 My name is Ashok Chander, the extension sugar beet pathologist with the University of Minnesota. I will be more writing this rest of the morning session here. The first speaker for today is Samantha Roode. She is a PhD student with Dr. Courier and me at the University of Minnesota Department of Pathology. She will be talking about evaluation of disease severity assessment methods for resistance to a kind of mild disease in sugar beet. So I'm very pleased to be talking to you all today, doing the first plant pathology talk of the day. As Ashok said, I'm talking about evaluating disease severity for a Phanomyces root rot of sugar beet. So a bit about a Phanomyces, I know it's a little bit less flashy than Cercospora. A Phanomyces root rot is caused by the pathogen known as Phanomyces, quickly ladies, because we're very clever with naming in this system. The pathogen is pretty widespread across the Red River Valley area where we grow sugar beets. Part of why it's so prevalent is that it can overwinter in fields for at least 10 years, which means that it's kind of always there silently waiting for a good season. Control is really limited to chemical sea treatments and the use of genetic resistance. Resistant varieties exist, but none of them are completely immune. And so that seems like an area of opportunity for where I can slide in. Environmental conditions play a big role in disease severity. So dollar amounts associated with losses can vary widely from season to season. That is due to environmental conditions, but if you don't prep for disease, naturally that'll be the year that pressure is really high. So it's always kind of something to think about. There are different symptoms, partially because this pathogen is a full season pathogen. Seedling phase over here, what we see it's post-emergent stamping off, which very characteristic are these dark dried like epicodals. As you might imagine, that makes plants release susceptible to wind damage because there's nothing really keeping them there, which is a big problem up here. For adults or seedling plants, we will see foliage that wilts becomes chlorotic. It's very indistinct to anything else. It looks like wilting said plants. But if you get infection later in season, you'll see the scarring of roots that's really characteristic. You'll also see stemting and malformation of roots blocking the laser. As you might imagine, all of that will really decrease your amount of extractable sucrose in your yields. And sometimes you won't even necessarily know how bad it is until harvest. So again, it's all about prevention is the goal. This is a disease cycle. I'm a pathologist. I have to show this. Osporous are primary inoculum motiles. Osporous are the infectious unit, so they can swim to roots. This is what I use as my inoculum source. So little guys. Osporous can insist on roots and start actually breaking into root material. And that part of the cycle can repeat a lot. It's a type E intern intracellularly in a root tissue. It can grow quite vast across the entire roots. And eventually we will see sexual reproduction. We only need one isolate. It can sexually produce with itself and it will because that produces Osporous, which can then last at least 10 years in debris or soil. So that's good cycle. The question you may be asking is why are you talking about disease severity assessment and not just disease resistance. And that's because I'm trying to focus on disease resistance. But in order to do that, I need to decide how best to phenotype my plants. So my PhD project is focused a lot on understanding more about this pathosystem. And specifically we want to associate regions of the genome and sugar beet with resistance to the appagin. So I need to phenotype all my plants. Most field studies are done in disease nurseries, but I want to take them into the greenhouse because I can do a lot more. I don't have to wait for the season. A lot more control. We're also comparing different isolates. So we have to artificially inoculate. So we know exactly what isolate is in the ground. So there's just been a lot of things to figure out in terms of how to inoculate and then how to score things. Oh, the other aspect of that is I'm using some varieties for this genomic work that have very varied resistance. So having more measures of phenotypic resistance is helpful for me so that I can differentiate between lines that seem quite similar. So experimental design, I was using two different isolates from different disease nurseries. We tried a bunch of different zoes work concentrations, all of them are for each one of these little pots. We inoculate two weeks after planting because our zoes cores need a plant to swim towards. So we hold dead plants throughout the experiment, and then we score them two weeks after inoculation. Honestly, by that two week point, not a lot is left to score. So it's usually very fast, which is very nice. In terms of scoring, we use a zero to three scale with a zero being perfect, a three being dead or dying. We also like to confirm that we actually have a phantom disease because it's very indistinct. So we look for these really characteristic zoes cord clusters. And that tells us we definitely have a phantom disease. I'm going to be talking about doing some above ground scoring. So this rating scale is used when we pull every single plant at the end of the experiment. But I also scored plants throughout the experiment. So I put a little box on the areas that I looked at specifically to see it was mostly just how far up the route has the necrosis gut. So in terms of disease assessment methods, I did a couple things. One of them was stand counts. So we counted plants roughly every day. And we always hold dead plants. When we're looking at this data, it's always based off of percentage of plants relative to our emergence at inoculation day, because that can be extremely variable when you're using experimental varieties that are primed. And I also do robot index values, which use that zero to three scale. We pulled anything that got pulled counts as a three because it was dead at day 14 and everything else gets rated. And I also played around with area under the disease progress curve or AU DPC, which was that above ground scoring that I did. So that way, we could kind of see how disease severity changed over the course infection. And I'll walk you through what that data looks like. So across the top, I have different varieties. They're all somewhat resistant to a fan of my seas, but they differ. And two different isolates down the side and my not doing concentrations. So these are just counts of how much, how many plants were left over time. And finally, we found that it fit nicely with our noculeum concentrations that we kind of deceived the least amount of disease, the lowest and highest at the highest. That was not necessarily true for this one isolate, where the highest noculeum concentration is doing very weird things and not always killing plants. More on that in March at ASS PT. The thing about this data that is good and bad is that it really just captures how many plants are alive and not much more. So like an instances here. We're kind of levels off for multiple days. That doesn't tell me anything about disease severity or more plants like dying at that time point like you just kind of only know what's alive. Sometimes a plant isn't alive, or it's alive, but it's not doing great. You want to distinguish them. I also have my rate rock index values for this. Again, we tended to see the most disease, our highest dose and the least at the lowest. And again, this one isolate was just doing wonky things in terms of how things ended up. The thing about we brought index value it's really good for an overall picture of resistance. It's done at the end of the experiment so you know how everything fair. There is a lot of variation as evident by the size of some of these spots. So if things survive, there's a large variety in survival, everything dies then you know it's perfect. So there seems to be like maybe missing information. The other thing is that this doesn't really capture the fact that for some varieties, everything died on like day two. And some varieties, things didn't die until they've worked in. So this doesn't really capture that. Disease progress curves. So these are my above ground scoring metrics. Again, similar trends and similar set up. And the thing about area under the disease curve data or disease severity data is this was incredibly