 Hi, I'm Ryan Bido, an NDSU Extension cropping system specialist at the NDSU Dickinson Research Extension Center. Ergut is a disease of wheat and other small grains that is continuously an issue for different parts of North Dakota. Even though we're in a drought here in 2021, if you get that rain at the right time, you can still have an issue with Ergut. So we normally see these black fruiting structures in the grain, but you need to keep in mind the life cycle of that plant is those structures will normally drop to the ground and then you will have the next spring those fruiting bodies will shoot up mushrooms and those will release spores. Those spores will then infect these different wide range of grasses, including those along the field edge or those in the field. The first step is then going to be a honeydew stage. From those flowers you're going to have this sugary, sappy honeydew that insects will then spread from field to field and as the wind is pushing those grasses or those crops against each other it will spread more spores to infect the flowers along those main stems or along the tillers. What we want to try to do is reduce as many steps of that life cycle as possible whether it's trying to reduce the amount of fruiting bodies out there or trying to reduce the amount of time that those heads are susceptible to erget. So when you're managing erget you can't really use any fungicide options. Nothing is going to work or be economical for managing erget, but you don't want to have that grain because you're going to get docked pretty heavily. You don't want to have that erget in the grain. So if you do have erget make sure you're scouting your field before you go out there and harvest and then if you do have erget in the edges of those fields try to store that separately from the rest of your crops so that that whole field of wheat isn't going to be impacted by erget. When we're trying to manage this disease one of our biggest friends is crop rotation but that's only going to help us if we're managing the field ditches. If you look along the edge of the field you're going to find different grassy weeds so erget has a wide range of hosts and a lot of those hosts grow in our ditches. So we want to make sure that we're cutting those grassy weeds before they start to head out. If you don't cut them before they head out that grass flower is going to end up getting infected with erget and then those fungal structures are going to drop to the ground and continue that life cycle for the disease. So we want to try to cut out as many parts of the disease triangle as we can and one of those is to control the amount of those fungal structures that are out in your field. Another thing that you can do if you do have erget in your seed lot you can plant it if it goes deep enough try to plant it at least an inch inch and a half and you're not going to have to worry about those mushrooms poking up through the soil. The biggest thing that you can really do is make sure that you're controlling a lot of those grassy weeds within the field so that the erget doesn't spread further into the field. People like to talk about different varieties but if you have enough pressure in that field from those grassy weed sources from previous years fungal structures it doesn't really matter what variety you're growing because the pressure is going to be so high that you're going to have an issue. Another thing to keep in mind with erget is that there are certain micronutrient deficiencies that can make the plant more susceptible to erget. So things like copper and boron if deficient in the field may help reduce the risk of having erget in that field. It's important to keep in mind that this is only if you're deficient in those nutrients. Copper isn't acting as some kind of fungicide against erget it's helping the plant reduce its deficiencies because any type of deficiency that's going to lengthen the flowering period or change that flowering structure is going to cause erget to be an issue because those spores are trying to compete against the pollen. So we want to make sure that we're good on a micronutrient for controlling our grassy field edges and if we do have erget that we're storing that grain from the edge of the field separately from the rest of the field to not contaminate the entire field's worth of grain.