 Our first speaker up today is Dr. Mike Osley. He's an agronomist with North Dakota State University Carrington Research Extension Center. Dr. Mike Osley is the research agronomist. His research includes a broad range of topics including crop and livestock integration, cover crop, and herbicide interactions. Variety testing, weed management, and precision agriculture also round out his experience. I grew up near Northwood, North Dakota on a diversified crop and she's operation. And then also Dr. Audrey Kalile, she is our host of the meeting today. She is the plant pathologist here at the North Coast State University Welliston Research Extension Center. She obtained her BS in biology from the University of Minnesota in 2007 and worked in the commercial inoculant industry for three years prior to entering her graduate program. Audrey obtained her PhD in plant pathology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she studied nodulating bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi. Audrey currently leads an applied research program focused on management of plant disease in Durham, peas, lentils, chickpeas, and sugar beet, as well as nodulation and nitrogen fixation in chickpeas. Audrey currently co-leads the North Central IPM Center Pulse Crop Working Group and initiated and oversees the Growing Pulse Crops podcast series. Then Dr. Claire Keane, she's joining us online. She is an assistant professor at North Dakota State University. She earned her PhD in agronomy from Penn State University from 2016 to 2021. She was the extension specialist in cropping systems here at the Williston Research Extension Center. While in Williston, Claire worked with local producers answering questions about weed control, saline soil reclamation, organic transition, and alternative cropping and marketing practices. She also conducted research on chickpea flax intercropping, salt tolerant alfalfa varieties, and the new perennial small grain curns up. In July of 2021, Claire joined the NDSU Department of Plant Sciences in Bargo as an assistant professor of small grain and corn agronomy. So welcome all three of our speakers this morning. Okay, thanks. So I'm going to kind of kick things up here and really before we get into the the meat of the chickpea flax, I'm going to go over a little bit of an overview just of what we're saying when we're talking about intercropping and then just some of the basic concepts behind it. So for instance here when we're talking about chickpea flax, this here's a picture I took right off the combine. So you can see I think this is a combination that actually threshes out really well when they're combined together. They've got a few green foxtail in this particular sample, but overall other than that are really nice clean samples. So what we're talking about when we say intercropping, we mean we're going to plant and harvest two crops or more at the same time. So we're not talking about making extra passes across the field during the growing season, but we are usually talking about separating the harvested grain out after harvest in almost all cases. Okay, so one extra step usually after harvest, but hopefully no extra steps during the growing season compared to growing a single crop. And so this is generally something that can be used as a way to increase space efficiency. So I think particularly if somebody has a limited number of acres, this might be particularly appealing because you can make better use of each acre. And just a few things to note that a lot of times you might have a lower cost to production simply because there aren't as many options as you have with one crop. Because when you start talking about best management programs, oftentimes you don't have that many options. And so out of necessity, even if you plan on doing things cheaper because of some synergies you might see, you might actually be forced into lower cost to production as well. And then when we're doing this, we do really need to also try to pair our maturities of our crops to make the best use of the reducing number of operations in the field. Okay, so here's a few pictures from the Carrington Research Center of this particular combination of the chickpea flax. We don't have the ability to alternate rows on the equipment we have. So there's a lot of debates right off the bat on whether it's best to alternate rows or go same furl on everything, right? And I think there's some advantages, disadvantages to either. But first and foremost, what we need to determine is what our equipment capabilities are, right? And so our equipment is not capable of alternating rows. So we put everything in the same furl. And it's worked pretty well for us. We have our flax alone, our chickpeas alone. And then here you can see we have a pretty nice flax stand. And if you look down the rows, you'd be able to see all these little chickpea plants growing underneath very healthily. The one thing that I really noticed in particular in 2020, when we were doing this trial. So if you look down the rows, looking at trying to find all the chickpeas down here in the flax, we also saw, all right, what's the one big weakness on flax weed management, at least for us? So you can use sulfentryzone ahead of flax, which is excellent. But the one big weakness of sulfentryzone is pigweeds, right? And so we almost always have pigweeds in our flax crop. All right, that's not too bad right here. We use sulfentryzone in this combination. You can see a few pigweeds popping up here out of where the chickpeas are. Okay. But the thing I really noticed is when we had the chickpeas and the flax growing together, we actually saw a very noticeable reduction in the size and stature of the pigweeds that were growing in here as well. So definitely wanted to point that