocetamide, and then a post application of glyphosate, Ethyl and a chlorocetamide. So we got to thinking, what if in that last post application, we took out that Ethyl and put ultra blazer instead. So we had an option to control that escape water hemp if it was there. And that's what led into the studies that I'll talk about. We looked at tolerance and we looked at efficacy. So I want to start with the tolerance experiments. They were randomized complete block designs. They had six replications across four locations. And the treatments we applied were a pre application, a two leaf and an eight leaf using our plot sprayer. And then we were spraying at 17 gallon per acre. And we measured stand count in percent necrosis and growth reduction. And then we did take these trials to yield to look at yield parameters as well. So like what Tom talked about, this is the treatment list for the safety. It's a factorial. We had a factor A and a factor B. Factor A was a pre-amorid herbicide. And then B was post. So we basically had three treatments. The first part of it was, did it have a pre or not? And then the second part was our glyphosate check. And then that standard program that I talked about earlier with the chlorocetamide, the glyphosate and the Ethyl at the two and eight leaf. And then the third was an early post of a chlorocetamide glyphosate and Ethyl followed by that chlorocetamide glyphosate and ultrablazer. So starting with sugar beet injury, we didn't notice any significant effect from a pre or not. So I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about factor B and that post-emergence herbicide. So what we saw is putting ultrablazer in the tank for that eight leaf application. Significantly injured the sugar beets up to 50%, seven days after treatment. We also measured seven, 14 and 21. And you see those values going down. So the beets did grow out of it. They looked rough at the beginning, but they started to look okay as the season went on. So we were curious to see what the parameters would say. And again, I want to highlight that treatment. We did take a yield hit. So root yield and recoverable sucrose were significantly reduced from that tank mixture with ultrablazer. And just to kind of show you what we saw, so up here in the corner is just our glyphosate check seven days after treatment, nice and green. And then down in the corner, this was seven days after treatment with that ultrablazer application. And there was a lot of bronzing, golding going on there. And this is just kind of to zoom in to kind of show you what we're seeing on those leaves. And then this picture over here, I think it's pretty neat. Again, this is our ultrablazer. The beets aren't doing too hot, but you can kind of see throughout the trial where those applications were made. Again, and then contrasting our kind of standard program down here in the corner with some nice green leaves. So moving on to efficacy. Now this treatment list was a little more complex, but I'll try to talk us through it. So again, it's a factorial. We had factor A and factor B. A was was there a pre or wasn't there? And then factor B was the post and we essentially had five treatments. And they kind of just got more complex as we went down. So we started with just glyphosate and ethode. And then at the two and eight leaves, and then we put in a chlorocetamide. So glyphosate, ethode, chlorocetamide. And then we did glyphosate, ethode at the two leaf followed by glyphosate plus ultrablazer. And then we added the ultrablazer chlorocetamide. And then at the end, we tossed stinger in there as well. So the treatments just kind of became more complex. So I just want to show you the five treatments with the pre because we did see that applying a pre provided better weed control than not. So I just have those five treatments there. There is glyphosate applied with all of these treatments, but I didn't want to be redundant. So we just have the ethoglyphosate so on so forth. Over here, I am showing two sites. We had a Glendon site and a Bloom Kiss site both in Minnesota. So the first column is sugar beet injury at Glendon. The second is sugar beet injury at the Bloom Kiss site. So once the mixtures started to become more complicated, we saw up to 94% sugar beet injury. That was a lot of injury. There was not much beet standing there. But over at Bloom Kiss, we saw up to 50%, which is more similar to what we were seeing in the safety trials. And then last column is water hemp control at Bloom Kiss. And I wanted to just show you that the water hemp control across these treatments were statistically not different. So whether we applied just ultra blazer and glyphosate compared with the chlorocetamide, the ultra blazer and the stinger, we weren't gaining more water hemp control. We were just injuring the sugar beets more. So what happened at Glendon? Why did we see 94%? Well, on May 31st and June 1st, we were just having a normal North Dakota summer, 75, 82. But June 2nd, 3rd, it skyrocketed to above 90s. A few days were over a hundred. And the application at Glendon was made on June 3rd. So it was in all those hot temperatures. And then the application at Bloom Kiss was made June 9th. So