 My name is Gary Secor, I am a plant pathologist at North Dakota State University and I'm with my colleague Dr. Julie Pashie who is a potato pathologist at North Dakota State University as well. And we work together on lots of potato diseases and we're delighted to be here at this virtual presentation because of the pandemic and all the things that are going on. I think the first thing we need to do is thank our staff that does all this great field work. Russell and Dean and Corey and Daryl we've got a great crew and our field trials look just wonderful this year because of their hard work. Yeah it's too bad you can't be here to see them but they're doing fantastic work as they always do. And we need to thank our cooperators that work with us on all these trials. Heimberg Farms, Northern Plain Potato Growers, Area 2, Carl Hoverson whose field we're in now, Blackgold, RDO Farms. Minnesota Area 2 potato growers and hopefully we didn't miss anybody but sorry if we did. We've got a great field crew, we've got a great group of cooperators so thank you to all of those. So we've got some we're going to talk about two different groups of diseases here today. We're going to talk first about foliar diseases above ground and then we're going to talk about the work that we've been doing with below ground parts of pathology. So Gary you've been working on late blight for years what can you tell us about your work with late blight? You know late blight this year it's thanks to the good work that the industry does I think and I give them the credit because they have to implement the management practices. So far we have no late blight in North Dakota in Minnesota or Manitoba and this is as of Wednesday the what the 12th of August is that where we are? Close enough. Yeah the 8th of August or the 8th of August. So the 8th of August we have no late blight in our area okay but we do have late blight reported in Wisconsin on about the 10th of August late blight was reported in Adams County in Wisconsin it's also been late blight in British Columbia okay and also yes and yeah it's in British Columbia and there was one more place but I can't remember that. Okay I don't know. Anyway we don't have any late blight so I give the credit to the industry for for keeping late blight under control. Absolutely and and of course we expect our our growers will continue to stay vigilant on that effort. I think so and we have sport traps. We have sport traps that Andy is leading up heading up those and we've detected spores but yeah due to your good work we haven't haven't had any in the field. We've also got a lot of trials going with early blight and I think Julie I'd like to ask you to talk about some of those trials that have gone with early blight. Yeah so as in the past we've done many trials on early blight and and really I think both of us together look at at controlling our foliar diseases of potatoes as a complex and so maybe we do you know trials aimed at early blight or other things but we're really looking at that program approach helping our growers across the growing season not just for one disease and so certainly we've continued to do that with early blight but also this year we've added in some brown spot work and brown spot is caused by a relative of early blight but there we know that there are differences in certainly there are differences in symptomatology but there are also differences in cultivar susceptibility and what we're coming to find out is that there are differences in the fungicides and the way the fungicides control these these diseases we know that early or a brown spot in our area is caused by three pathogens and even amongst those brown spot pathogens we know that fungicide and cultivar susceptibility differs and so we're starting to take a little bit closer look at that and and as well as fungicide resistance amongst all those all those pathogens and so really kind of broadening that that scope of our foliar disease management package will you say and of course black dot is included in that as well and so you know growers want more information on on those trials and all of that information of course will be disseminated at the end of the growing season when we have more more results on all those trials and this is one of the sites for the fungicide trials yeah that we're doing yep yep and this is a great example of a complex of diseases here just right in front of us we have a combination of both early blight and botrytis and and really is quite difficult to tell the difference between them you know the lesions are a little bit different and and but right here amongst this you can see that we have both we have both pathogens and and both diseases yeah this is interesting because you can see these small little lesions for brown spot on here that are scattered throughout the leaves as opposed to as opposed to botrytis that we see here coming in at the end of the leaves and typically comes in there as well as in the hydrothodes and where your your early blight lesions tend to remain smaller and more angular and where the brown spot lesions tend to expand and so just important for the growers to really be able to distinguish among those to plan their foliar fungicide program and it's important yeah exactly because they they have different fungicides to control the different diseases so it's important to identify which ones they are in order to get the right fungicide absolutely so please let us know if you have questions specific questions about these things we're always happy to answer those and work with you on on your programs going forward um anything else gary no just if you've got samples that you need identified absolutely and the samples give us calls yep we're available yep thank you