out as even though we do have maybe reduced options for herbicides when we're doing mixed combinations, we actually can see an added benefit of biological weed suppression, right? All right, so a few other notes here. So I just want to point out normally I do these presentations in a standard agronomy meeting. People aren't really necessarily looking to do something new. And so I really try to pair people's expectations down because I think there's a lot of potential with data cropping, but there are definitely some things we need to think about before I really encourage people to go down this route. So number one, this trade-off here can over yielding by having two crops growing together, make up for the cost of separating grain and the cost of potentially two different seed lots. Okay, so that's one of the first things we need to consider. Very likely we will be needing to desiccate more so than if we had each crop alone. That's not always the case, but I would say there's an increased chance that we're going to have to either desiccate or swap. Okay, we have less pest management options. Okay, and then some of the ones that are labeled for multiple crops in our systems are usually not quite as effective as the best ones you can use for either crop alone. But as I mentioned, sometimes as long as you can keep it clean in the beginning, usually the late season wheat control is better by the biological wheat suppression. And then it also takes time to perfect a new system. I definitely do not tell people to go in and plant 100 acres your first year. This is something where we'd say maybe try five or 10 acres, see what you think, see how it works for you, because this is not simplifying anything. By doing this we're trying to get more production, but we're making it more complicated and we need to figure some things out. It's going to look different from farm to farm. And then also there's other basic management things we need to figure out too such as do we have to add fertilizer if we have a legume partner in our mix. All right, so there's a lot of things that we're still trying to figure out. And a lot of things that you would need to figure out doing this on a farm as well. This one might have been helpful. Okay, so just to give you an example, one of the basic concepts I think in intercropping, it's not the only thing, right? But one of the major things that we probably will all talk about at some point today is this concept of over yielding, all right? And for those that need to calculate this on the farm, this is the basic concept. So let's say on a normal year you grow a POP crop and your yield is 50 bushels an acre, all right? And you have a canola crop and your yield is 2,000 pounds an acre. Okay, now you do an inter crop and just in this example here, let's say you plant two-thirds of your normal field PCDA, two-thirds of your normal canola rates and you might get 38 bushels instead of 50 and 1,400 pounds instead of 2,000, okay? So in this example, this is 100% of a normal P crop, 100% of a normal canola crop and down here we've got 76% of a normal P crop and 70% of a normal canola crop. So you add those together and in this example you would have a 46% increase in yield over either crop alone. Now that's pretty hot. This is, I'm just trying to use some easier numbers to work with here. We don't normally see almost a 50% yield increase, but 30% is what I would consider an achievable target, all right? And you don't always get there either, but I think that's something to shoot for. Okay, and another way to say this is, this is what we would call our LER, our land equivalency ratio. And in this example, this 50% increase, we would write that out as like a 1.46, 46% more yield than either crop on its own, okay? All right, so I just wanted to bring an example of this here as we go. So what does this mean? So this is an actual data set that we had. So we have this listed as our canola seeding rate first, and then our field pea seeding rate second. So I didn't list the yields here quite yet, but so we have 100% field pea yield, 100% canola yield, and this is what it looked like when we combined them. So when we added canola, we got a pretty big reduction in our field pea production, okay? But the field peas did not affect our canola. We saw a maximum of around 25% reduction in our canola yields, okay? So then you add those two together, and we saw anywhere from a 10% to 23% increase in total yield. Now, now for the downfall of LER, it is not everything, right? Profits is what's going to be the most attractive thing in the system, right? Okay, so what happens when we actually plug in the yield? So the average canola yield this year was actually 3,400 pounds. Fantastic canola. Our field peas were only like 35 bushes in here, all right? So we have our LER combined values here, 17%, 16%, 23% over yielding, you say, well, those look pretty close. But when you actually put the gross return, not net return, when you compute your gross return, we actually see a very big discrepancy. So up here on the upper right, this column labeled field pea. This would be like, if you were growing a field pea crop, what would happen when you add canola to it, all right? And so because the canola yield was really good, if we are a field pea grower adding canola, we're almost always coming out substantially ahead because our field pea was only okay and our canola was fantastic back here, all right? This column will be if you're a canola grower and you wanted to add field pea to that mixture, right? From that perspective. In this case, you're sometimes better off growing just canola, economically, all right? There are a few times here in this particular mixture, we came out $100 ahead by adding field peas to our canola because our canola