it kind of missed out on those hundred degree temperatures. We kind of know that ultra blazer works is at the mercy of the environment. And this just kind of solidified that, is that the environment plays a big effect on how ultra blazer works. But again, this is our efficacy trials. So down in the corner, we have the glyphosate, chlorocetamide and ultra blazer. And you see that bronzing. And then up here, the application with the stinger. So in summary, I'll start with the tolerance first. Again, pre, whether it was there or not, didn't have any effect on sugar beet injury or yield parameters, but tossing ultra blazer as part of the Water Hemp management program did cause significant injury and reduced yield parameters. So it must be applied in its own application alone or with glyphosate. It can't be tank mixed with our current program because it's not safe for the sugar beets. And then as far as efficacy is concerned, these trials did tell us that ultra blazer applications control Water Hemp escapes. It's most effective on Water Hemp, less than two inches tall. But again, I wanna think back to those numbers we saw. As we added more chemicals, the only thing we were doing is hurting our beets more. We weren't gaining more, we control statistically. This is the slide that Tom showed. Again, a big thanks to everyone we work with. And thank you. Our next talk is titled, Results from the 2021 Ultra Blazer, Section 18, Emergency Exemption in Sugar Beets, be presented by Emma Burns. Okay, so like Alexa said, while the technical work leading up to the Section 18 for Ultra Blazer was done as a graduate research project, a big acknowledgement needs to go to Joe Hastings of American Crystal, Mike Metzger of Mindak and Mark Lundquist of Southern Minnesota Feature Cooperative for their assistance in securing this Section 18. We were given a low probability of getting this, mostly because it's hard to demonstrate a yield loss, but because of their help in providing us with that data and especially to Mark for writing such a compelling case as to why we needed Ultra Blazer and Sugar Beet, we have these results to share with you here today. So today we're gonna talk about the Section 18 itself, the rate that was allowed, the cohort besides adjuvants that could be used and the Sugar Beet stage, how many acres were actually sprayed and then the results of a survey that was passed out to growers that use Ultra Blazer and also to the ag staff at the co-ops. Then we're gonna talk about some research that was done this past season, touching on the effective water hemp size at the time of application, the idea of using micro rates and then the effect, if any, that Ultra Blazer has on Kosha and we'll end with plans for this upcoming season. So we started the application for the Section 18 in January of 2021. The application for Minnesota, especially is quite complicated, almost like a mini-discretation. So the application consists of our request which was using Ultra Blazer and Sugar Beet and then the technical data and the Sugar Beet data to support the use of Ultra Blazer. So we received the Section 18 with the support of Luther Markworth and his American Sugar Beet Growers Association team, approval in Minnesota and North Dakota and then others used our technical data to receive Section 18s in Michigan, Nebraska and Colorado. The components of the Section 18 were that growers could only use Ultra Blazer manufactured by UPL. UPL is the company that we had worked with while conducting our research. The use rate was 16 ounces per acre. Only one application could be made throughout the season and Ultra Blazer could be applied alone or with glyphosate. It should be applied to Sugar Beet that were at the sixth leaf stage or greater only applied by ground equipment and the pre-harvest interval was 45 days but also you could not apply it after August 1st. So the goal was to target Water Hem that was four inches tall or smaller because control is reduced as Water Hem becomes larger. There were about 32,000 acres that were treated with Ultra Blazer, roughly 28,711 in Minnesota and 3,294 in North Dakota. We're very pleased with those numbers. However, our Section 18 was complicated by a couple of factors. First being that it was extremely hot immediately following the approval of the Section 18, air temps above 90 degrees for about a week after approval. And we know that hot weather increases the injury to the Sugar Beet. So the issue there was, do we spray anyway or do we wait for the temps to cool down a bit? But every day that we waited, the Water Hem gets bigger. Then the second issue was that we had a variable crop. We had Sugar Beet newly emerged all the way up to sixth leaf or beyond in the same field. So with our research demonstrating that we would severely injure and or kill super young Sugar Beet, we needed to wait until Sugar Beet for at the sixth leaf stage or greater, but then that also resulted in us spraying large of Water Hem. We surveyed growers and egg staff about the Sugar Beet injury and the Water Hem control. We used a one to four scale. So for Sugar Beet injury, one indicated that there was no injury, which highly unlikely. Two was slight