 Hello, I'm Dr. Julie Pashi, potato pathologist at NDSU, and I'm here with my colleague. I'm Gary Secor, plant pathologist, North Dakota State University, and we are here in round two to talk about a below ground diseases. In round one, we talked about above ground diseases, and now we're going to talk about below ground diseases. And I'd like to ask Julie, you're working on some underground diseases, and maybe you can just tell us about some of those, you've got a bunch of targets there. Yeah, absolutely. So, we're continuing some work that has been done in the past at NDSU with verticillium wilt, and really looking at some management practices that growers can use as far as adjusting their vine kill date, or maybe adjusting their planting date, and so that the stems don't become as colonized by the pathogen, and we don't return as much of that pathogen to the soil, hopefully to reduce those pathogen levels over time, and therefore have to reduce some of the chemical inputs that we use and give growers some more options. We also have started a new project, I think in NDSU potato pathology, is working with Common Scab, and so we received an award from the Nebraska Potato Commission to work on Common Scab, and our overall goal there is to quantify the pathogen in the soil, and we're hoping that in the end that will allow growers to make some management decisions as far as maybe where they're going to plant, as well as use that data to input into an overall model to again help growers with management decisions, and so we're doing that work in Nebraska, but because the pathogen is really somewhat ubiquitous, we believe that that's going to be applicable to our growers here, as well. And that's a great project because scab continues to be a serious problem, and nobody wants to work on it, and that's a real difficult problem to attack, so I'm glad you're doing that. So you're making the new girl work on it? Exactly, exactly. I'm too old to work on that, so we'll let you do that. All right, perfect. And Gary, you also work on some soil rim pathogens, Rhizoctonia, and others? Rhizoctonia, and we're calling Dickia soil-borne pathogen, even though it doesn't really survive in the soil, it's an underground pathogen. Oh, underground pathogen, sure, sure. You know, just a couple of comments on Rhizoc. We've been doing Rhizoctonia trials for 40 years. We've got lots of chemistries, they're very effective against Rhizoctonia, and we think that we've been, over the years, been able to suppress Rhizoctonia to the point where now it's even difficult to find seed lots that have Rhizoctonia. Just because it feels so effective over the years, but we continue to do the trials, and we've got lots of actors in the field, so we continue, again this year we're doing that again, so that's a consistent thing that we do. We also have a grant from SCRI to work on Dickia, which is really a new name for the softrot bacteria. It used to be called Erwinia, now it's Dickia and Pectobacteria, and it's been a problem since about 2014. It's a new bacterial species that came into the U.S., and it caused real serious losses, especially on the East Coast. We don't have much of that in North Dakota and Minnesota in our surveys that we've done, so we're happy with that. Certainly, all for sure. And we've also developed a good assay for screening seed lots, so you can screen seed lots, those that are highly infected, we get rid of them, and over the years the number of seed lots with disease are fewer and fewer, so we have less stand problems coming from that. So you know that, we've also found that it doesn't spread during cutting, we also found that it spreads in the soil through all the water, the irrigation and moisture that's in there. And the other thing that we've done is Susie Thompson and I have a project together, a graduate student project, looking at screening her population and varieties from other breeding programs for resistance to Dickia, because we don't know if there's any resistance. And fortunately, we find a range, lots of stability, but we do find some resistance, so let's open that area as well. Awesome, yeah, so you're attacking it from all angles. We are, we're trying, and this is a multi-state project, so it's a big, it's a big national project, and you have to have the shotgun approach almost to get that done. Well, you've got some other projects you're working on. Absolutely, and again in that SCRI arena, you know it's wonderful, we have these funding sources to allow us to get together as multi-state groups as you're talking about, and tackle some of these problems. And so the University of Minnesota is leading up a soil health grant, and we're involved in that, and just working with growers for management decisions, and looking at the microbiome, and how management decisions, and rotations, and other things affect the microbiome and the soil health, and it's certainly a wonderful project that I've come into. We also just recently were funded to work on PMTV, so potato mop top virus, and we'll continue to look at the diagnostics as well as the pathogen in some of that work. And so again, a large multi-state project that will tackle it from all angles going forward. So those are a few of the things that we're working on in the below ground, if you will, or soil-borne problems, and certainly there are many more, but that highlights a little bit about what we're doing on that front. I think our plates are full, we're busy enough that we've got a lot of things going on, but please call us if you've got questions, send samples if you need to, we're here to serve. Yep, absolutely. Thank you.