yield was almost identical to what our monocrop canola yield was. But here, this 20% reduction in canola yield resulted in a big swing economically here because field peas did not make up that difference based on the price of each crop, okay? So LER is interesting. It gives us a good indicator what our system is doing, but economically, it might tell a little bit different story. So I just wanted to bring that up, okay? So back to chickpea flax. Why are we considering chickpea flax? And you notice the program, we really have two things we're talking about, field pea canola, chickpea flax, right? So why? All right, for chickpea flax, we have two very different plant types, right? We have chickpeas and flax and completely different plant families, so very different architectures, very different ways they use nutrients, water, different ways that they grow different architectures are using sunlight differently. And when you just start talking about system efficiencies, your cropping system, that's a very, very big plus in a way that is going to be able to utilize resources, okay? Doesn't always mean it's going to turn out in your favor, just at least theoretically this is a really good thing, all right? We've seen some increases in weed control. I think in some cases we're getting more yield per acre, and we're going to talk quite a little bit about Ascocytoblite coming out, because we've seen some really nice things from that perspective. So we're just kind of pausing mid-talk to briefly give an introduction to Ascocytoblite. If you're not your chickpea producer, you're familiar with it, but if chickpea's new to you, you're not. So we just wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page regarding this pathogen. If you've not grown chickpea, I think it can be a little bit of a bogeyman. You've heard about it. You know it's aggressive. It's kind of scary, but hopefully by the end of my slides you'll kind of have an idea if you have an integrated disease management plan. It's not so bad. Well, it's bad, but you need to manage it. All right, so it's a fungal pathogen. You're probably familiar with Ascocytoblite on lentils or Ascocytoblite on peas. Just know that this is a different pathogen. It's specific to chickpea. So if you're adding chickpea into a pea lentil rotation, it's not going to increase your foliar Ascocytoblite problems in lentil or pea. It does affect all plant parts. So you can see lesions here on the pods, the stem, and the leaf. It forms these kind of really diagnostic bullseye pattern on the plant. And that bullseye, those are little fungal structures, and I'll talk a little bit about that later. It can develop really quickly, but you need kind of wet, cool conditions. A year like this year where it was really hot and really dry does really reduce the amount of disease that you get. This is an example. This is a fungicide trial that I had under irrigation. This is no fungicides, and I'm inoculating it with chickpea residue that has been overwintered somewhere. So I'm doing everything I can to get a lot of disease because that's my job. And so if you're not controlling it, it can be quite aggressive and you can end up with complete yield loss. But with this pathogen, we want to talk about using intercropping and just know that's going to be one part of your management strategy if that's what you want to do. So let's talk about where this pathogen comes from, how it overwinters, and how it spreads within the crop because that's where the concept of intercropping is going to come in. So the red circle here, that's what's happening in season. You've got these lesions on your leaf, and we'll talk about how they got there to begin with, but all these little dots within that lesion, these are called the canidium, and they're full of spores called canidia. And what's important here is that this is a cycle. So these are going to germinate and release spores under wet humid conditions, and then rain and wind are going to spread them around. So the more rain you have, the more spread you get. And this can happen over and over and over and over again within the growing season. So the more lesions you have, the more canidia you have, and the more spread you have. So it's just important to keep that initial number of lesions low and get ahead of it. All right. So this is what it's going to be doing in season, across seasons. So you end up with these stem lesions, right? You're cutting it pretty low. So you're going to be removing some of the pathogen, but it's going out the back of the combine too. So that's going to be your inoculum source, along with the pathogen born on the seed. So if you have contaminated seed, as that seed germinates, it can affect seed germination, you're going to end up with some lesions probably earlier in the season than you would have otherwise. And again, then you start your cycles earlier, which you don't want. And then if that residue is there, that's going to be really the main provider of inoculum. So all of our management strategies always have to do with the pathogen biology. And that's why I want you to understand how this pathogen works within and across seasons. So our management strategies, I talk about IPM a lot, just know that's integrated past management. It just means throwing everything you can at the pathogen. So we'll start with our prevention, right? Seed testing, seed treatment, and crop rotation, and then spacing out where you're planting your chickpea fields, right? If your neighbor had chickpea last year, don't plant chickpea right next to your neighbor's chickpea field. That will provide an inoculum source. And same thing within your own land. There's documented literature that increased row spacing will prevent the spread of that pathogen in your crop. So