injury, three moderate injury and then four was severe injury. At American Crystal, injury range from slight to moderate with an average of 2.79. At MNDAC, again, slight to moderate, this time with an average of 2.38. And at Southern Min, injury range from, again, slight to moderate and the average there was a 2.5. So ending up with a 2.6. And then on the wheat control side, one indicated excellent control, two was good control, three was fair control and then four was poor. At American Crystal, we ranged from good to fair, average of a 2.14. At MNDAC, again, good to fair, average of a 2.6. And then at Southern Min, we actually ranged from excellent to fair with an average being a 2.43. Rounding out at 2.3 overall. So these results, while they were all fairly close, we might try to tease out more of a difference if we do, when we do this again, but this is what we have for 2021. We did get some other good feedback though. Our survey responses clearly stated that both growers and ag staff found the section 18 to be beneficial and would wish to apply it again in 2022. 95% of respondents thought that it was beneficial and contributed to the overall wheat management and 92% would willingly support a section 18 again in 2022. Other comments that we received or things that we learned from the use in the field was that we need to use plenty of water. When larger waterhemp was sprayed, we did see regrowth, especially when you had insufficient coverage. And then the recovery of the injured sugar beet was based on moisture and the degree of the actively growing beets. Some things that we learned doing some research trials did hold true while most all fields had bronzing. There were some that had more than others, but no respondents suggested that they had a yield loss from ultra blazer. Okay, so now we'll move into some of the 2021 research. After we got the section 18, we needed to educate the ag staffs quickly about how to use this section 18. So we held meetings with the co-ops and we devised a one to five scheme here for using an ultra blazer based on the risk of injury and your waterhemp pressure. So starting at the top, one was using ultra blazer by itself. Two, we added a low rate of NIS. Three, we added a high rate of NIS. Four was ultra blazer plus glyphosate plus AMS. And then five was ultra blazer plus glyphosate plus AMS plus NIS. We conducted demonstration probes in all of the co-ops at Benson, Crookston, Hendrum and Fox Home in Minnesota and in Castleton, North Dakota. The Hendrum site was along a dirt road, but it was so popular that Tom joked that the township should pave it for ease of viewing. So this is the data from the demonstration sites. The treatments are in the same order as the previous slide here. So we would expect that injury would increase as we added to the tank. And that's exactly what we see here at each site. As you added to ultra blazer, our injury increased. A note on the Benson site, we have much higher injury than at any of the other sites. And this is most likely due to the air temper application was 95 degrees. Now this data is just from the Hendrum site because it was taken to yield. While we did see the percent injury increasing as we added to the tank, injury is amenable about a month after application. There was a yield decline as you added to the tank as well, but that decline was not statistically different for percent sugar. For root yield, ultra blazer alone was not statistically different from what we would call our hardest hitter, that number five there, the fully loaded tank. And we saw the same thing with recoverable supose as well. A note on this site was that it was quite dry. So we did delay regrow from the application. Here's that Benson site that I talked about, the highest injury there because of how hot it was 95 degrees and the spray occurred in the morning. So we do see lots of bronzing in these photos, ultra blazer by itself and then more bronzing and then more growth reduction when we added the glyphosate. This site taught us to be mindful of the air temps and to avoid spraying in the morning. Many applications now went on late afternoon or early evening, also based on our knowledge from applying bathing mix. This is just an up close picture of the bronzing that we saw. Adding glyphosate is essentially like adding an oil-based adjuvant. Usually we did observe more water and control, but more burned into the sugar beet. This is a bloomcast spray early June. These photos are about 10 days after spraying. Some ag staff requested a repeat application maybe seven days after the first step. And then others have mentioned differences in control based on the direction that the sprayer was moving in the field that the canopy maybe protected the spray from getting the waterhound. Then the experiments were conducted investigating the size of the waterhound. So you can see here we've got a state with inches to measure the waterhound at the time of the spray. So this is the data from that, a bloomcast and a moorhead site. So we've got waterhound visible percent control in response to the size of the waterhound ad application. Moorhead had a more steep decline than bloomcasted, but you can see it's