time intensive. It's really helpful. You got a lot more information. I don't look like it because it's just a line graph, but in terms of information, it was helpful. But, oh my God, it's like forever. But this added is a lot more descriptive. And so, depending on what you want to do with your data that might be quite helpful. So I also looked at how those different measures of disease resistance or severity correlated with each other. So on this one, my y axis is the robot index that like the disease severity score. I took it each day, not day 14, just my area, my disease progress values. And that actually matched fairly nicely with percent sand. It was fairly linear. It seems like there is a good relationship there. When I looked at my robot index value at day 14 versus my like singular ADPC value, which is all of my time points collapsed into one. You can see that it's much less linear. I mean, it still is a fairly linear correlation, but it's not great. So it seems like maybe there's something to be said about this is capturing information that this one isn't or maybe some of the extremely dead plants. So there's differences there. So, I mean, this is very much interesting to me. I don't know necessarily what it means, but it does mean that I know what I'm going to look at for. So my ground up is a table is who doesn't like a table. I did some analysis looking at different variables in my data. So my isolates, my inoculum concentration, the different varieties I use, concentration by isolate and other things for percent sand. All of those were considered to be significant. Thing about percent sand, it's not really easy to compare values because you have so many from all your different time points and your time points might not match up from experiment to experiment. But it's really useful for comparing how many plants survived. What does that line look like in terms of survival rate for F? Robot index value had similar findings statistically to percent sand, except for concentration isolate was not significant. What's nice about this is it's a very comparable value. It's used as a rating scale. You only have one time point, though, but it's still a really good value for just getting a strict where did this line fall. You can compare different lines really easily. You could easily come up with a threshold value. It has a lot of benefits. For ATPC, we found yet different things. For some reason, my varieties were not significantly different in that one case. So that's telling me that something, this data is finding differences in varieties that were not otherwise apparent, which is exactly why I wanted to do that study. So I was very pleased with that. One thing that's nice, you can get a singular value, but you do have multiple time points. It's easy to compare and has multiple uses a rating scale. It's good for getting ideas of severity throughout time. The downside is the time. So I think when you, when I was putting this together, my answer ended up being what method works best is what research questions you have. If you want to know how a line is doing just survival rate, all you care about is did they make it to the end of the season? Why would you do anything other than percent sand? If you care what they looked like, how much they could survive, I guess, at the end, we brought in the tell you straight. You need to get a lot more phenotypic differences between varieties that are otherwise quite similar than your best bet is probably AUDPC. And in that case, plant fewer plants so it doesn't take you multiple hours every day that you want to do that. And with that, I'm done. So I would like to say thank you to my PI Ashok, my co-advisor Corey Austin for helping me very much and taking me to my first ever sugar beet harvest at his family's field. And I'll take any questions if I have time. The next speaker is me. So I'm going to talk about mainly the management of rhizectonia and stochosporine sugar beet, right? So from the standpoint of fungicides, you know, that's the focus of my talk. I always want to talk about, you know, what happened during the season in terms of the plant samples. Then we'll talk about two different trials for rhizectonia. And at the end, I'll just show some of the data from the stochosporine trial here. So first and foremost thing, right? So we always talk about, we just need to know what's killing our plants in the field. So typically I only show the samples, you know, mostly we'll get root samples, but this year we got root and leaf samples separately, right? So predominantly it's a phenomyces. Some of the data that Tom showed with the rainfall, you know, April and May, we got, you know, more than normal precipitation. So that explains some of the phenomyces being a water mold. And then fissurium, about eight samples, very low rhizectonia. And then still, you know, some of those are caused by like chemical carrier or some other issues there. When you look at the leaf samples, I think one thing that was pretty significant this year, talking to friend Gary here, I think that's the same thing he was observing here too. So more little bit of more alternative in some fields and some samples. And stochospora, so believe me, there's more than two samples of stochospora, but these are the ones submitted to our lab. Because about 98% of the times the ag staff is pretty sure if it's stochospora, but sometimes the 2% of the time we still need to, you know, isolate and then try to see what's causing it. And then other thing in the league right now, it's stem phillium. I think if you remember in 2020 at the reporting session, our colleagues from Europe actually explained what's happening there. This is something new, it's very low frequency that we recovered from some samples. But every time we recovered stem phillium, there was a lot of alternate area and then maybe there's one or a few sports of stem phillium just, you know, lurking in there, that's how we found this stem phillium. And then a little bit of bacterial leaf spot from a few samples from southern Minnesota Beach Sugar Co-op. I think all those heavy rain events and some of the strong winds, they cause some chattering of the leaves and it's very easy for the bacteria to get into the leaves. But these are not really causing any damage to the yield or any big concern. We do have some isolates from this so we're still characterizing those. Just looking at very typically, you know, whenever you saw alternate area in 2022, that's very classic alternate area, very, you know, very regular shapes, necrotic, you know, primarily at the margins or without the damage for the leaves. This is actually another alternate area. This is alternate area as well. The interesting thing about this year, even I think a little bit of those lesions or some of the necrosis caused by ultra blazer. Those were actually colonized by alternate area. So I would not say it's not even primary or secondary. It's like tertiary, right? It's just, it's a very strong sap or fried. It's just trying to colonize that, you know, dead and dying leaf tissues. It's a cacospora. It always has ready sprung margins and then the gray centers. And once you see this correlation, you can just see the fuzzy growth in the center. And again, this is some of the pictures from Netherlands here, the stem philium. It looks very similar to the manganese deficiency. They start as yellow speckles, but then in the severe conditions, you can see, I mean, these are actually looking almost like alternate area here, but very extensive damage in the field. It appears that certain varieties are more susceptible to stem philium compared to the others. But, you know, we don't need to worry about that right now, but I just wanted to show you this. Coming to rhizotonia, so typically it can kill the beets before or after emergence, you know, pre or post emergence damping off. Or when the beets are even like four or six or eight leaf stays depending on when the infection happens, right? So you lose the plant, then you lose some of the stands. But as you go later into the season, you can also have a, you know, crown rot or this surface rot anywhere from the top to the bottom of the road. Mostly on the surface or it can actually go inside the road depending on, you know, when the infection has started. But what we are seeing more and more with the roundup ready beets, right? We are seeing less of this crown rot and, you know, you're doing less of the cultivation. So mostly we are seeing rot at