potentially that's where the intercropping comes in. You're increasing your plant spacing, but then you don't have a bunch of bare dirt where you're not getting any yield. Variety selection, I'll talk a little bit about that. You need to be on top of the pathogen out there scouting for it. This is not like peas or lentils, right? The fungicides are going to start when you see the pathogen right away. You really do have to get ahead of it. And we'll talk about the fungicides as well. So this is a stacked approach and intercropping can definitely be a part of your approach. All right. So if you're new to chickpea, just know that you can get your seed tested. If you're running bin run seed, please test your seed. 0.3% is your threshold of whether you want to plant that or not. So don't plan chickpea without testing your seed. If you're buying chickpea seed, you should know what your asculculate of life levels are. You can send it to the state seed lab in North Dakota. You can send it to the regional pulse crops diagnostic lab at Montana State. Just know there's going to be a little bit of time to turn around. Seven to 10 days and no, we can't shorten that because that's how long it takes for the pathogen to grow. And then in terms of seed treatment, just make sure you're checking the label or checking our field disease management guide and making sure it says asculcite of life and also pithium. Pithium is also an important pathogen. So just make sure when you're getting your fungicides, you know those actives include control of these two pathogens and it should say. All right. So let's talk about variety resistance. I've color coded these. These are two variety trials I've done over the past two years. Obviously yield has not been optimal in either of those years and this year disease levels were really low, but even so we're able to distinguish the very susceptible chickpea varieties from the moderately susceptible chickpea varieties and you definitely want to go with the latter. So here we have we're comparing CDC Frontier, CDC Leader, CDC Orion, Sawyer, Royal and Sierra. There are some different seed sizes in there so make sure you know what seed seed side class you're in. Andy Crown, I don't have on this slide. It is in our annual report this year for the Williston REC, but it kind of fell in with the leaders in the frontiers. So this is percent severity of asculcite of life. The lines in blue kind of clustered together and the lines in red clustered together. That's just based on statistical analysis. You see disease severity is higher in the royal and the Sierra and that results in a significant yield loss even in a year where we have less disease. So making sure you're not growing a variety that is highly susceptible. But know that in the case of chickpea production in Australia they did have their disease resistance which was quite strong in their chickpea varieties there overcome. It took about 10 years but their variety resistance was overcome. And that's just because the pathogen wasn't being controlled in other ways as well. So that's why I keep harping on stacking your disease management approach because there's cases where we don't have that approach anymore in other countries and I don't want that to be where we end up. All right so fungicides. There's a lot of old literature out there that talks about using Strabiliarans for the control of asculcite of life. Resistance was detected kind of in the mid 2008-2007 in Canada. It's been documented here in North Dakota. So know that you cannot use Strabiliarans for control of asculcite of life in chickpea. They are not effective. The pathogen is resistant. So products where you've got that in the tank mix too. Just know you're not getting anything from that. So we're using the Fract3 and the Fract7. A lot of the products are combo products within of both of those groups. Just if you're applying more than one application in the season, make sure you're rotating those. And then Michael Bunch and I have been working on tank mixes with chlorothalonil. Tank mixing chlorothalon with Proline resulted in really, really excellent disease control right now. And the bonus of that chlorothalonil is that it's a multi-site mode of action and we're helping again control the pathogen overcoming these products so that we can have them available to us for a longer period of time. So far we don't have resistance to these, but it's really important that we take care of these products for rotating and we're stacking these other approaches like intercropping so we don't get a highly aggressive pathogen that we can't control. So first timing is going to vary based on your growing season. When do you see that disease occur in the field? Just keep an eye on it. You know, if you don't see it up until flowering, your earliest application could be at early flowering. And then the window is 10 to 14 days. Usually in my research trials, I'll do the end of that window the 14 days. And we have a pretty short growing season some years. I've combined chickpeas mid-August some years, but October other years so it can vary. But, you know, if you're on a mid-August harvest time frame, you know, you might end up in a really bad year two to three applications here in the Williston area. But usually I do around two, my disease trials I've done up to four. But again, that number of applications you're going to make is dependent on the level of disease in your field, what the weather looks like. You know, if you've got a big thunderstorm coming and you're at the end of your 14-day window, spray ahead of it, right? But if weather's hot and dry, maybe you can stretch it out a little bit. Just keep an eye on it. So it's just going to be really weather dependent. And again, dependent on the level of disease