 Good morning, everyone. This is Tom Peters. I'm calling from Fargo, North Dakota today. I'm at my NDSU office. I'd like to welcome you to the Grand Forks Grower Seminar. Yes, it is unfortunate. It's two years in a row now that we're doing this meeting remotely. But that's just the way it is. Before I get into some introductions, I'd like to acknowledge the Sugar Beet Research and Education Board. So our funding for the projects that we're going to discuss today is from the board representatives that represent the various factories. And ultimately, that's a lot of the people that are participating today. They're responsible for the solicitation of projects and some of the priorities that we have. So I'm very honored to acknowledge the Research and Education Board. Second, if we were to have lunch today, Crystal Beat seed and Sumitomo would have sponsored lunch. So unfortunately, we still had to pay for lunch. So we thank them for their generosity. So today is the first. On February 3rd, we'll be at Moorhead. And we're hoping that we'll be in person at the Holiday Convention Center for the Moorhead Grower Seminar. And then on February 17, we'll be at Grafton. This year, we're going to be at Frosty Fox. I was thinking of Frosty Lady, but that was a song from the 1960s. So we're going to be in Grafton at Frosty Fox. And we'll have our meeting there. And AMVAC will be our sponsor for that meeting. Before we get started, I want to indicate that the presentations today will be posted on the website at the end of the meeting season. So we use the website to post our various information, including the research reports that we write from our projects. And we post a lot of other information there, including presentations. So our website is SBREB or sugar beet research and education board.org. So you can find the materials at that site. Okay, I'd like to introduce the first topic. And that's going to be weed control and sugar beet. But you're going to see this time that I'm going to also speak a lot about crops growing in sequence with sugar beets. Because many times our most effective strategies are what we're doing in other crops. So you'll see a strong tone towards that. I'd like to acknowledge Alexa Leestead, who helps and does a good job of helping us to set our priorities through the summer. And Alexa is very active right now with helping us get the report summarized, which we'll get posted on the website. Speaking of the website, I was interested in a question recently and was curious about what we've had for our most important weed over years. And it started just to check on five year increments. And before I knew it, I was looking at every year all the way back from 75. And it's really interesting to me that we've done this survey 45 times. And 39 times we've picked pigweed. So of course, it wasn't water hemp until recently. But for many, many years, red-red pigweed was our most important troublesome weed. And I would add to it, it's not only troublesome, but it's very common, which is probably why we're selecting it. But the one I want to start with is Kosha. And that'll be the first topic that I'll go through. After we're done with Kosha, I'm going to go through a series of other, I call them chapters in the presentation. So I'm going to talk a little bit about water hemp, including crop safety and water hemp, our experiences with ultrablaser. And then I'd like to visit for a few minutes about herbicide carryover. I want to make sure everybody is thinking about the prospects of carryover on their farm. I have some words about common ragweed. And in addition, there are some labels that are in that section. And then finally, we'll end with an update on Palmer amaranth. So I want to start with Kosha. And as you know, I spend a lot of time driving. And I saw a lot of Kosha this year, or last season, unfortunately. And I have a concern that Kosha is going to be an important weed in 2022. So my presentation on Kosha is mainly to create awareness, but also to help you to start thinking about Kosha in the crop sequence. So why so much Kosha? Well, we saw it in the survey. We had stand challenges and where we didn't get good stands of wheat, we didn't get anything to grow, and Kosha came into those fields. And we know that Kosha makes seed one or two years, seed that's viable one or two years. So I'm really concerned about some of the sugar beet fields. And I'm wondering if this was your wheat field that's scheduled to be in sugar beet next year. I'm wondering if maybe we should consider an alternative, because unfortunately, as you're going to see in my presentation, the weak link in Kosha management is what we do in sugar beet, especially if you have glyphosate resistant Kosha. So what would a Kosha control strategy be? And I'm looking at the rotation here, and I want to focus on the soybean year, the wheat year, and then sugar beet coming up after the wheat year. So I want to introduce some products that maybe you haven't thought of before in soybean production, especially for controlling Kosha. So Valor is a PPO herbicide that's soil applied. And Valor can come alone, or it can be in mixtures with Zidua, which is called Fierce. And then sometimes Metribuzin is also either added to the tank mixture, or it is part of the pre-mix. And that would be called M-T-Z, Fierce M-T-Z. So the combination of these actives, triazine, acrylacetamide, and a PPO inhibitor are very, very effective for controlling Kosha and soybean. Second, don't forget about your herbicide trait. So especially the extend soybean trait and the use of dicamba, but also liberty as well. Both of those traits are very effective. And the herbicides that you use in that program are very effective