nice and steep there. The size of the waterhound is a big factor. All right. The biggest question that we had was what about using Dr. Dexter's micro-weight program? So we did conduct a couple of probes. The green table on top is a field experiment conducted in collaboration with KJAG. We saw that waterhound control was less as the micro-weights were used and then injury was roughly the same. And then also was done in the greenhouse, that's the blue table. We did see some response to rate with less injury from the micro-weight approach, but the fresh weight reduction was the same. So KOSHA was not a component of the 2021 section 18 just because we have very inconsistent control and experiments that were done in 2020 and 2021. And this is a function of the size of KOSHA, key being that KOSHA should be three inches tall or less. And a note that the data from these sites, the KOSHA here is sensitive to glyphosate, so the mixture of state is misleading. However, we would still recommend ultra-laser plus glyphosate mixtures for controlling KOSHA. Okay, so wrapping it up. For 2022, we do intend to request a section 18 for Minnesota and North Dakota, as well as Eastern Montana for Waterham and KOSHA control and sugar beet. And Michigan will also request a section 18. A section 18 is the only option for a label at this point until UPL submits for a full label, but they are not far enough along in the regulatory process to get that. So this is why we are going with section 18, but we will continue to work with them towards that goal. Some ideas from egg staff, just looking into, like I said before, the repeat applications, touch on MSL or crop oil instead of the NIS, taking more of those one through five schemed trials to yield and investigating the spray volume and spray coverage. We will not make changes to the six-leaf growth stage recommendation and or to using just glyphosate with ultra-laser. Okay, now. Put a round of applause for Emma. So our next presentation is entitled Fall Seated Cover Crops for Waterhemp Suppression presented by Brian Orgid. So Waterhemp has continued to provide production issues in sugar beets. This morning I'd like to talk about waterhemp suppression with the covered nurse crops. In my presentation I'd like to talk about some benefits we've received in the past by the use of cover crops, compare spring and fall seeded, and then talk about or describe a couple different ways you can integrate them. And then I would like to end our presentation talking about our recent experiences which has developed some good and unfortunately not so good results. I'd like to start with this picture that was captured last spring. We experienced a dry fall in 2020, a mild winter where we received little snowfall and which eventually led into a dry and early spring. This created some production problems for farmers as far as leaving vulnerable dry topsoil that was prone to wind erosion. As a result, you can see that there's valuable nutrient-based topsoil that was blown in road ditches. And then the picture on the right is a cotyledon sugar beet that was severely damaged by the soil erosion and that caused stand development issues. So some of the benefits that we've received in the past include reduction of soil erosion from wind and potentially heavy rainfall, stand protection from chili temperatures in the spring. And then, so since integrating cover crops has become a popular production practice for producers, we were thinking about what were the potential additional benefits that they might provide. For example, is there any value from a weed control aspect and can we integrate them through different tillage practices, seeding rates and using different cereal grains? So here's an example of the traditional spring-applied cover crops through broadcast. So now I'd like to transition talking about spring seeded versus fall seeded. Producers using spring seeded cover crops that would may want to consider using fall seeded might extend the window protection against wind and soil erosion over the winter and early spring. You can integrate these in the fall with tillage or fertility programs and allow the cover crops time to establish. And this might potentially suppress early emerging weeds. So here's an example of integrating cover crops in the fall using strips. Producers went at an angle here and alternated rows and after termination, the residue broke down and was able to protect stand. This particular producer seeded cereal rye in the strips in the fall and then came back in the spring time to plant the sugar beets. By the looks of it, this is the most precise way to include fall seeded cover crops because you can get your cereal rye or your cover crop on where you like it. So there's become a little bit of a renewed interest in strip tillage as recently. Strip tillage with new technology and machinery and GPS and has allowed producers ways to reduce soil movement and ban fertilizer and reduce fertilizer rates. My colleague Aaron Hoppe will talk with strip tillage a little bit more later. So what if we could potentially integrate strip tillage and fall seeded cover crops for water pressure and sugar beets? That would be the ultimate