in your field, which you hopefully minimize through checking your seed, growing a resistant variety, good crop rotation, and intercropping. All right. So Mike's going to start us off with some of the data they've collected on the intercroppages. Yeah, thanks. All right. So here's some examples of what we've been able to work with with the chickpea flax. So Carrington, just to preface, it's not a chickpea growing region. It's never something I would tell somebody to go, yeah, you should be growing chickpeas out here. We do not have an environment for that. We do have a chickpea variety trial, but sometimes I don't know if five fungicide applications would be enough to optimally manage chickpea alone. So just throwing that out. So we do test chickpeas, but nobody really grows them in our region. Now, here, we did a trial over a couple of years. And Williston did this, this is the one here with Justin Jacobs. We're looking at different chickpea flax seeding rates. And whether we applied fungicide or no fungicide. Now, when we applied fungicide here, we were, this would be two times. So two fungicide applications versus none at all. All right. So there's some things here, again, different seeding rates. So out of here, we have the chickpea seeding rates on the left and then the flax seeding rates on the right. And as we go across our table, maybe we'll just start with the ascokita information, the second column in the yellow here. So with no fungicide and chickpeas alone, we had around 50% incidence in ascokita. This was measured mid-season. Actually, you have two columns. So measure twice in the middle of the season. Okay. Why don't we go to the green one? The green one, I think, is a little bit more interesting. Yes. So in this case, we had 60% incidence a little bit later here in early August. Okay. So now our chickpea alone with two fungicide applications, we're able to cut that ascokita incidence down by about half. So about half the amount of ascokita in our plots. All right. Now, no fungicide, but with different rates of flax mixed in with our chickpeas, look at these different incidences of ascokita. And you look at those numbers compared to chickpea alone with fungicide. So chickpea flax, no fungicide at the bottom, chickpea alone at the top, with fungicide. The numbers are very comparable. Right? Very comparable. All right. Now we look at the top fungicide with intercropping. So essentially, just what Audrey was talking about, layering. We have two mechanisms of ascokita control and reduce our ascokita substantially more. All right. So fungicide, in this case, fungicide and intercropping provided similar amounts of control. You do both. We had an even further reduction than either control method alone. So very fantastic news there. Now, we haven't been able to replicate quite that same level of efficiency since then. So this isn't something you should count on, but it's something that may be possible in some cases. Okay. So again, just to throw those numbers out here, a little more simplified. If you take the, I have the yields next to it as well, the final yields in both years here. So this year, we went from 60 down to roughly 30 with these two control methods, intercropping and fungicide. And then we reduced it even further with both. Now, in 2020, we saw again, not quite as much ascokita with our chickpea alone with no fungicide. All right. Once again, we saw a pretty similar amount of reduction, whether we were intercropping or just using fungicides and chickpeas. Okay. But the difference is when we did both fungicide and intercropping, we didn't see that further step down. We saw maybe a slight reduction in ascokita with both, but it wasn't nearly as pronounced as the year before. All right. Now, again, that's not the end of the story here. All right. This year, our plex did really well. Our chickpeas didn't do so well. And so with a very aggressive plex crop and conditions only, you know, not very great for chickpeas, we had huge yield reductions here in our chickpeas. So even though we had these amazing drop downs in ascokita control, this year, this might have been financially feasible. But most of the time, plex prices were more normal. This would probably be a bad thing for your system. Right. All right. 2020, we had much better chickpea yields and plex yields were quite about lower. So we still saw a fair amount of reduction in our chickpea yield, not quite as much. So depending on the prices, again, we'll see. Now, the one thing we learned is that when we were doing these trials, we didn't really didn't have low enough plex rates. Most of the time, the plex was just too competitive with the chickpeas. And we saw really well, I consider a lot of times unacceptable chickpea loss, because most of the time, that's going to be the economic driver. Right. All right. Here's a little bit more balanced year where both chickpeas did really well and the plex did actually quite well as well. So it wasn't always one way or the other. In 2018, we had a year where we had kind of both. But nonetheless, because the plex, we really weren't testing low enough plex rates in this year either. And we still saw most likely unacceptable yield loss, because if you could market over 3,000 pounds of chickpea when you're going on its own, odds are you're going to be pretty happy with that. So once again, very good for us with kaito blights. But I think we need to be really careful, at least in Carrington area with the rate of plex that we're using. So to summarize what we've been going through here. So in Carrington, without any control measures, we might, we've been expecting 50 to 60% incidents of acycaita. Some years is higher than that. This is what the medium resistor that one of the less susceptible varieties. So we