 Hi, I'm Michael Vunch. I'm the plant pathologist at the Carrington Research Center. I'm here at the Oaks Irrigation Research Site, south of Oaks, where we do a lot of our white mold research in conjunction with the Carrington site. We typically do our testing in Carrington and down here. This is an irrigated sand, so it's very, very typical of the types of conditions that irrigated producers here in North Dakota and neighboring Minnesota face. Irrigation here is with a linear irrigator, and it is in an irrigated production belt with significant irrigated soybean production. What I'm standing in here is a dry bean study. This is the third of a three-year effort to evaluate the impact of rose-pacing and seeding rate on agronomic performance of pinto beans and kidney beans under white mold pressure. Growers traditionally have chosen wide rows in both kidneys and dry beans and pinto beans wherever they're worried about white mold. And there is evidence from research done in other areas that this might not be optimal. Some very limited research done in other areas of North America as well as in South America indicates that on dry beans, many times the distance between plants is more important than the distance between rows for white mold. So we set out to look at this. You're going to optimize the distance between plants in a narrow row spacing if you keep your seeding rate constant relative to wide rows. So we set out to look at this. And what we have learned to date over the first two years of this study is that in kidney beans we have minimized our white mold by seeding to seven and a half or fifteen inch rows as long as the white mold pressure is relatively low, below about thirty percent of the canopy diseased. And we have optimized our yields in those narrow rows as long as the white mold pressure at the end of the season is less than fifty percent of the canopy diseased. Now most growers would not consider either thirty or fifty percent of the canopy diseased acceptable. Very few commercial fields hit that threshold. And with appropriate fungicide usage you should not. And so what our research results to date suggest is that the findings from other regions may translate to us and we may be able to improve the agronomic performance of our kidney beans by narrowing the row spacing and not only getting higher yields but as long as we keep that level of disease below thirty percent of the canopy diseased at the end of the season even minimizing our disease. On pinto beans the story is similar but a little bit less dramatic. In the case of pinto beans we always increased our disease by narrowing the rows. The difference, the area that is similar to the kidneys though is that as long as we kept our disease levels below a quarter of the canopy diseased at the end of the season we maximized our yields in seven and a half or fifteen inch rows. And often by a lot we have big yield gains by having those narrow row spacings. You had a little bit more disease but not much and a lot higher yields. And this isn't surprising when you seed to wide rows the pinto beans and the kidney beans often enter bloom with still dirt showing between the rows. And so the plants are entering the reproductive stage and there's a lot of sunlight that's going to waste. That's not being converted to biomass, not being converted to flowers and pots. And white mold is a disease that only occurs when water isn't limiting. It is a high moisture disease. And so when you are wasting your sunlight and water isn't limiting you are by definition losing yield. And what's happening on the pinto beans is that the yield impact of losing that extra sunlight is greater than the yield impact of a little bit more white mold. At least until you get to about twenty five percent of the canopy diseased. So if your field does not have a history of severe white mold and you have confidence that you can manage the white mold to satisfaction with fungicides in the years when white molds are risk during bloom. You are almost certainly guaranteed to improve your yields by moving to narrow rows at least from the results of our first two years of this study. We are completing the third and final year of this study and as you can see behind me these studies are large. The plots are ten feet wide and the studies are very very large. These dry beans behind me, behind me is probably only two-thirds or so of the entire study that we are looking at here for split between kidneys and pintos. And so we are doing this work very rigorously and if you have any questions go to the Andesuke Carrington website and a detailed report is posted under the plant pathology page there. Thank you for your time.