the bottom portion. I think I've shown some tactics in the, in the previous years that infrared fungicides work really well for this, the bottom rot. And this is how the rhizotonia looks on the plates. And then when these beets die and it makes these resting structures and it can survive up to, you know, two years in the soil. So when we talk about management of rhizotonia, you know, that's an, you know, no one single tactic will help but we just need to combine several different methods. But for today, we're just going to look at some of the at planting treatments, specifically seed treatments and infrared fungicides. And also I will show you some data for the post emergence trial that's done in 2022. So for the at planting, we use a moderately susceptible variety, you know, based on the two year rating, it's 4.7. And we did a lot of stand counts. And also, we did the disease here at the end of the season. So it was planted on May 25 and inoculated with the mix of two different or actually four different isolates, age two dash two, three B and two dash two four. So then we could get some disease pressure. So again, a little bit about the rainfall. So just pay attention to the Crookston site here, April and May, a lot of rain, you know, a little bit in June and July August and September were, you know, fairly dry. So we got a little bit of disease early on, and then not so much as we went later into the season. So that will reflect in the data that I will show you, right. So when it comes to seed treatments, you know, believe it or not, since 2014, we have a lot of SDHIC treatments that work very well for rhizectomy, right. So this is my untreated control. I have a number of plants for a hundred foot to four on the y-axis, and then the days after planting my non-treated control started at 149 about two weeks. And then by, you know, three, four and five weeks reached to 188 and then we lost a little bit by about five weeks here. And by the time of harvest, we were about 153 for that. So some of the standard seed treatments are labeled right now. So everything looked pretty good. You know, Cabino was a little bit lower right, you know, during the emergence, but you know, it caught up with everything else. You know, Sistiwa, Vibrance, you know, Zaltara was pretty good too. You know, Zaltara is very close to Sistiwa. I cannot even see the line there. And then MetallocSuite and Zaltara. So they all did relatively well. And statistically, there are no significant differences other than this time point, but not for the seed treatments. You know, some of the inforos actually hurt some of the early stats. And when we looked at the inforophonic sites, again, Quadris, Elatus, you know, Asteroid and Astronaut, it's a combination of Hisaxis-Trobin and also not really extract here. You know, it's slightly for Asteroid, you know, it's higher and then Astronaut was slightly higher than the non-treated control. Again, statistically, these are all very similar. So the inforophonic sites, you know, we started with really good moisture early on. So this is where you don't see any damage from the inforophitalizers with the starter fertilizers. And then we also looked at Headline Preaxler, Proline and Propulse. You know, Propulse is the one really hurt the stance, you know, for anywhere from the, you know, two weeks from up to three and four weeks after planting. But all the other Headline Preaxler and Proline did very good, especially the Headline and Preaxler. You know, most of you probably use Headline if you're not using, you know, Quadris or Asteroid. And at the end of the season, we actually rate these roots for on a 0 to 10 scale. So 0 is completely healthy. 100, say, 10 is actually a dead plant. Or in terms of the root rot, it's 91 to 100 percent, right? So these are the values that I have in the tables. So when I compare the seed treatments and inforophonic sites as two different groups or a contrast analysis, we had 153 beets versus 164 by the end of the season. That translates about 8,700 to 9,000 pounds RSA, which is, you know, statistically not very different. But in terms of the root rot rating, you know, it's slightly 7% versus 11% and 30% of the roots had disease, you know, anywhere from 1 to 10, you know, on that 1 to 10 scale versus 25%, right? Not really much towards the end of the season. So both of them work really good this year. And I just want to switch gears a little bit and show some of the data from the post-emergence fungicides, right? So typically we say seed treatments are good for, you know, four to five weeks after planting. We looked at the data, but if the rest of the season is dry, then you can still get some benefit. Whereas the post-emergence fungicides, you know, my recommendation is always to go between four and eight leaf application. But we planted these trials on May 25, right? So it's the latest planting date that we have in the last, you know, 10 years or so. That means we had to wait until July 5th, you know, to get those beets a little bit bigger. And then we applied our fungicide treatments and then inoculated with rhizectonia right into those crowns, right? So we don't use the whole barley grain here, but we just grind it and then use the ground inoculum there. And in the past, we know that, you know, band application works really well for most of the time compared to the broadcast. So that's the reason actually, you know, we wanted to test every single fungicide as both seven-inch band and broadcast application. Looking at your showways, you know, 50% of you are doing broadcast and other 50% you're doing a band application, right? So let's look at some of the data here. So again, it's very busy table, but you know, I'm just going to share this presentation on the SBREV website. So you can take a look at the numbers later. But my non-treated control where no fungicides were applied. Look at this. We lost 33% of the plants from our last sand count until the harvest. About 33% in terms of disease severity. 62% of the roots had some sort of rhizectonia on them, right? So if you look at the recombinant super sprayer, we're only barely at 6,000 pounds per acre. That's right there. So I'm going to show two different rates for quabbis. You know, my typical recommendation is about 14.5 fluid ounce. But we also use 10 fluid ounce, you know, depending on, you know, some years there is, you know, low to moderate disease pressure. It works very well. 10 and 14, both of them did really good about, you know, 9,000 pounds RSA, very low rhizectonia root rot rating, and also instance for this, right? Quabbis is still good as opposed to emergence application. Excalia, it's a relatively new player since the last two years. But the difference in the rate for Excalia is if you do a band application, you have to cut down the rate, like especially for a seven inch band, a third of the rate as a broadcast. So that's only 0.64 in Excalia, two fluid ounce. So they both did very good again in terms of suppressing the root rot and also 92 and 9,400 RSA, correct? Excalia is very good. And some data for asteroid here, that's equivalent to 14.5 fluid ounce of Quabbis. And then the latest, you know, that's the one that's recommended by Sinjanta, you know, moving on, not Quabbis. It's a combination of his oxytrobin and also his DHA fungicide. There's a little bit flip-flop of the numbers here in 98 versus 8,985 and 89. And statistically, these numbers are very similar. So both of them did really good, right? So in looking at the band versus broadcast across, you know, five different, you know, the two different rates for Quabbis and all the fungicides here. 91, 1, 9 versus 89, 9, 2. Again, Prickledwood-Sucrose is very similar whether you did a band or broadcast application. So I think for you, if you have a band sprayer, go with the seven inch band. But I think if you don't have a band sprayer, don't just drop the ball on the post-emergence, you can still get a broadcast application. So in summary, the seed treatments are still working well, but they offer protection mostly during early season. When you think about the infrared fungicides, they're anywhere from early to mid-season. For the post-emergence fungicides, mid to late season, you know, depending on, you get a lot of rain in July and August or how much disease is developing. So if you have a susceptible variety, I think the best thing to do is a seed treatment followed by, you know, the post-application. But if you have a field, you know, you're rotating