have a little bit of genetic resistance built in there already too. So 50 to 60% incidents of infection. We were able to cut that down by about half to review these practices or down to about 75% reduction by stocking and best case scenario. Okay. All right. And I think this was specific to 2019. Our monocrop chickpea had an 80% reduction in yield without our fungicide. When we were intercropping our chickpea, we were able to gain 30% back without applying any other fungicides. So there's definitely an intrinsic value to having that intercrop going there with your chickpeas. So the one thing I didn't show here, because it's a pretty boring graph, but we actually saw 100% control of white mold in the one year that we had a big white mold outbreak in our chickpeas. So we had any monoplex in the plot. We had zero white mold. If we had just chickpeas, we had substantial white mold. Okay. So it's a pretty boring graph. But and then of course my biggest takeaway is that I think in our area, 10 pounds an acre of plex is the most I would consider ever putting in the system. Okay. Maybe we need to go even less than that. And I think we turn it over to Claire at this point. All right. All right. Hello, everybody. Claire Keane. And sorry that I'm not there in person. Hopefully some of you recognize me from my time out in Williston. I've been here in Fargo the last few months and still adjusting to the new job, but very happy to be able to share with you some data from Williston. Okay. So I'm going to talk about two trials that I conducted in 2018 and 2020 at the Williston Research Extension Center dry land farm. So these were not done under irrigation. And I think that was a nice transition from Mike in those seeding rates of flax because what was I was interested, you know, oh gosh, three years ago now, when starting to do this is, you know, could I identify a flax seeding rate that reduced the Asco chyta blight without reducing chickpea yield. So that was my goal. In both years, I use CDC Orion chickpea, which is a Kabooley type, and then CDC glass flax. And the treatments that I used, I guess, can you see the mouse if I move it on the screen? Yep, you're good. Okay, great. So I had my treatments ranging from monocrop chickpea to chickpea with five pounds of flax, 10, 15, 20, 40 pounds of flax, and then a monocrop flax of 40 pounds per acre is a check. In percent, Mike had presented his data in terms of a percent of that full seeding rate. So five pounds of flax compared to 40 pounds is 12.5%. So this is 12.5% to the monocrop, 25%, 37.5%, 50% and 100%. So just to give you that continuity there. So I did have some of these lower rates included in my trials. I also wanted to point out planting configurations and this will have implications when we get into the yield. But I did use different planters in the two years of these studies. So in 2018, we used an old single row planter with 10 inch spacing. And on that single row planter, there's a different funnel, essentially for each row. And so I would dump, you know, packed of flax, packed of chickpea, packed of flax, packed of chickpea in the inner crop plots or just all chickpea or flax envelopes for the monocrops. So what that ended up looking like was a four row plot of chickpea with monocrop. As I mentioned, flax, chickpea flax with the inner crop plot, and then monocrop flax, all flax. And that seeding rate of the monocrop chickpea was about 120 pounds per acre. I was targeting that four plants per foot of row. So seeding it at about four to five seeds per foot. I didn't, something that kind of dawned on me like after I planted the trial, this did result in half as many chickpea plants present in the inner crop plots as monocrop, because I didn't double that seeding rate of chickpea in the inner crop. So functionally, the seeding rate in my 2018 trial was 120 pounds per acre of chickpea in the monocrop, but then 60 pounds per acre of chickpea with those different rates of flax in the inner crop, and then the monocrop at 40 pounds. And so just a picture of that can see flax, chickpea, flax, chickpea, so that four row plot and alternating rows. In 2020, we used a cone seeder. And that cone seeder, like we use in many of our variety trials, is designed to be able to do, you know, different varieties of the same crop plot to plot. And so it's a six row seeder with eight inch spacing. So looking at the monocrop flax, that's what normally gets planted out of this planter is you have your seeding rate, and you just put it down the cone seeder and away you go. But to do the chickpea, we actually put it in the fertilizer box. So the chickpea was coming out of the banded fertilizer tubes. And so my monocrop chickpea plots were three rows of chickpea at a 15 inch spacing. The inner crops, that chickpea was still coming out in that 15 inch spacing, but then the eight inch spacing of the flax rows on top of it. And then again, that monocrop flax was six rows of flax at an eight inch spacing. The monocrop chickpea rate was 120 pounds per acre again. But because of this different planter configuration, I was able to keep the chickpea seeding rate consistent between the monocrop and the inner crops in 2020. And again, you know, when we get to yield, I think there's something interesting there to mention with that. So 2020, a picture of those plots. There's an outer row of flax, a row of chickpea, two rows of flax between the next row of chickpea, again two rows of flax, chickpea, and then an outer row of flax. So different configurations between 2018 and 2020. So for effects on asco chytoblite, in 2018, again, just remembering that there were half as many chickpea plants in the inner crops as the monocrop. I looked at incidents as the number of chickpea plants out of 10 with asco chytoblite