 Good afternoon and thank you for the invitation to give a quick presentation for the Agronomy Seed Farm Field Day. My preference would be to be standing in a field and discussing kind of how things look and how things went for the last few years on some variety data. Love to show you how the breeding nurseries look in the program. The supper is always pretty good too, but we'll have to use our imaginations until next year, unfortunately. This is kind of an interesting opportunity to be able to give a virtual presentation though, because I think what it does is it allows me to show you some of the data, some of the visualizations that I would be using to make the presentation that I would give where I am in the field and be able to see this on a screen in a way that you couldn't see on the wagons on the tour. What we're looking at here is this is three-year data. These are a comparison of yield on the x-axis here, so higher yield to the right, lower yield to the left, and protein on the y-axis, and with, again, higher protein going to the top left-hand corner here and lower protein down here. In general, what we really see is what we would expect, which is a pretty general negative relationship between yield and protein, and this is no surprise. Higher yielding lines tend to have lower protein, lower yielding lines tend to have higher protein. That shouldn't be any big shock, but what we do see when we look at a figure like this is our lines that potentially are above average for multiple traits. If you go across here and you find the point where zero and zero intersect right about here, that's the average for yield and for protein. By the way, why are we talking about yield numbers that range from negative 10 to 10 and protein that goes from negative 2.5 to 2? Well, these are not protein percentage and yield in bushels per acre. These are what's called best linear unbiased predictions for these traits. If you are familiar at all with livestock, this is the same approach that we would use to calculate estimated breeding values or the EPDs, the estimated progeny differences in cattle. If you're looking at a bull catalog, those numbers are very similar to what you would get for the blups for these two traits that we're showing here. The average of this group of genotypes is centered about zero. This point right here where I've marked the X, anything higher than that X going this direction has higher than average protein. Everything to the right of this X going this way has higher than average yield. Things that are outside of the normal trend for yield and protein would be things that fall in this quadrant of the graph here. Up here in the top left, that's low yield, high protein. Low yield, low protein. That'd be a really bad news down here in the bottom left. Then some of your more what we might call resource varieties that have high yield and low protein are found in the bottom right. The quadrant we want to be in is high yield, high protein. What we've got are a handful of lines that over the 2017 to 2019 data. They suggest that they might be a little bit different than the average for these traits. Actually, that should include Lang MN here. The circle should have been broadened to include it. What do we have now? Well, we have things that as we said have high yield, low protein. Does that mean they're bad quality? Not necessarily, but it's difficult to get a good loaf of bread out of a low protein wheat. What we find when we do our functionality tests in the Milling and Baking Lab is that a lot of the things that fall down in this quadrant are sometimes difficult to use for the end-use products that our customers expect. We've got some things hovering in the middle here. HRS 3100, which that would be CP3100, AP Murdoch, Surpass. Those are around average protein with high yield. It might be worth taking a look at. Then the things that are in this, as we said, quadrant here with the high yield, high protein, there's a pretty decent chance that those will have okay milling and baking quality along with good yield for these locations, which is again specific to this Castleton area here. What else is important in selecting a variety? Well, we'll come back to the quality on these. Bacterial leaf streak and fusarium headlight are the two diseases that I would say, especially in this area, I would be paying the most attention to. The best resource to find the most up-to-date information on these lines is the annual variety trial results and variety selection guide that we release around October every year. That's going to have the most current disease data and the most current quality and also the agronomic data from that year, as well as those three-year averages. Bacterial leaf streak, what we're starting to see with some preliminary data is that seven is the tipping point. If you're higher than a seven on that BLS scale that we produce, you're looking at some potential for some very serious yield loss in an environment where BLS is present. Anything lower than that? You're not as bad off. If you're lower than four, four or less, I would say that in most cases, you're going to be in pretty good shape because those lines stood up to some pretty heavy pressure last year and exhibited a pretty high level of genetic resistance. If you can find it four or less is great. Stay out of that seven or higher and you should be okay. Fusarium headlight. There's a lot of things grouped in the five and six. Everything sort