constantly with soybeans in the corn, you have to do an infrared application on top of everything that you do, you know, to get a decent yield. So the other topics typically, you know, Austin was giving presentations in us since 2020 on management of stochospora. We showed you a lot of data from Crookston site. But one thing that's different in 2022 is we had two different varieties, the regular moderately susceptible variety that's 4.9 rating and also CR plus variety for the first year at this site. Right. So stochospora particular, it does not need introduction. You know, we see devastating damage from stochospora since 1980s and as early as 2020. Right. So once it makes this conidia, you know, there's millions and billions of them in a particular field. Everything is driven by relative humidity and how warm it can get and then can cause extensive necrosis. So I was driving at 65 miles per hour on highway 75 and then took this picture. You can see a clear difference between 4.1 and a 4.4 variety for stochospora. This is back in 2020. Right. So in addition to the varieties, I think we rely a lot on fungicides for managing riser stochospora. But the problem is, you know, we have widespread fungicide resistance for several class of fungicides. So we have to use a mixture of broad spectrum and also narrow spectrum fungicides and also rotate with the different modes of action. And tolerant varieties, you know, we're already using some, but we have some extreme tolerance to stochospora. These are called HCT or CR plus. So this trial was actually planted in on May 24. And then it was inoculated with inoculum that was collected from the end of the season in 2021 on July 13. You know, that's actually we coincide inoculation with canopy closure. And then we did six sprays at 10 to 14 days intervals. And we assessed the disease, the severity for CLS every time, like twice a week. And at the end of the season, we got yield and quality parameters, right? The spray one is actually done five days prior to our inoculation. It's almost like a spray zero or a preliminary application and then sprays one to five. Right. So some of the data from 2020 and 2021. I think predominantly most of the work is being done by trials. You know, you can do the tank mix partners with the mango zap or copper or tense. But most of the work is actually done by, you know, Proline and Inspire XT. Very less disease severity compared to, you know, Provisol and then Minerva here in 2021, not significant disease development at the same site, but you can still see those subtle differences, right? Still those DMS are doing, you know, heavy weight lifting for that. So if you look at the CR plus variety, this is 2.4. We didn't see a ton of disease developing. So we barely saw some spots. And then you can see these ones are looking more like alternate area here. This is an August 22nd. This is a non-treated control for non-CR plus with the 4.9 rating. We can see, you know, this is between two and three in terms of disease severity. A lot of sarcasm are developing, right? So the CR plus control, this is the four weeks after the last picture that I showed you. Again, you know, just by looking at the plot, there is hardly any development of sarcasm relief spot. Whereas for 4.9 variety, we can see some necrosis on these leaves. You know, it was getting to probably three to four percent severity, which is about six to seven on one to 10 scale for this one. And if you look at the overall disease development, I showed you some pictures for August 22nd. You know, barely it was getting started here. But most of the disease was developing between August 25th until September 22nd, right? You know, July, August and September were fairly dry in Crookston, but still you can imagine like see how the disease was taking up, right? It just tells you that, you know, just because it's dry, you cannot just give up your fungicide application, especially for a sarcasm relief spot. Because once you have the canopy closure, those, you know, if you walk around five or six a.m., right? You know, your pants, you know, you get all the dew on your boots and everywhere. You know, that's what is actually helping sarcasm there. And look at the CR plus, you know, there's barely any disease development here. And looking at the fungicide spray program here, this is actually based off of our previous few years of experience. So this is based on two triosols and then MancoZap and then and 10 and also 10 and pre-accelerate the end. So again, this is mostly focused on the northern part of the Redview Valley in Crookston and North, you know, especially we don't have any data from the south. But the standard six-prace program. So this is what I'm calling is the spray zero. And this is our untreated control, right? On one to 10, we are at 6.9 by the time of harvest, 7,500 RSA. And this is actually the net revenue. So we calculated the gross revenue and then we subtracted the cost of fungicides. So that's the number that I'm showing here is the net revenue, but we did not include the cost of application there. And then the column here, that's again over control, right? The six, five, four and three. And then the control. If you look at the disease development, I don't know, you can get any decent data. Then there's 3.2, 2.8, the step by decrease. And would the way we assess the state hospital leaf spot, you know, typically we don't give like one, one rating to the plot in Austin and the crew, they do like five stops in that 30 foot row. And then we do five assessments and we take the mean for this particular plot. So these are pretty robust ratings that we got here. And you can see gain for each application anywhere from $157 to $190 per acre. So in a year like 2022 with the 4.9 variety, you know, this is probably the same thing you have seen in your fields. And this is the CR plus. Again, I'm showing the same six spray program, five, four, three, two, and then one and then control. And obviously if you're doing only two or three spray programs, we have to tweak these right. So here there's only one pro line application. It's only pro line and 10. And this is just pro line reactor and doing that. So that were control. Look at the numbers 0.3, whether you do six spray application or no fungicide application, it's about 0.3 on a one to 10 scale. But one thing we don't need notice between the CR plus and then a non CR plus variety. Our planter is having some issues. So the row four was little tough in terms of the stand establishment, which actually disproportionately affected the varieties. The CR plus we had even lower stands compared to the non CR plus. So we are 190 beats for 100 foot of row for the non CR plus and then about 150 beats for 100 foot of row. So you have to keep this in mind when you look at these numbers. So some of these are probably caused by the lowest chance as well as the 60, 500, but generally you're seeing benefit with the fungicide applications. This is actually anomaly when I looked at the data. This is the lowest stance about 145 to 150. So that's what is reflected in the recalbless across per acre. So we're going to repeat this study again in 2023. I want to see if we know how the results differ. And we also have some data from these spray programs with some skips, you know, for the five spray program is skipping, you know, two and four and I'm not showing the data right now, but I'll be showing the data during the growing, growing seminars. So in summary, I think the fungicides, you know, still a strong tool in our toolbox to manage tracospora, but you have to use the fungicide mixtures and also rotate with fungicides with different modes of action. And that's the key. And number two, I think time is a sense for tracospora management. Right. So if you miss those, you know, first one or two applications and I mean, you can get a little bit of control, but you cannot, you know, catch up, especially if the DAVs are higher and then, you know, the conditions are favorable for disease development. So maintain the spring intervals for 10 to 14 days, especially, you know, if you're doing a 10 or bank is that if you have a heavy rainfall, I think you have to shorten the interval to about, you know, eight to 10 days. Otherwise, if you're doing DMI, like what you did when in 2022, at least we know 14 days is pretty decent. CR plus varieties. I think I have seen a lot of data from our colleagues from KWS and B2C and also some of the in-house trials. I think those trials have