lesions present. So just presence or absence from 10 plants randomly selected in the plot. And then severity used a zero to 10 scale. Sorry about that. With no lesions being zero and a rating of 10, meaning many lesions present throughout the canopy, including on upper leaves and pods. And so in 2018, there were significant differences in asco chytoblite incidents at the July 17 sampling date where monocrop chickpea had higher incidents than intercropping with chickpea and flax. But noting that even though it was statistically similar, that monocrop chickpea incidents of asco chytoblite was higher than all of the intercrop combinations. And on July 31, the severity rating, again, with severity being on a zero to 10 scale, that monocrop chickpea plot was rated at 7.3, which was significantly different from any of the intercrop rates of 10, 15, 20 and 40 pounds of flax. And then that five pounds of flax being similar to both the monocrop and those higher rates of flax. And so there wasn't, you know, obviously a statistical difference at every sampling date. But I do note that, you know, even with severity and incidents of July 17 and 31, again, that trend of the monocrop chickpea having the highest rating, both in terms of severity and incidents is there. And now 2018 was a pretty wet year for us out at the Williston REC. We had approximately 9.2 inches of rain between May and August, so certainly one of the better rainfall years we've had in the last five. And then we did spray the whole trial with fungicide twice. So on June 25th and July 12th. So all of these treatments did have two applications of full-air fungicides. Now in 2020, so again, just reminding you that there's the same density of chickpea plants in the monocrop and the intercrop in this year. I also changed my scales with some input from plant pathologists. Thank you, Audrey. Number of chickpea plants out of 20 with Asco chytolesia present. So again, that present substance and then the severity of a 1 to 9 scale. I learned that that's a more typical scale in plant pathology. So we went with that. So one meaning no lesions and nine again, many lesions present throughout the canopy and then also with Wiltinger dead plants present. And so in 2020, we did these ratings July 1, July 9, July 24. And the only time we saw a statistically significant difference was July 24, where on the incidence, 15, approximately 15 out of 20 chickpea plants checked, had Asco chytolesia present, which was different from with 10 pounds of flax, roughly 11 and 11 plants with that 20 pounds of flax. So not a lot of statistical differences in 2020. However, again, that trend. So on July 1 of more plants in the monocrop chickpea plots, having Asco chytolesia present, then the inner crop plots, that was, that was true at July 1 and July 9. And then severity, these severity ratings just were not very high in 2020, which makes sense in light of the drought that we had. So still that trend of the monocrop chickpea having a more, you know, more severe nature of that infestation. But again, relative to 2018, these are pretty low numbers. I'll just go back quick. You know, so reminder in 2018, looking at a 10 plants, by the end of July, even with two fungicide applications, I was seeing those monocrop plots, you know, 10 out of 10 plants having Asco chytol present. But then you go to 2020 and out of 20 plants, you know, 15 out of 20 in the monocrop, and down around, you know, 11 out of 20 plants in the higher rates of flax in our crops. So very different years in terms of moisture. But I think that that still shows that one in a dry year, you can still have Asco chytol, but then to intercropping, while it may not provide as high a degree of control, is in a wetter year, it's still doing something. And again, just pointing out, so in 2020, the growing season rainfall was approximately 4.3 inches, so half of what it was in 2018. And again, this whole trial did receive fungicide three times in 2020. It's something Mike mentioned in his preface that intercropping might increase the need for desiccation. And I do think that's true, especially with the pea canola combination that'll get talked about later. But just kind of an interesting side note in my conversations with Lena Shaw and some other growers in Canada, you know, they had noticed that they felt that intercropping chickpea and flax generally provided a benefit to chickpea dry down, that that chickpea, or sorry, having the flax with the chickpea just encouraged the chickpea to shut down late summer like you want it to and start drying down rather than staying green and continuing to flower. And so I did dry down ratings each year. And so in 2018, went out about every 10 days and rated the plots for the percent of chickpea plants with mature color. And there were significant differences at each of those dates. Again, this was in a pretty wet year. And then in 2020, that dry down happened with the drought, certainly much more quickly. But again, the trend of those intercropped plots drying down the chickpea faster really held true. And I feel like to me, an interesting observation in 2018, again, a pretty wet growing season, you know, you start to see the spread really widen, you know, functionally, the difference between 0% of your chickpea plants with mature color on August 2nd. And hope I keep losing my cursor. There we go. And 5% doesn't mean anything, right? And then the difference between 15% and 30% that spread started to widen. But then by the time we get to August 24th, seeing pure chickpea and chickpea with five pounds of flax down at the 60, 65% mature color, but the chickpea with 20 and 40 pounds up at 80%, that's a pretty big difference. That might be close to that tipping point of if you were going to go out and desiccate