Kosha products. I want to really call out dicamba for a minute and emphasize if you're going to use dicamba, you might consider pre-emergence, because in my opinion, in my work, that's the most effective use of dicamba to use it pre-emergence before Kosha germinates and emerges. And, you know, there's even out west, there's people that use Valor post-soybeans where they'll lay it on the surface as late as possible, and they won't do any tillage, and then they'll direct seed wheat into that program. And that's an effective Kosha control program. Jumping ahead to wheat, and here I want to emphasize fluoxapyr. So fluoxapyr is sold under the trade name Starane, and there's a lot of premixes, but those premixes contain fluoxapyr. And what I want to really emphasize here is you've got to be using at least one and a half ounces, at least one and a half ounces. And I would prefer that you spike in extra Starane to get to two ounces. That's going to be the most effective Kosha control in wheat. And as I mentioned, there's a lot of different mixes in wheat, and I would encourage you to check the wheat control guide if you want to look at some of those names. And I have a slide coming up as well. Now I mentioned the herbicide traits, and we have three of them. We have Roundup Ready soybeans. We have the Liberty trait, and we also have Enlist. And I will say that I would prefer that you not use any of these herbicides by themselves. So the Liberty data looks pretty good, but I'd want you to combine Liberty with something else. And we've seen really strong results with a Liberty PowerMax combination. So it's true, we do have some glyphosate resistance, but usually that's partial resistance. The combination of Liberty and Roundup is a strong program. Now the 2,4D, 2,4D choline, or 2,4D by itself, is not an effective Kosha product. So if you're going to use the Enlist trait, it's going to be really important in that case, what you mix with Enlist. And we would prefer that you use the Liberty trait on that one. I mentioned the wheat herbicide mixes, and here's some of the names. I want to call out Tallinor. Tallinor is a long residual program. It's a Group 27 herbicide. So that product, while it's very effective for controlling Kosha, isn't going to be very useful in fields that are rotated back to sugar beet the following year. But lots of different products there. And as I mentioned, please use the weed control guide to look at those products. And as I mentioned, you're probably going to need to spike in extra starane as well. So that takes us to sugar beet. And usually when I get into a jam in sugar beet, I call Tim Kenyon. Tim has a lot of experience with Kosha and sugar beets. Tim would say, and I know Tim's on the call, and Tim's saying use as much ethos you can pre-emergence. And that would be the starting point in sugar beets. In my data, I usually have very good results. But in a lot of the fields I'm studying in, I have a mixed population of both sensitive and Kosha, and sensitive and resistant Kosha. So that may not be the case on your farm. We're starting to investigate the utility of blazer for Kosha control. And I will tell you that our results are all over the board. And part of the reason is because you've got to spray very, very small Kosha with ultra blazer. I believe if the Kosha is bigger than three inches, you're wasting your time. And that's probably one of the reasons why I have control less than 50%. The Kosha was too big. The combination of ultra blazer and PowerMax looks pretty promising. And that'll be the basis for some of the work that we do in 2022. Now, the second product or the next, the second weed that I mentioned in the beginning was pigweed species. And I want to start with a question. So why is pigweed such a challenge for us? And I think there's several reasons for that. So one, sugar beet and amaranthus species are somewhat closely related. And as you know, it's very difficult to find herbicide tolerance when you're dealing with a weed that's closely related to the crop that we're trying to cultivate. Number two, and I mentioned this earlier, the pigweed species, and I'm talking about water hemp, now they are both common and troublesome weeds. So common, meaning they infest a lot of acres, and I'll show you a survey data shortly. And then the second part of it, they're difficult to control. And I know you already know that. From a biology standpoint, they germinate and emerge in response to light, moisture and tillage. So starting with moisture, when we get a rain event and then seeing the drying that occurs after rain, that is a trigger for water hemp germination and emergence. And that means water hemp can germinate and emerge anytime during the season. And we've seen it anytime from April through August. And that moisture event or the light response to moving soil, even with cultivation, is responsible for the season long germination emergence that we have. Towards the bottom, water hemp makes a lot of seed. And it depends on the situation and when water hemp germinated and emerge. But it's not uncommon to hear people mention half a million seeds per plant. If you have one of those plant making seeds, that means you're going to have to work really hard to clean it up, since water hemp is viable for up to six years. Now I've gotten a lot of support from the cooperatives on surveying. And the poll that we completed a few minutes ago has also been very helpful for us. And what I want to just focus on here is the year 2020. And I want to indicate that in the American crystal sugar area, three of our factories have greater than 75% of the acres where water hemp has been called the most troublesome weed. And even more