clearly shown that, you know, using fungicides is also essential for maintaining the CR plus. Torrance, you know, in the short term, you may think that, you know, you save some money by not doing fungicide applications, but in the long run, I think, as a result of that, the process for a medical, it can be very notorious to adapt. And then you can see some negative consequences. I think we still need to do some fungicide applications, but I think the verdict is not out there. You know, what is the best strategy for CR plus? And then hopefully we can learn from Dr. Kahn's team this afternoon from their own research. So with that, I would like to thank the recent education board for partial funding, from American Crystal, the seed and chemical companies and lots of hardworking folks in these projects. I'm very thankful for my team, for all the work that they do. So I'd like to introduce our next speaker for this morning, Dr. Juanita Ramchendran from DSDA, and she is going to talk about the evaluation of sugar beet field soil to identify rhizomania resistant breaking strains of beet necrotic yellow vein virus from the Pure Valley of California, Idaho, Minnesota and North Dakota. So again, my name is Juanita Ramchendran and I'm a research plant pathologist with the USDA here in Fargo and my research is focused on sugar beet viruses. So today I'm going to show you the evaluation of rhizomania that we have conducted across the field in North Dakota and Minnesota. So this slide shows the sugar beet production across the nation. So as it's color coded, the dark green to light green, it shows that the capacity of sugar beet production that you can see in the Red River Valley and Michigan and Idaho are the top producers compared to the rest of the locations and there are a lot of diseases that affect the productivity of the sugar beet and among those there are two viral diseases, is the curly top and rhizomania. So rhizomania is a devastating disease if it's not controlled. So rhizomania is, otherwise I learned after I joined here from the different cooperatives that it's a sleeping giant, meaning that the sports that transmit the virus can stay in the soil like 10, 15 years. So it can come up anytime if the conditions are favorable for the organism to grow. Here is the picture of healthy sugar beet root versus the typical rhizomania symptomatic sugar beet and this kind of heavy symptoms of the hairy root that we actually encountered last year, 2021 and 2022 as well. And like I said, the disease is caused by deep necrotic yellow vein virus. It's a soil-borne virus and there are about four to five RNA components that makes the virus infectious. But in the United States, we only have RNA one to four and we have not detected the RNA five yet. So next is how we are managing the rhizomania. So the disease management, like I said, it basically comes from genetic assistance provided by the host gene. And we do use RZ1 and RZ2 and now there are two genes, RZ1 plus RZ2. These two are integrated into the commercial varieties which considerably gives pretty good management of the disease. And there is no any registered chemical treatments that actually can protect the polymixa. It's a vector for the virus and there is no any transgenics host resistance available for the polymixa as well. So in the field, although the disease resistance is manageable in the field, we start noticing the appearance of rhizomania. As you can see here, here is the aerial view of the rhizomania disease, the yellow strips and then here is the ground view and the individual plant shows kind of blinkers and here is the root with the classic rhizomania symptoms. So since we started seeing the rhizomania blinkers, so the next question is like, it looks like the resistance breaking strains of the virus is appearing. So we would like to collect the soil and the plants to evaluate for the presence of the VNYBV and this will give the feedback information for the growers to do cultural practices, variety selection, like crop rotation, etc. So once we collect the rhizomania suspicious soil, as you can see here the yellow patch in the field, so we collect some beads as well as soil around the beads of the suspicious area and then for the beads, we just scrape the hairy roots and we do the ELISA. ELISA is a serological test to detect the VNYBV and in the case of soil samples, so we collect the soil and we, this is a kind of like quality comparison in terms of identifying the rhizomania resistance breaking strains of the virus. So the soil is used and we plant the, for example, susceptible sugar beet, RG1 sugar beet and RG1 plus 2 sugar beet and we take the roots from these bait plants. Basically, we are recovering the virus from the soil at this stage. So we take the roots from these plants and then we conduct the ELISA. So as you see the yellow color, meaning that the virus is, that the sample is positive for the virus and colorless shows the negative and so what is it giving? So this data, we actually give back to the cooperative in agronomists, so this give informed decisions. So this field does have a virus affecting the rhizomania and there will be a watch out for the future planting. So for the year 2022, for the last year, so we collected these many samples. The location stands for is a different field. So we collected samples from 12 different fields across Minnesota and North Dakota and we collected these many beets and we collected soil. When it says, yes, we have been got the soil from the corresponding beat location and no means that either we are testing the soil or like we did not obtain soil for that location. So like I said in the previous slide, so we do the ELISA testing to identify the virus and I just want to show you a couple of slides of how we assess the ELISA testing. So in this case, let's say we have like a beat number one. So each beat is individually evaluated. So beat number one, two, three, four and we do have healthy and positive controls in each diagnostic plate. So this shows the reagents and everything is working. So as you can see here, we have a scale of the estimation scale. So anything about this threshold that we consider as a positive and depending on the value. So it can be moderately positive or intensely positive. So as you can see, the value here for beat number three is high as compared to beat number one. And for the soil baiting, so we have susceptible plants, RG1, RG1 plus two and we do have healthy and positive controls here. So in this particular slide, I would say that this soil, whatever we tested is there is no concern because none of them are showing positive for BNYVVV. So this is another scenario where we got more number of beats and as you can see there, the variation in the BNYVV detection and if you look at the soil baiting experiment, so the RG1, the susceptible shows the high and next is RG1 and next is RG1 plus two. So in this case, there is a concern that like it looks like they know the BNYVV is adapting to the, adapting to overcome the resistance provided by the plant. And so this is the consolidated data that we have for the 2022 samples. So among the 77 beats that we tested, 51 showed, here's the key for that. So 51 beats showed intensely positive for BNYVVV and 11 are kind of moderately positive and 15 happens to be negative. And in the case of soil baiting, it's kind of like varying depending on the location, but it looks like overall that like, you know, risomania is kind of like coming back based on this assay. So what is next is like, okay, now we know that like, you know, some locations are kind of like showing risomania, even with the resistance breaking quality. So next is, you know, we take that plant roots and then isolate total RNA and it goes through the high throughput sequencing. So in this case, you know, after completing this high throughput sequencing, it has the ability to give us the genome sequence or the nucleotide sequence of all the RNA of BNYVVV. So after, you know, in silicoanalysis and then, you know, doing functional analysis, we should be able to get the sequence of the virus that will determine what is the difference between that sequence versus the wild type sequence. And then that will give us to identify any changes that occurred, you know, adapting the virus to overcome the host resistance. And this is for the 2021 survey that we did last, not last to the previous year. And in these, this is also all the samples are from Minnesota and North Dakota. So we didn't get