goal, just establish cover crops in the fall, protect over the soil in winter and then just come in and plant sugar beets in the spring. So we starting in fall 2020, we see there are cover crops and then let them develop and came through planted strips. So our objectives of this experiment, determine if fall seed cover crops and spring seeded nurse crops at different seeding rates will suppress water ramp and just explore the different possibilities and see if we can integrate that into a future strip tillage program. So our materials and methods, we had two locations in the previous year, one at Hickson, North Dakota and one at Morin, Minnesota. The experiment was a randomized complete block design with four different replications and it was a factorial treatment arrangement and our factor A was our cereal range included winter wheat, cereal, rye and barley and our other factor, factor B was our seeding rate which included zero, 20, 40 and 80 pounds of these cover crops. So what data did we collect throughout the summer in the fall? NDVI, Normalize Difference Vegetation Index which I'll describe or talk about a little bit later through data collection. Visual percent ground cover, how much cover crop was able to develop within the plot. We took stand counts for a hundred feet of roll and we took a visual percent how much water hemp we were able to control within each plot and then in the fall, water hemp biomass was collected and weighed out. We also did have stand count and yield data but I won't include any of that in this presentation because we had some environmental effects. So here's an example of an untreated check and you can see we had difficulties developing a stand just due with the little rainfall we received after planting. Here's an example of our spring seeded barley at a low rate and here's our heavy rate which does 80 pounds of cereal rye on the left and 80 pounds of winter wheat on the right. And as you can see, there's not many sugar beets within this heavy rate just due to the fact that we had extremely dry conditions and at the end of May throughout month of June and ultimately the cover crops all competed the earth standard sugar beets. So I'd like to talk about a little data right now. We'll talk about taking NDVI data with the Trimble Hand Heal Green Seeker. So basically this is a measurement of plant health. And as you can see looking at the graph here, the pictures that I provided earlier you could see a visual difference in development through different rates of the cover crop but statistically into the data we collected we didn't see any differences. So on a zero to nine scale we collected data about using ground cover and that's just looking at each particular cereal grain and seeding rate and to see if there's any differences and how much they developed over time. Ed Hixon, the fall seeded cover crops developed much more than that moorhead. And I think we can attribute a little bit of that to some yeast that like to hang around there but at the same time we really didn't see too many numeric differences in the data we collected. Here's a few images of the struggles we had to establish a stand. We planted early and we didn't receive any rain and you can see that the furrow started opening up and especially in the heavy rates cover crop that competition that cover crop and especially a cereal or I actually pulled the furrow apart. So cover crop termination we did not terminate early enough and especially this year when it was so dry we let the establishment of our cover crop get a little bit away from us but at the same time as from a wheat suppression standpoint I can't see much for water hemp within these treatments but then again we deteriorated our stand at the same time. So some recommendations for terminating cover crops. We terminated using glyphosate mixed with either acetumazate or asthmatic lore in May of 2021. The recommendation that we provide for terminating is that you do it before it reaches about 10 to 12 inches tall. So looking at water hemp control at Moran and Hickson in July of 2021, looking at the different cereal grains and the seeding rates here they had about relatively the same amount of water hemp control at Moorhead and then Hickson compared to the untreated checks we see a good amount of water hemp control. So looking at a picture of an untreated plot compared to a heavy treated plot of cereal rye you can see how much weed pressure we experienced. So in summary looking at from our previous experiment with this trial in the summer of 2021 I believe with the data will provide us that we can reduce our rate from zero, 20, 40 and 80 pounds to zero, 10, 20 and 40 pounds this upcoming year. And like I said earlier, I didn't elect to include any standard yield data just because they were severely reduced by the cover crop development and how fast they ended up developing and the water hemp. So we just observed the evidence or some evidence that weed suppression was created by the use of cover crops. It wasn't very consistent and it turns out it wasn't depending on seeding rates. So looking ahead the use of cover crops and water hemp suppression I think and we believe that we need to