interesting or maybe even alarming to me is in Drayton factory where I don't always see a lot of resistance in water hemp. We were measuring over 50% of the growers in Drayton indicating water hemp as their most important weed control problem. So I think the inevitable is happening. I think everybody is going to be experiencing water hemp probably sooner than later. And this survey data certainly supports that. Our water hemp control program is very complicated. So gone are the days of one or two or three glyphosate applications. Our water hemp control program is a program. It starts with pre-emergence application. We use a concept called lay-by application where we're using the chloroacetamide herbicides at two and six to eight leaves. So pre-emergence, early post and post are creating layers in soil for us. And it's like a barrier in the soil to try to stop water hemp from germinating and emerging. Now we know and it's inevitable that there are escapes. And we've investigated a number of different strategies for controlling scapes, including ultra blazer, liberty through the red ball hooded sprayer, inner row cultivation, the use of the weed zapper and even hand weeding. And I would say that any of those are fair game and they should be part of your strategy for managing water hemp. Now at this point I usually jump into the weed control data and I decided this time I was going to go a different direction. I wanted to focus on crop safety. So often I'll hear the comment that you know I'm using your lay-by program, but I don't think my beets are growing as fast as my neighbor's beets. And my neighbor is just using the PowerMax program. So what's going on? Is that lay-by program injuring beets? And we had a very, very nice experiment that we did this year across multiple locations. And it compared that that PowerMax application to the lay-by program. So the lay-by program meaning Esmetolachlor or in this case dual magnum applied at the 2 and the 6 to 8 leaf stage in combination with PowerMax and Ethol. And what we did with this experiment is we compared with a pre-emergence program and without the program. So the data is in the table. So first of all seven days and yes there is a difference. We did see more injury from the lay-by program seven and fourteen days. And it really didn't seem to matter if you used the pre-programmer or not, but it was different than the PowerMax control. However, and this is important, however at 21 days everything looked the same in our experiments. And this is an across location and analysis. What about yield and quality? So the same treatments you can see pre or no pre-emergence. And then we've tabled here root yield sucrose and recoverable sucrose. And this was a really nice data set. You can see how close these yields are. And what we saw is there was no statistical difference. No statistical difference with root yield sucrose or recoverable sucrose. So what I'm hoping here is that this data set gives you the confidence in using these programs. We know that we need to use them in some places because we have water hemp. And those of you that are just beginning, I'm hoping this data gives you the confidence that these programs aren't going to injure sugar beet. So let's move into the section 18. Our section 18 was approved on June 1st. The North Dakota label came out on June 7th, on June 2nd. And what it called for is a single application of ultrathlaser at 16 fluid ounces per acre. Could you mute please? Robert, could you mute please? Thank you. So that application was made with ground equipment. And it targeted water hemp that was less than four inches tall, but we would prefer water hemp less than two inches tall. And you're going to see why I say that in a few minutes. But the other key part of this is the sugar beet had to be greater than six leaves. That was very important. We discontinued our applications the 1st of August. And we also had a 45 day PHI. So the first thing that happened after we got the section 18 is it got hot. And it was interesting in five years of development, we never had temperatures as hot as they were the first week of June in 2021. So that was a very, very significant curveball for us. We tried to time those applications for late in the day. We were using the same rules as Betamex. And we were also very careful with how we used ultrathlaser. And I'll show you that going forward. But that stated, we did see a pretty high level of adoption with over 32,000 acres of ultrathlaser applied in sugar beet in both North Dakota and Minnesota. So how did we use it? The first thing that we did is we put out some grower demos and we call these one to five. And one was very simply ultrathlaser by itself. And then we built by adding surfactants. And on the other end was what we would call our fully loaded treatment, where we combined ultrathlaser with PowerMax with a nonionic surfactant and AMS. So we sometimes said going five was going nuclear, because we put everything in that we could. And I would say that these demos were very, very good for us, not only to get comfort level with the agriculturalists, but especially for growers in the neighborhood, they also got to see what the crop response would look like from using these treatments. And we took some notes as well. Very quickly, we had less injury from ultrathlaser by itself. And we had more injury when we combined a second herbicide. So one of the things that we learned about ultrathlaser is that it responds to surfactants. And they could either be in the tank, or they could be a formulated surfactant, for example, the ones in PowerMax. So this is a picture from a producer field. So it happens to be in central Minnesota. And it's one of the first