that many positives in the soil waging. And for this, we already completed the high throughput sequencing and the data analysis is still ongoing but here is the preliminary data for the soil waging as a, so we have like these many samples tested and we have the data back and we've got, you know, these many numbers of contents obtained for each of these samples and we saw the presence of the big necrotic yellow wine virus, you know, it's highly far in this particular sample versus the rest. And the next one is coming up is this beach soil bond virus. This is also a virus that, you know, present along with the risomania whenever we sample the classic symptomatic beats. So it looks like it's also kind of like showing high numbers in some of these samples and most interestingly, we found a satellite, you know, like that's also coming up. Although this data is not like, the countings are not normalized yet, but, you know, like it looks like, you know, we are getting more than beat necrotic yellow wine virus and we are yet to determine what is the role of these, you know, satellites and the BSVV in intensifying the symptoms. So in summary, we evaluated suspicious sugar beats and field soil and we do, we detected BLYVV and we say that that's a measure of risomania right now, but, you know, it looks like there are other cohorts that coming along with that and we will be nailing that down to what is their role in causing the disease. And then the results indicate that there is a potential occurrence of resistant breaking strains of BLYVV across the fields based on the evaluation that we did for 2022 samples and the subset of this 2022 samples, I think many of them are going to be investigated using the next sequencing to identify the resistance breaking nucleotides associated with the virus. So I would like to thank the SBREB board of Minnesota and now Dakota for funding this project. And I acknowledge my lab people, Eric and Chinnah for doing a great work and I would like to acknowledge collaborators Dr. Khan Joe Hastings, Mark Blumquist and Emma and Mike Metzger, you know, like they are very helpful in, you know, identifying the pockets of the risomania and then, you know, helping us to get the samples both soil and beets and I like to thank all the sugar beet seed companies for providing us the seeds for sugar beet genotype testing and Dr. Anna for support and I'd like to thank the research unit that the people from the sugar beet research unit with that, I stop and take questions. Our next speaker for this morning is Mr. Jake Rodriguez from North Dakota State University. We're talking about evaluation of experimental insecticides for spring tail and road baggage control. Sorry, we threw your curveball. Yes, I am not Jake as most of you know, Jake is not feeling well, so I get to present his paper as well. The gist of Jake's presentation or the focus to this was on exploring alternatives either for root maggot or spring tail management. The materials and methods, these will be fairly similar between Jake's talk and mine. We at our root maggot trial was conducted at St. Thomas and I think many of you know many of you in the room know well familiar with how severe the root maggot populations are in that area. The planting date was very late as has been alluded to already in previous presentations about three weeks later then we like to do to plant our plots so that presented some challenges. The plots as Dr. Pierce had pointed out in some of his photos, there are six real plots but we focus on and take all of our assessments out of the inner four rows, the outer two on either side are going to be buffer plots. So this first slide is root injury ratings. So we rate these for sugar beet root maggot feeding injury on a zero to nine scale, zero being no damage and nine being a dead plant. He's got these grouped by formulation or application timing. So on the far left we've got three granular materials supplied at planting time and then we've got three materials here as well that are these are sprayable liquids that are applied dribble in furl at planting and then the green bars on the far on the right are post emergence applications. Now this is an experimental trial and so these are single applications which we would never recommend as a sole mode of control in the St. Thomas area or any at risk or high risk area but we do need to look at them as individuals to see what they're bringing to the table. So what we saw here was provided some optimism. Here's our moderate rate counter we chose a moderate rate we had a lot of treatments in this trial we stuck with one rate of counter it's a moderate rate. Just to see if anything in the study was going to be in the ballpark park of a product that we know tends to work pretty well. So we got results out of Aztec smart choice really everything from the lavender to your left provided very good or significant reductions in in root injury ratings. So we may have something there and one thing to point out and I'll probably repeat on that through the presentation but the post-emergence foliar were applied later than we would have wanted we had to wait as someone else has mentioned after we finally got into plant in late May we didn't get a lot of rain to get those plants up and out of the ground so we were waiting to be able to put on our post-emergence foliar so it was not an ideal situation so I'd really like to give these the foliar materials another run to see what we might get out of them. This is what some of the plots look like we don't have a picture of every single plot every single treatment here's what our entry check looked like and some of those surviving plants you can kind of see the lines here those are actually wheel tracks where the females likely lay eggs so probably would have been even worse had we not had that to be there. The counter looked pretty good as a second smart choice you saw on the previous chart they performed pretty well we're keeping the check up on this slide so we have that as a reference point index looked pretty decent echizen we've seen decent performance out of it in the past delegate this was the first year of looking at delegate and we believe there might be something there as well not optimal but as you look in the following slides the upper right here Yuma that is a chlorpyrifos formulation applied at its moderate rate of one pint per acre so it didn't look real outstanding either under that kind of pressure and that again late application time and then delegate we also ran it as a post emergence foliar and again it looked better as an outlier here's what the yield results look like of course we're looking for big bars on this this particular slide and the pattern of performance reflected pretty well those ruby injury ratings so very good control excellent yields actually for very late planted plots you know breaking 30 and 10,000 pounds of recoverable sucrose per acre so good performance out of those not all these treatments here that separated from the check in the the root ratings pulled through in the same manner with the yield comparisons but we had a lot of variability in these plots too so that's the root mega experimental trial that we ran much to our surprise and kind of late in the game we got a report from a central agriculturist that helped us inadvertently I guess him reporting a problem in a field turned out to be a very hefty springtail infestation one of the largest I've seen in Red River Valley in quite some time and it was right under our noses it was in the Glendon area so we despite it being kind of late in the season we did go ahead and put trials in the grower Brett Keele was very kind he said do what you want with it and so my technician Jake took that to heart and he tilled up enough space for us to put in 10 replications of the treatments in three trials so the downside is it's easy to plant plots well it's kind of easy but it's the pay-forward in the end with all the stand counts and all the ratings and all the yield and I think our NDSU and U of M calling for helping with harvest because it was quite a chore so this slide is kind of busy this is the progression of the sand council in the yellow bar we had the first stand count just a couple of weeks after planting planted July 6th then three weeks after planting and then 34 days after planting so each cluster bar has those comparisons so you can see the progression so the initial stand counts likely were the combination of how quickly the treatments were