target seeding rates for more so wind and soil erosion water rather than weed suppression. Our last speaker in this section is going to be presenting next. The title of his talk is strip and conventional diligent sugar beet and it'll be presented by Aaron Hoppe. All right, good morning everybody. Today I'm here to talk to you about strip tailored versus conventional diligent sugar beet production. All right, so to kind of relate to Ryan's talk strip tailored part of the reasoning we wanna evaluate or look at it is because I think we can all relate to this slide. Certainly soil when it's exposed it's susceptible to blowing around and this past winter there was a decent amount of soil that was blowing across fields and into the ditches that farmers had to try to extract out and they're never gonna be able to extract out a hundred percent of that soil again. So strip tillage allows producers to leave greater amounts of residue on the surface however be able to till some of the soil to plant the next crop into. So certainly sugar beet being susceptible to injury from wind blown soil from cotyledon to about the four leaf stage. This could be possibly a great tillage practice for farmers to adopt. So some of you are probably well aware of the research that was conducted back in the late 2000s by Dr. Overstreet. So Dr. Overstreet looked at strip tillage for four years from 2007 to 2010 at two locations and small plots. So the tillage was primarily conducted all in the fall except fall of 2008 was extremely wet where they had elected to make the strips in the spring. So briefly the results from those four years there was no difference in root yield in 2007. There was no difference in root yield at Moorhead in 2008. However there was 10% less yield than strip tillage at Prosper. In 2009 there was no difference in root yield and in 2010 there was 12% greater yield than strip tillage at Moorhead. However, no difference at Prosper. I will admit one conclusion or one thing that they did observe was that occasionally there was less sugar produced in strip tillage. So why is extension getting involved in strip tillage research? There's becoming a lot of renewed interest in this. So some of the growers are desiring to reduce input costs. So we have many different collaborators in this study and through visiting with some of these producers a lot of them are talking about trying to reduce some of their investment. So this research is gonna look at on farm comparisons versus small plots. And with precision egg it's not a new concept by any means, but with RTK and our sub inch accuracy we can create our strips and then be able to come back that following spring and plant right into them strips. Federal programs are certainly a lot of interest around federal programs among farmers to be able to capture some subsidies. Companies like General Mills are also offering funding to be able to prove or claim that their products are produced sustainably. Now, one of the questions that kind of involves weed science aspect is how is this maybe gonna change weed control? So the objectives of the strip tillage research are kind of three elements. The first being to evaluate strip tillage on farm and should it be production? Is there a difference in production between the two systems? And we're gonna specifically look at plant stand, yield and quality. Now, number two, we're also gonna assess some other metrics between the two tillage systems. So we're gonna look at plant NDVI or we're gonna look at NDVI to look at plant vigor. And then we're also gonna look at soil temperature and soil water content, which I will describe a little bit further coming up. Number three, we're also gonna try to determine an economic comparison between the tillage systems. So as I mentioned, some growers are trying to cut their investment. This can be accomplished through fewer field passes where they can eliminate some of their primary and conventional tillage practices and perform that in one operation with strip tillage. And along with that, it can save them fuel, labor and time. So the materials and methods of this research comparing conventional and strip tillage, it's gonna be a randomized complete block. And simply the growers are gonna use their respective practices. We're not gonna change anything up regarding that. Within each tillage or within each treatment, we're gonna nest six data collection locations where we're gonna collect the plant stand and some of the other data. So each of those data collection locations are gonna be six rows wide by 10 feet long. And the data collection locations will be paired in strip and conventional tillage and positioned within the length of the strips to represent any field variability. So we can certainly not compare data that's gonna be near a drainage ditch or anything like that. In 2021, we had six on-farm locations that included Walsh and Trail counties in North Dakota and Polk County in Minnesota. Going into the data collection on this research, like I mentioned, we collected plant stand which was simply a count of two of the six rows by 10 feet long. Grows stage, every time we were at the field we documented grows stage simply as greater