 Hi, I'm Joe Eichle, the Extension Weed Specialist with North Dakota State University. I decided for the Castleton Field Day we're standing in a field in Cass County that this was a field that did not have a crop in it last year. The weeds went to seed and again we did not get a crop planted this year. So not too dissimilar from what happened in some areas of the southeast part of the state last year and again this year. So what you can see behind me, we do have some weeds that are dying and then some that are still green and so the weeds that we have in this field, a good mix of weeds but all the green weeds we still have common ragweed and water hemp that are glyphosate resistant in this field. This is kind of a worst case situation if we were to manage a prevent plant situation in the field here. Did nothing to it last year except for spray once, weeds went to seed, have sprayed once this year and we're controlling most of the weeds except for the glyphosate resistant weeds which based on the green you can see behind me we still have a pretty hefty population of those weeds that we would have to deal with. So that's one of the things we've talked about this year is dealing with weeds and prevent plant. As you can see if we have resistance spraying one herbicide alone does not going to do the weed control job that we need to do. This is traditionally a conventionally tilled field so if it ever dries up we would come out here and disc this field under and control the weeds before they go to seed. Otherwise we have a little bit more limited herbicide options some of these weeds such as lambs quarters and some of the water hemp are going to seed so we definitely want to get this managed as soon as possible through mowing some cultivation or really aggressive herbicide program that would be effective on those weeds. Some of the other topics that we've dealt with in 2020 to date I already mentioned water hemp. Water hemp is emerged very early this year compared to historically what we've seen for water hemp emergence across the valley. So on this site we've actually found water hemp that emerged on May 1st and really it was probably up a day or two before then. So typically we talk about May 15 as the beginning of the water hemp emergence window in this part of North Dakota it was May 1st this year and we did have a very cool spring, cool and wet spring as well. So what we think happened is a lot of our fields across the valley were not tilled last fall. We had a lot of water hemp seed production in 2019 because of the wet conditions which is conducive for water hemp growth and seed production and so what happened is we had a lot of water hemp seed on the soil surface. We did get a couple of days in the 70 degree temperature range at the end of April and that sun beating down the black dirt probably got that part, that germination zone for water hemp seed on the surface warm enough to trigger germination and the moisture was there. Another possibility is we just have a lot more people actively looking for water hemp so possibly just more scouts in the field looking for water hemp but you know this is a weed we typically think mid-May the battle begins, it began early May this year and we've been fighting this weed so far to this point in the summer multiple flushes and now we're still two months to go of water hemp that can germinate and emerge and become a problem throughout the year. If we have drowned out areas last night we had a lot of heavy rains in some areas and so we had that happen last year and some of those areas did have water hemp go to seed and we could see water hemp germination once the flood waters recede again in the coming days or weeks. The water hemp is one that is growing in its range of where we're finding it we'll have to fight it into the future. Common ragweed is also becoming more prevalent so here again we have glyphosate resistant common ragweed in this field getting more questions about ragweed as well because of resistance to glyphosate and our group 2 herbicides. One good thing with ragweed our group 4 herbicides like 2,4-D and dicamba are very effective stinger as well if you're in sugar beets for instance so group 4 herbicides very effective on common ragweed but when we rely on glyphosate or group 2 chemistry that's when we're starting to run into a lot of issues with ragweed control. The other thing I'll just kind of mention is we are on July 1st now so we're past our cutoff date for spraying dicamba and extend soybeans for this year. What that means moving forward the federal registrations are up at the end of this year we do think these products will get re-registered moving forward but it's really going to be until fall will we really know what that looks like as far as use patterns whether it's still used as we've used it in the past couple years pre-emergence only at this point we really don't know been getting questions on that but we'll have to see what the re-registration process looks like moving forward but I'd expect that we probably will have those products again in some way shape or form in 2021 and moving forward so that's kind of a recap of the season to date some of the issues we've been fighting as always you can call my office send me an email for those you have my cell phone give that a call as well for questions moving forward and hopefully when we're back on field days in 2021 we'll be able to see everybody in person again.