going to emerge but it also had the springtail X factor effect too so slow emergence also had to do with springtail pressure so the essentially these saw and I know the text is very small Jake tried to squeeze it in as best he could but we have three rates of counter on the far left performing pretty well we have an individual the seed treatments the three registered seed treatments all performing at similar levels was a little disappointed here initially with the Mustang and Midak dribble and furrow we'd like to probably look at those more things too because if you look over here Mustang improves with the T-band application you'll see that more so in the yield actually as the springtails continue to feed but we've got excellent performance out of a combination of ponchal beta treated seed plus Mustang max as a T-band much more so than when the Mustang was applied dribbling furrow or wants to hear that or wants to put nozzles on a multi huge planter and maintain them but I've seen it for close to 20 years that the T-band almost universally outperforms the dribbling furrow and I think we're just getting a better coverage with that T-band pressurized nozzle of really coating that seed furrow distribution of the product that performed very well or treatments I should say were the combination of ponchal beta and myodac and then one big surprise I shouldn't say big surprise we hadn't really studied it that much before but we did look at movento as a post-emergent spray a rescue spray which would be really nice because I've had to say we don't have much for options for you when growers ask about my stands falling apart is there a rescue treatment for spring tails and sugar beet and I've had to say no for many many years so this suggests possibly we have something there with movento as a post spray this probably is not very visible sorry about the overhead light but you can't see the contrast that well but if you do see it it would tell you that treatment is popping pretty well with ponchal beta with Mustang Max as a T-band sticking out very good these were unbelievably beautiful in person in the field they were just lighting up like neon almost the counter performed very well also keeping the check up there like they had done before there's the movento and ponchal beta treatment both ponchal movento applied post-emergence combination of ponchal beta with mydac so that again was a pretty good performant treatment just a couple more treatments there's a cruiser also looks good and then mix it inside comparable performance so what did it look like in the yield again remember this is 10 replicates so it's fairly robust for a one-time trial the granules worked very well as did the seed treatments you look over here pretty much universally across the board everything is providing a very significant level of benefit with regard to recoverable soup gross per acre I won't go through this too much I'll be sharing more of this in the grower meetings but as you can see there are differences with regard to this is the net revenue it is revenue overdoing nothing it's not most revenue but it's in comparison to the untreated chat and there's the stand count and then the revenue or excuse me the recoverable soup gross data suggested we're getting very good responses easily paying for pretty much every treatment in the list was paying for itself a few times over so to summarize the presentation overall with root mega control our best performance was out of those act plant granules to a lesser extent the act plant liquids I think we have some prospects with those spread the liquids index act as in delegate and maybe end ago as well you know some of these certainly the experimentals I would say would be components of future programs so maybe looking at integrating them with other application technology we definitely want to repeat that experimental trial for root megits under more normal conditions where especially where we can see what we can get out of those folder applications when more properly time spring child granules all work quite well mustang the three inch t-band was superior to the dribble and frill and then we got good control out of the neon x C treatments as well as my act which is also a and then the C were augmented the control that they provided was augmented by using adding another component so with that I will entertain any questions Peter my do okay for so the next the presentation is also by me and Mr. Rickis we're looking so this is again more the search of either registered alternatives or programs developing programs for managing root megits and we're also exploring some experimental and then I'll wrap it up with the root megit forecast so the materials and methods are very similar to what I alluded to before shared with you before the differences are instead of looking at those root injury ratings challenges it already really shared with you but we had really tiny plants for those post-emergence foliar applications so with that we'll the other factor if you will was despite that delayed planting wet soils and even I would say cold soils they warmed up and caught up in degree day units and the root megits came out at the same time so we had a kind of a bad scenario of small and still emergent plants when they were laying eggs so this first data slide is a all registered products we're just looking at programs either single dual or triple application components and so and you can see right here the top three are triple component or dual at plant or single at plant protection followed by dual post-emergence and these weren't even really optimal again the post-emergence applications they were made I think the granules were applied two days ahead of peak fly I would much prefer to have had them at least five days to a week ahead of peak fly but that's the cards we were dealt same with the three days after peak fly so to get a response from it I would say is a positive thing but all of the treatments with regard to recoverable sucrose per acre and tons per acre all of these treatments or none of them are statistically different from each other there are differences in revenue so revenue is being maximized and look there over 10,000 pounds of recoverable sucrose when it was planted the last few days of May so pretty impressive and we had very good root media pressure at this location this is just a few shots what those plots look like down at the bottom these are just reference points just to see what kind of control you're getting so our entry to check here damage rating ER stands for damage rating and again we don't recommend any seed treatment or any lesser performing a lower rate of a granule at planting but this gives you some idea of the benefit you can get by adding and developing a control program rather than a single component approach one thing to point out here is interestingly our number one treatment if you threw the stats out just looked at revenue our number one treatment here was console beta followed at the same time as a console beta treated seed with the moderate rate of counter 7.5 pounds and then coming over with a granular finite application not statistically different from this treatment but numerically yes and I think part of what's going on for when we have a high rate of a organophosphate on at planting and then we have to apply that post emergence granule shortly thereafter that finite was applied 19 days after planting so as early as we could to be reasonable and to kind of fit within that window of post planting but not post root maggot needed to have those granules on so a lot of active ingredient to have on those very tiny plants all at once the next slide is a similar approach some singles and then some dual and even triple quadruple component programs the again we've got recovered sucrose per acre tons per acre and then again that gain in revenue over the untreated check which is quite sizable for the next trial so we just looked at the moderate rate at planting of counter 15G or 20G sorry just to again to kind of tease out differences so we're not watering down performance of the subsequent treatments and so the first point I'd like to make on this one or pattern I'd like to identify is that going from a single application to Mustang to a double with a sauna in the middle and those were spaced probably about four days apart we maximized revenue is an excellent amount of revenue per acre the other point I want to make we've got exponent and I've talked about exponent before it is a