 Hi, good morning. My name is Claire Keen and I'm the Extension Specialist in Cropping Systems here at the Williston Research Extension Center. Thank you for joining us for our virtual field tour today. I'm here to talk about curnsa. And so before we get into that, my question is, what would a crop look like that could meet the environmental demands of agriculture being made today? What would a crop look like that could protect soil against erosion, that could store carbon in the soil, that could allow farmers to have a profitable return and maybe give them some flexibility with their management? Well, it might look like this. This is called curnsa. Curnsa is intermediate wheatgrass, which is a forage grass that has been around for quite a long time. But the difference is curnsa has been bred for increased seed size and yield. And the goal of curnsa is to get it to yield as much as wheat. However, we're a long ways off from that. It's still an experimental crop, but the breeders have made a lot of progress in the last 15 years. I'm looking at curnsa as a new dual use crop for here in the Mondack. It would give producers the option of harvesting it for seed, which they might be able to do for about three seasons. We're not quite sure on that yet. This is only the second year of my trial, so we have a little ways to go before we find out how long we can get curnsa grain yield. And then it would also give farmers the option of grazing it or hanging it, and that's the forage use. So the special thing about curnsa is that it's a perennial. A perennial is a plant that you would plant once, and it comes back year after year. It survives the winter, it grows back in the spring. And when you have perennial cover, that helps protect soil against erosion, because you don't have a bare field in the fall and the winter in the early spring when our crops aren't growing. The annual crops that we rely really heavily on, so our oats, our wheat, our barley, excuse me, our rye, those are all annual crops, and we have to replant them each year. We're excited about curnsa because of its perennial nature, the ability to protect soil against erosion, store carbon in the soil, and then still produce a tasty grain that we can eat. So why are people excited about curnsa? It's because of that perennial nature and the ability to store carbon in the soil. There are some food companies out there that are very excited about it because they see it as an opportunity to reduce the carbon footprint of their supply chain. For some example of curnsa products, each down here. So first of all, we'll start with this is curnsa grain. So this is clean, de-hulled curnsa grain, and that can be milled or flaked like wheat or oats and made into food products. So one product you might have heard of and maybe seen is long root ale. This is a beer being brewed by Patagonia provisions. It's currently in distribution on the west coast in Colorado, but they would like to increase it nationally. Another thing you might have heard of is a cereal made by General Mills. General Mills put out a curnsa honey toasted cereal in 2019 as a limited release and donated the profits to the breeding program in Kansas. One of the major limiting factors of more curnsa foods being released is the limited curnsa supply. Right now there's only about 3,000 acres of curnsa in the US. And to compare that to spring wheat, we have over 5 million acres of spring wheat planted in North Dakota alone. So as you can see, there's not very many acres of curnsa out there. And so this has meant the supply of grain varies quite a bit year to year. And so that's a problem for food companies. I and other researchers are doing work to help address this. So here at Williston, we have some curnsa variety trials. And those are the plots that I'm standing in now that you can see. I have both a spring planted trial and then also a fall planted trial. We don't know yet if fall planting or spring planting will be better for curnsa in northern latitudes and especially semi-arid climates like northwestern North Dakota. And then I also have work looking at nitrogen fertility, so different rates of urea and some herbicide options. So I'm working in collaboration with scientists in Kansas and Nebraska and Minnesota. And we hope that these results will help farmers better manage their future curnsa crops. And so with that, thank you again for joining me. And I hope we can find some curnsa in the grocery store soon.