 This is the SugarBeat Report, bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the SugarBeat growing season. If you grow SugarBeat, you are all too familiar with Cercospora leaf spot. To battle this devastating disease, research is key. Our guest is Nate Wyatt, USDA research plant pathologist in the SugarBeat and Potato Research Unit. Nate, before any signs of infection, can much be done with Cercospora. Every year in the beginning of this growing season, typically starting end of May, running through June and into July, we do a latent CLS infection study. And what we're doing is we're accepting leaf samples from grower fields that are submitted by the agriculturalists, and we're running a molecular assay to detect Cercospora boticola DNA. And that is what's helping us get an idea of when infection is truly beginning within the growing season. We also typically run spore traps. So we know that spores are out and about early, early May, so even before planting. So we've got that particular part of the infection cycled down. And then this latent infection study has really helped us get the time points of when those spores land on leaves germinate, infect that leaf tissue, which is really the start of Cercospora leaf spot disease. From there, we're running a lot of our fungicide resistance assays just to see what that infection profile looks like from a fungicide resistance perspective. And this is all flowing into our meta-analyses for doing a more comprehensive disease modeling. Can you tell us more about disease modeling? Right now, the disease modeling is very reliant on temperature and humidity. It doesn't factor in things like the latent infection or spore production. And so those are key aspects of the pathogens infection cycle that we're not accounting for yet. And a lot of our research now is geared towards figuring out if those aspects of the pathogens life cycle that we're now paying attention to are key components that we could target with fungicides. So perhaps a very early season fungicide may work to lower inoculum loads and lead to a lower disease pressure throughout the year following. How effective are CR plus sugar beet varieties? CR plus genetics, it's a great trait and it's been really useful for growers in the Red River Valley. And Sir Krosper resistance is really useful for alleviating some of the selection pressure that fungicides put on the pathogen. Instead now we can rely on the plant to provide some of the necessary resistance. But we know that the pathogen evolves pretty rapidly and we believe we've already identified some isolates that are circumventing that resistance. And so when we move forward with disease modeling and looking at fungicide resistance, we now have another aspect to account for which is how CR plus affects that. When we do our disease modeling and our risk analyses, we can start factoring in. Is the risk modeling happening on a susceptible variety or a CR plus variety? Nate, what's the best way to find your Sir Krosper research? So right now with the latent infection study, with the agriculturalists from each of the three co-ops we work with here in the Red River Valley, they submit the samples. I report back to the people who are quarterbacking this for each of the co-ops and they report that to the agriculturalists who communicate that to the growers. We're also working on making a website where we can put all this information a person could log in and piece through each week and see where a latent infection is popping up and where it's spreading. Thanks, Nate. Our guest has been Nate Wyatt, USDA research plant pathologist in the sugar beet and potato research unit. This is the sugar beet report, bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the sugar beet growing season.