synergist it synergizes the insecticidal activity of mainly of the pyrethroid insecticides and so a sauna being a pyrethroid we wanted to look at that so if we compare nips and a sauna at planting time dribbling furrow by itself well we got a significant increase in yield but we really pushed it up there where it was not outperformed by the best treatment in the trial so exponent appeared to be providing a pretty good impact there it also did not so much but and this again the post-emergent sprays in this trial were later than we would have wanted I told you I was going to repeat that a lot and I am but these are like treatments here the sauna with exponents slightly edged out the sauna alone similarly nips at planting followed by a foliar application of a sauna here's its counterpart different but about $80 per acre increased revenue so I feel feeling more confident about the impacts of exponent this next trial the focus was on mydac a fairly newly registered insecticide and sugary the take home from this was that all of our treatments provided significant improvements with regard to recoverable supra and root tonnage as well now this is root injury so the lower the number the better they also provided significant reductions in feeding injury that validated that the treatment impacts were from the one other thing to point out although we did get significant levels of benefit from poncho and mydac as individuals again those are individual treatments that we wouldn't recommend as put that on and you're good for the rest of the season but they performed very well just as good in fact numerically better than the high rate of counter so right in the ballpark with a pretty solid treatment there by combining those two approaches and then this last trial we had some experimentals and registered products veramark and vantacor are both diamide insecticides so they would provide a new mode of action we were comparing them again with a moderate rate of counter and then the full rate of mustang either with sorry with or without exponent so these were all dribble in furl for the liquid insecticides and then we have the and what I wanted to point out here was that across the board with mustang max we got a significant reduction in feeding injury significant increases in yield and a doubling of the gross revenue above the entry check so a pretty significant benefit of this experiment with mustang as well veramark the experimental performed quite a bit better than vantacor they actually had the same mode of action or same active ingredient actually but we were able to apply essentially this 10 fluid ounces of veramark was about 33% more I think it was 33% more active ingredient per acre then the 2.5 don't do the math here I did it for you it depends on the amount of material per gallon so the active ingredient was a little higher for veramark so we did get better performance out of that this is what those plots looked like and so here's our comparative plots we have our entry to check 7.2 on the 0-9 scale our counter sorry I'm sure I'm doing that the counter did pretty well you can see some contrast there though the dribble and furl alone of mustang or tank mix with exponent we got a better canopy fill with that and then with veramark although it looks like there was a rate response visually there we did not see a statistical difference between those two rates but I think we're definitely seeing something out of that product so to wrap up the root maggot trial experiments Mustang max the plant was improved by incorporating exponent the synergist we did get a positive response by increasing the number of applications of Mustang over the growing season and then we also got additive control by alternating between Mustang and Asana for three applications total Asana looked good also with exponent Poncho Beta plus Midat looks decent as a program but we probably still want to with even with those two combined we'd still want to look at being poised and ready under high pressure situations to include a foliar application as well so do neonate seed treatments have a fit in the sugar beet system I still think they do I've told you in the past or told the growers in the past I really think we need to be very aggressive and I think we do but when incorporating them with a two and three or even four component program you can do pretty well with that you just don't want to rely on that seed treatment as a standalone post-emergence maggot manager counter remains effective as a maggot management product climate does as well we recommend applying them at least five days ahead of peak fly activity Veramark and Vantikor as I mentioned that offers a new mode of action which we've been desperately needing for about over well probably over 30 years in the sugar beet system so Veramark was the one that performed best what's their registration status Veramark is not registered at this point but it's registered in a lot of things that I think I would guess registration wouldn't be that difficult in sugar beet Vantikor actually I discovered is registered but only as a foliar application so we need to do a lot more work and looking at that product so let's see I should just ask are there any questions about the screening trials before I go into the forecast yeah the MIDAC how was the MIDAC applied that was dribbling for all it's something we want to explore the question was any work on combining tank mixing exponent with Mustang for post-emergence applications and so it's definitely something we want to look into it's certainly that's where we really need some help well I think I'll get into the forecast give you a little idea of I still see the green sheet so hopefully I'm okay so here's you've seen this slide before I added another year and unfortunately I mean sometimes it's fun to break records but in 2002 we broke a record for the population density of the Root Mag this is valley wide so the worst fly infestations in the last 16 years the next slide most of you in the audience have seen this before those of you that haven't are wondering why 2018 is on the top of this I'll animate this so you can see the progression of populations over the last four years and what we're looking at for 2023 here's 2018 2020 2022 and 2023 so not a lot of difference between 2022 and 2023 but we definitely have a problem on our hands I would say one little reason for optimism would be that the root injury ratings that we collected in a lot of those fields that we monitored the flies in have trended downward a little bit Joe so I'm tarting on getting you some data but I have a little bit of good news on that so I wouldn't say let go of the reins of the horse or whatever euphemism you want to use there but I think we might have made progress this year maybe it was because a lot of people were really worried that without chlorpyrifos what are we going to do and so my impression is that growers were pretty aggressive this year maybe someone from the audience can correct me if I'm wrong on that we do have a long longer list for both North Dakota and Minnesota as far as high risk areas I've told you before this audience and my grower meeting audiences that usually I used to be able to have high risk on one side and moderate risk on the other side probably four or five years I've had to put all the high risk locations on one slide and and then the moderate ones on on another slide I will show more of that during grower meetings and by the way please attend the grower meetings if you are an industry person or a grower because I think I'll include about three of these slides in my grower meetings there's going to be a lot more data a lot more kind of results and recommendations on what to expect and how to control them coming up so with that I'll wrap it up I want to thank the irony board for their confidence in our program and their support over the years I want to thank the co-operators Wayne Lussard, Austin Lussard and then Brett Keele as well excellent co-operators American Crystal for collaborating with us on the fly counts seeing our ventures helping us with a lot of things and namely water, there are water supply now germans for treating our seed and broadly the seed and chemical and allied ag industry in the region is just a great the sugar beet families is awesome I want to thank my summer crew who did a fantastic job collecting all those stand counts and keeping the plots clean and then I want to acknowledge the USDA and have the support for my program as well