than or equal to 50% of the plants reached. NDVI was collected with a unit called the RapidScan CS45 and this was collected three times throughout the summer to basically assess plant health or vigor between the two systems. The other data collection that we looked at was soil temperature and soil water content. So on the lower left, we can see there's kind of a flexible fence post as I would call it standing erect and we zip tied two soil temperature units to them which had temperature leads that were then installed into the soil. So we had two sensors in each of the environments where we were collecting data. So in the conventional tillage, we had sensors placed and then in the strip tillage we essentially had two sensors there because you can think of it as two micro environments, the strip tillage as well as the no tillage micro environment. The picture on the right is how we collected the soil water content with a volumetric soil water content instrument. So simply we just pushed it into the ground, pushed a button and it gave us a reading. The last data collection that we did in 2021 was hand harvesting. So we actually did this twice throughout the year at the end of August and again at the end of September. So we collected beats from 10 feet. As you can see, and every beat from that 10 feet went into a bag and was brought to the lab for analysis. So some of the preliminary results thus far, this slide specifically looking at stand counts you can see on the Y axis I actually did this in plants per acre. And then on our X axis we have location. So for Warsaw North you could see the orange bar being strip tillage, the blue bar being conventional tillage. At Warsaw North we actually saw statistical advantage and stand in the strip tillage. Now at Park River you can see that we had count one and count two. Due to the dry conditions in 2021 the initial stand counts were very low. So we felt we should do another stand count determination to see what might be happening later on. So the first count, there was no difference in stand. The second count, there was actually a statistical or statistically more plants in the conventional tillage compared to the strip tillage. So part of that reasoning that we feel from 2021 there was greater moisture in the strip tillage that allowed some of them sugar beet seeds to imbibe water and germinate but likely synest off because some of it became dry. Where the seeds in the conventional tillage likely sat there in dry soil and until we had decent moisture to allow that germination process to happen then they finally came through. Hillsborough was another location for us that was extremely dry. So early on you can see we actually had more plants in the strip tillage and then at our second count timing there was no difference in stand count. At Warsaw East there is no difference as well. Now Eldred and Euclid, those collaborators wanted to take part in this study. However, in 2021 they did not have a comparison for conventional tillage for us to compare. And then the average is simply just looking at all locations across. The second slide of data that I'm gonna share with you today is NDVI. Like I mentioned, plant health comparison. So at Warsaw North there was no difference. At Park River, again we saw no difference. At Hillsborough we saw no difference. However, at Warsaw East we did observe the conventional tillage just to be slightly ahead of that, slightly ahead of the strip tillage, excuse me. So I kind of like to share this slide with you just to kind of share what the two tillage systems look like. So this is certainly later in the season but you can see on the strip tillage side there still is that integrity of the wheat stubble that is still standing there. So early in the season this would likely protect the sugar bead a little bit more from the wind blown soil that can happen. So plans moving forward, as I mentioned I didn't include all of the data and part of that's due to sake of time but we're gonna continue to analyze our soil temperature. Soil temperature was collected hourly so we have tons of data points that we can look at to see what is happening between the two tillage systems. We also collected soil water content so we can compare each of those environments as well as the yield and quality data from our hand harvesting. Certainly we're gonna continue the collaboration with the growers. We hope to have six locations in 2022 like we did in 2021. And then the far-off vision like Ryan kind of mentioned is to integrate strip tillage with nurse or cover crops. So special thanks, Mr. Brad Brumman who has had a hand in this as well for his passion and leadership from Walsh County. I'd like to also thank the sugar beet growers who took on some additional risk with looking at strip tillage. And also Mr. Ryan Morgan for helping collect a lot of the data that went into this presentation today. So with that, thank you. So the question was around if we did take it to yield do you think there was a difference? I guess early on, I would like to say that I don't expect there to be much of a difference. And part of that stemming from the NDVI data which oftentimes correlates well with one another.