 I'm Michael Vunch, I'm the plant pathologist at the Carrington Research Center. We're here in our very large, driving white mold fungicide application technology studies that this is now the third year that we're running these and the second year that we're running them on a large scale. And what we're interested in is how do we improve the performance of our fungicides against white mold. We all know that fungicides give only partial control of white mold and what we are trying to do is get better control with the same fungicide application, exact same cost. And what we're working on here is optimizing fungicide droplet size. The universal recommendation for fungicides is to apply the fungicide with a fine to medium droplet because fungicides only have local systemic movement within plants, i.e. from the point of deposition they can move upward with the water moving cells, the xylem, a certain limited amount in stem and leaf tissues, but not downward and not upward a great deal. And because of that it's very important to have good coverage and the smaller the droplet you have the more coverage you have. But the problem is that white mold develops in the lower canopy and very fine droplets do not penetrate a dense canopy well. And so fine droplets give you excellent coverage to the upper canopy where white mold doesn't develop. And so the research question we're looking at here is whether or not we actually need to have coarser droplets to optimize fungicide performance against white mold and dry beans. In soybeans we have found this to be true, that the droplet size that optimizes fungicide performance is very, very directly correlated to canopy characteristics. If the canopy is open a fine to medium droplet optimizes fungicide performance against white mold, but if the canopy is at or near closure you actually need coarse droplets to optimize fungicide performance which goes against all of the standard recommendations. So we've been asking this question on dry beans and in this study here we're looking at four different market classes just like we did last year. Kidney beans, black beans, pinta beans, and navy beans. And we're looking at two or three different varieties within each market class selecting varieties that are very widely grown commercially. And what we have found to date is that on black beans and on navy beans for both wilger and t-jet tips, we're optimizing fungicide performance with medium droplets. But fine droplets do not perform well, okay? Medium droplets are needed. With wilger tips it appears that you might be able to go to coarse droplets as well with those. With kidney beans we're optimizing performance with coarse droplets. Coy beans are with their architecture which is a larger upright bush type in general. They are a little more like a soybean and so it's not surprising that a coarse droplet optimizes fungicide performance. And that's true for both t-jet and wilger tips except with wilger there may be some latitude to also use medium. And to summarize what we have found thus far using both t-jet and wilger tips that if you apply with medium droplets, we've optimized fungicide performance against white mold in black beans and navy beans, coarse droplets have optimized control in kidney beans. Our work thus far in pinta beans has been inconclusive. And this year we've expanded testing to three different varieties in order to get a better picture of what would optimize fungicide activity. This testing is done in a real world setup. We're doing applications with a tractor based sprayer. Typically at last year we did nine miles an hour. This year we had to slow down a little bit but it's a tractor based sprayer with a pulse width modulation system that allows us to maintain a constant driving speed, constant spray output of 15 gallons an acre even as we change tips at different output. We've added one additional study this year and that's a study looking at spray volume on how much of additional gain in disease control and agronomic yield response we get as we increase spray volume from 10 to 15 to 20 to 25 gallons an acre. One of the things to remember here is that none of these questions have been addressed previously. And while the recommendation has always been to apply fungicides with larger spray volumes, we don't know how much of a return you get for that. So after this season we should have some data for that. Thank you for your time and if you have any questions go to the NDSU Carrington Research Extension Center website and click on plant pathology, scroll down and you'll find our data from previous years on the impact of spray droplet size on fungicide performance against white mold in dry beans. Thank you.