of looks like it's kind of the same. To a large extent, that's because with enough pressure, a lot of varieties will perform similarly. If you can grow a four on this scale, I would highly encourage it. Those are the most likely to stand up to the disease without necessarily needing fungicide. Greater than a seven is putting you at a very high risk in a year with a conducive environment. Those fives and sixes, you're going to want to monitor your risk. You're going to want to check the SCAB forecasting models, look at things around that head emergence time and make a decision based on your risk factors there and the potential of your crop. Those are the boundaries that I would use for those two diseases. With that in mind, take a look and see some of these things that are standouts for yield and protein may not necessarily be the best for some of these diseases. However, because this data is from a trial that has trials that were largely exposed to these pathogens, generally speaking, if the disease has a really big impact on yield, we're going to see it in these results. Check that guide. Keep an eye on the disease resistance that you've got there and make a decision where your risk level is going to be for those two in particular. From there, I think it's also important that we just mentioned briefly the end-use quality. If you've heard me talk before, you know that end-use quality is a big deal in our program. Frankly, if it weren't for the quality of spring wheat, our prices would be even worse than they are now, which I know for some of you might be hard to imagine. Stay out of the areas of things that have very poor end-use quality if you can afford to. Those hurt the overall marketability of the wheat that we grow in our region, and it's very apparent to wheat buyers abroad when we have a crop that has a large influence of some of these varieties with poor quality. We publish a lot of quality data. What are the three columns that you would look at if you could only look at three? Frenograph absorption, which is a measure of water absorption capacity in the flour. The Frenograph stability, which is a measure of the dose strength, and the loaf volume, which is the physical measurement for the miniature loaves of bread that are made from these varieties. We want high numbers for all three of these categories. When we start to get into trouble is when we have a line that has multiple strikes against it for end-use quality. An example of this is our racehorse LCS trigger down here. It often has very low protein levels and very poor quality scores along with that, a low stability, a very poor loaf volume. This is a wheat that I would really think twice about, because I think you can get some things that have still very competitive yield potentials in the area of this graph in particular. Anything right in this category here, you're going to have pretty strong exceptional yield potential on, and there are some things in here that don't have as poor of milling and baking quality. Check this guide. Look at the things that sort of fall around these averages or slightly higher than average. AP Murdoch is one to keep your eye on. We've only baked a few locations of this line, but the early indications are that it has a nice combination of yield and end-use quality. SY Valda is a little bit lower than average for absorption, not so bad for stability. The loaf volume can be a little poor. This is one that, as many of you know, the protein can get a little low on if the yield is high. Not the best quality, but there are a lot worse decisions you could make. Torgi is a recent release from the Minnesota program with pretty good stability, pretty fair absorption. The loaf volume in the data from our initial sites last year wasn't as good, but 2019 was a difficult year for getting really strong data. CP39.39 is one that has, in those initial tests, pretty good quality across the board. As you can see, also falls into that high yield and high protein quadrant of our graph here. There are things out there that buck the trend for necessarily having low yield just because they have strong quality or strong protein. I would really encourage you to take a look at the data that we produce in the fall of this year and look at those factors that are important to you and try to consider where your priorities are on your farm and keeping the overall market class in mind. The one thing I forgot to mention on this figure here is that the dots are color-coded by straw string, so a more blue is a stronger straw, more red has had more problems with lodging over the past three years with sort of the gray being in the middle. Last year we had good lodging data. The previous years in the sites around here, the data wasn't as strong, but depending on where your risk is there, I would be looking in the blue to gray for sure and staying away from things that are colored red. These are lines that have had issues with standability over the past few years, particularly in 2019. If you've got questions about varieties and you want to talk about any of this type of data, if you'd like to see some of these types of manipulations or you've got questions about interpreting the quality data, give me a call if you want to talk about how things are going in the program. I'd love to hear from you. My information is listed on the NDSU webpage. I'd be glad to talk to you about it. Thank you very much and I hope you enjoy the rest of your field season.