fields that were sprayed after the section 18. So anyway, this was about two weeks after application. And you can still see some bronzing in these picture. That was very, very common. And quite frankly, if you didn't see bronzing, I would question if we did something wrong. Now looking at the pictures on the right, we did see some regrowth that occurred. And this is where the part about weed size is very important. And I would also call your attention to the picture on the bottom. It looked like on the trailing side where the sugar beet itself was maybe providing some cover. We didn't always get good coverage. And you can see that we had some weed escapes that occurred. But I would say regardless of the weed escapes, in many cases, the damage we did to water hemp slowed the water hemp down enough where it gave the crop an opportunity to have a competitive advantage. But certainly size, spray quality, water volume, the nozzles that we use are all pieces that we're going to have to spend some more time considering as we prepare for the 2022 section 18. A couple of other things. So 95% of the respondents who took the survey said the emergency exemption was beneficial. And 92% of them have encouraged us to do the section 18 again in 2022. And we're planning to do that. I've already mentioned the point about spray volume and size. We saw the bronzing. And what was interesting is sometimes bronzing last quite a while. And it seemed like soil moisture and how active the beets were growing had a lot to do with how quickly new leaves came out and how quickly the beets re-grew. And then finally, for doctors Kahn and Chanda, we had some growers that said, you know, where I use ultra blazer, I didn't have as much leaf spot. And we heard the opposite in other cases where you used ultra blazer, we had some more. So that might be something you might want to put into your own research next year because quite frankly, I hadn't really thought about that question when we did some of the preliminary research. Okay, I want to say a few things about herbicide carryover next. And I will say this, that the weed guide or our labels have guidance for crop rotations. And these guidance messages are targeted to average environmental conditions. But for conditions like what we had in 2021, I think it's safe to assume that in certain environments, we might see some carryover if you follow the guidance from the labels. And why is that? Well, I think this cartoon that was done by the University of Wisconsin does a good job of explaining it. And what it's showing is that for one reason or another, the herbicide just doesn't degrade as quickly in drought conditions as it does in average or wet conditions. So I want to get into why that is and what some of the precautions we might use are. So first of all, it might be because of the herbicide itself. So herbicides bind to soil. And it takes water for them to move into the soil solution. And in the soil solution is where we get microbial degradation. And I will tell you that microbes are the most common method by which herbicides are degraded. And of course, moisture is very, very important for that to occur. And I've said this in some of the other meetings, just because you get moisture to incorporate the herbicide into the soil doesn't mean you have enough moisture to keep the herbicide into the soil solution through the season. Number three, temperature is important. So the best conditions for microbial degradation are temperatures from 70 to 85 degrees. And I'm thinking about the rain events that we got in August and September. And I'm wondering if those conditions were warm enough for degradation to occur. I think it was because it was pretty warm yet in August and September. But at least the people that study this would say that the best case for degradation occurs is when there's moisture and then in the months of June, July and August. And then finally, the characteristics of soil are also important. And I would say that organic matter is the one that stands out the most. Degradation is fastest or most rapid in higher organic matter soils. This is a table and it features different families of herbicides. And then how we would expect the carryover risk to be for corn, soybean and sugar beet. And I'm going to go through this quickly because I'm starting to run out of time. The oxen herbicide, we're going to have a risk maybe in soybean. And I'm going to call out cloperalid stinger in the next slide or two. Certainly with the ALS inhibitors, we don't use them as much anymore. But we would have a concern with sugar beet following those. Likewise with the HPPD herbicides. And Lottis is one that's commonly used in the corn crop before sugar beet. So especially for the growers to the south, I'm worried about Lottis carryover occurring. The PPO inhibitors, they're all over the place. Some of them are long residual products. Some of them are shorter. I'm certainly concerned about those. And I want to have that conversation if you use those products. And finally, the photosynthetic inhibitors. So I want to use cloperalid as an example just to make my point. And I'm going to focus on soybean. So one thing I want to remind you about cloperalid is it's used in a lot of different crops now, small grains, corn, in addition to us using stinger and sugar beet. Stinger is degraded by microbes. So all of the factors that I mentioned in the previous slide apply to stinger degradation. The phenotype that you're going to see in soybean is different than what you would see from 2,4-D or dicamba. So you're going to see stack nodes. You're going to see a lot of plant to plant or area variation in fields. And then I'm going to show you a strapping phenotype in the next slide. So on the left, you're going to see that variation in the field that I think is indicative of stinger carry over to soybean and look at the close-up and all the variation. And then look at the phenotype that you see in, and I call this strapping, this is very different than the pictures that you've seen from enlist or 2,4-D. So the stinger phenotype is certainly unique. Just a couple of quick messages about common ragweed control with stinger. So the pots on the left, on the right, excuse me, were sprayed with three ounces and six ounces of stinger. And as you go from the front to the back, those are different populations from different places. And you can see some of those populations in the table on the left. And what I want to tell you is I have some concerns that stinger is not as effective on common ragweed as it used to be. And I want to encourage you that you need to talk to your agriculturalists and make sure you're using rates that are sufficient for common ragweed on your farm. So if we're talking about the current formulation of stinger, I would like to move you away from two ounces and to move you to three ounces as a starting point and maybe even consider four ounces under some certain situations. Okay. So in 2022, we're going to see a high load stinger formulation. So it's a five-pound gallon product. So what that's going to do, it's going to change our recommendations. It's going to change from two, three, or four ounces into these, I guess I'll call them fractions, 1.2 fluid ounces, 1.8, and 2.4. So I want you to make sure you know if you're using the old version of stinger or new stinger high load because it's going to matter for the rate that you choose. The other thing is the maximum now in one season is 6.4 fluid ounces as compared to what we used to use 10.7. And speaking of label changes, we're also going to see a new glyphosate formulation. So PowerMax is going to change from PowerMax to PowerMatch3 and what that means is the use rates change slightly. There's more glyphosate in the jug now and you can see that that's indicative of the of the rates. So the changes are minor, but they are nonetheless changes that are occurring. Now quickly, I know I'm almost out of time, Mohammed. I want to create awareness about Palmer Amaranth. So Palmer Amaranth is another pigweed. It makes a lot of seed. It competes with our crops and it certainly will compete with sugar beets. We're working on a publication that we're going to have out early this year. And as soon as we get that publication out, I'm going to put it on the website. But the real concern that we have is the number of families of herbicides where we've seen resistance. And again, this is with Palmer Amaranth, but this is really striking to me that many of the favorite families that we have have resistance. Quickly a map, and since we're at Grand Forks today, I'm going to focus on Minnesota, finding Palmer Amaranth in fields in two different places. One in Clay County and the second in Polk County. So in Clay County, they found it in chicken feed. Okay. So this was feed that someone purchased and they put the manure out in the field and they found Palmer Amaranth and traced it back to the feed that they used. In the case in Polk County, this was an egg trailer that called and said that they have Palmer Amaranth or something that looks like Palmer Amaranth. And it was traced back to screenings that were fed to animals and then the manure spread the fields. On the North Dakota side, we have issues as well with Palmer Amaranth. Very quickly, you can see them, the map with the various counties where we've detected Palmer Amaranth. And the last message I want to leave is if you see something that looks suspicious, call me. I don't care if it's day or night, I want to get that call because it's critical that we identify Palmer Amaranth before it gets established. We have a number of shop meetings coming up. These are going to be in Grand Forks District. We'll cover lots of things in the shop meetings. And then finally, there's a lot of people that contribute to my program. And I want to call out especially the growers that helped me to conduct my experiment. So thank you very much for your support. And that is my last slide. So Muhammad, maybe in the interest of time, I'll take questions on chat if you think that's a good idea. Yeah, it may be wise they can kind of put the questions in the chat screen. Is there anybody who would like to, let me just kind of, I think they can go ahead. If anybody has a question? And I've stopped sharing. So I think Ashok is next. Maybe you can put your talk up while I take any questions. It could be Mark next. Oh, Mark, sorry. I see a question here, but you are, are you ready, Tom, for this? Yeah, go ahead. The Travis Peterson is asking, would you expect a similar crop response slash yield result if you added singer to the tank mix with deal, etho, and glyphosate? That's a really, really important question. And the answer is yes, we do. We tend to see a little bit of a yield bump. And so one thing you might say is, well, why haven't you talked about adding ultra blazer into the lay by program? Well, the oil that we get from dual Magnum is too much. It puts us over the top, and we do get a yield loss. Now with Stinger, it's more subtle. For 2022, we are not going to allow that mixture. And we're going to continue to evaluate it. But it's all about the formulated oils that are part of the formulation, maybe related to that. It's the reason why we're using non ionic surfactant as well. Instead of crop oil or MSO or one of the others, those oil based products just make it hotter. And we're just not comfortable going there yet.