to do that and be able to harvest those chickpeas potentially a week or two earlier than you otherwise might have, I think is really important. And then in 2020, just with that very dry summer, you know, that chickpea was dragged down much more quickly, August 4th, we were already at 30% mature color in the monocrop compared to about 56% with the 40 pounds of flax. So just that intercropping does seem to push that chickpea dry down more quickly. And again, you know, maybe at the production scale, I'd say we don't have good data on that yet. But if this is a way that a grower could get into that field earlier to harvest those chickpeas, prevent it from getting rained on next week or two weeks from now, I think that's where there's some real potential with this. For some photos, so these are from August 14th of 2018. So monocrop chickpea here on the left. And I'll just point out, so there's still quite a few, you know, dark green, healthy leaves doing doing photosynthesis. And if you see a dead plant or, you know, what you might think of as mature color in that monocrop plant, I would say in nine out of 10 cases, those plants aren't mature color because they naturally senesced. It's because Ascotida killed them, you know, a week or more ago. And so that's what you're seeing in the monocrop chickpea plants when you see brown with the 10 pounds of flax. So those chickpea rows are here and here. And then chickpea with 40 pounds of flax on the far right. Those chickpea plants just have many fewer lush green leaves. They're much more yellow. And so that's what I was capturing with those ratings on the earlier slide. From 2020, again, with a drought year, August 4th. So chickpea is definitely drying down more quickly in 2020 than they did in 2018. But again, just looking at those monocrop chickpea rows, more green present there with five pounds of flax, those chickpea rows are starting to get lost in the yellow flax. And then at that 20 pound rate of flax, I'd say the chickpea leaves are getting pretty hard to pick out from the flax stems as they're all turning yellow pretty quickly. This is a photo taken at harvest of 2018. So again, these are small plots. I did not need to desiccate in either 2018 or 2020 to be able to harvest these. So after that last set of ratings, we waited another five days or so. And went out and with the small plot combine, it worked. There really wasn't much green material. It was pretty clean in terms of weeds. We did use Spartan ahead of planting. And that did a nice job in these fields. So weeds, certainly if you have green weeds out there, that could be an issue that needs desiccation. And I'd say it's certainly too soon to say whether you can get away without desiccation in the system. But there might be years in which that's possible. But again, something to play with at a field scale if you're a grower considering this. Here's a shot of my intercrop straight out of the combine. To me, I mean, it did look pretty good. Certainly we had a lot of pieces of chickpea pods and straw, but those separated out very easily with the clipper cleaners that we have at the WRAC. So now in terms of yields. So in 2018, I did not see overyielding in any year. So just to put that out there. But I do think there were some interesting things happening with with both the chickpeas and the flax in these different yields. So in 2018, the monocrop chickpea did yield the most, the most chickpea of all the treatments, but then certainly the most total poundage of grain coming out of the field. So the different letters on these light beige bars indicate statistical differences in the chickpea yield. So monocrop chickpea, 5, 10 and 15 pounds of flax. It did step down from the monocrop chickpea. We went from about 1700 pounds per acre down to about 1100 pounds. But that was statistically similar to the monocrop. But then also the lower yields of chickpea when it was intercropped with 20 and 40 pounds of flax. And so down there it was roughly 850 and 620 pounds of chickpea at these higher intercrops. And we did see the flax yield stay kind of similar at those lower rates of intercropping, but then step up at the higher seeding rates. And something again just to remind you about like that planting configuration. I didn't have plant stand counts, unfortunately. So I don't know the mechanism at play here, but I do think it's interesting that even though we had half as many chickpea plants in these intercrops, because there were just two rows of chickpea compared to four rows over here, we were getting about two thirds of the chickpea yield as the monocrop. So we were getting two thirds the yield with half the seeding rate. So had I had the foresight back in 2018 when I was planning this to put in the other set of plots with the same number of chickpea plants in those two rows, I'm really curious to know what that would have done. But I think that shows maybe there's some potential for over-yielding at the plant level potentially, maybe with that lower density of chickpea there. They responded by getting bigger, producing more pods, but I didn't collect that data, so I'm not sure. In 2020, so looking at 2020, definitely saw the potential for flax to be much more competitive in a dry year than a wet year. I think that's the take home of 2020. So overall our yields were lower, the monocrop chickpea yielded just a little bit over a thousand pounds per acre. And then it did step down as the flax seeding rate increased. So even five pounds per acre of flax did decrease it to about 700 pounds of chickpea. And so there I think the take home message is if we're in a real dry situation, even a very low rate of flax can reduce chickpea yield. But then just looking at maybe the bright side and certainly a bright side in a year where flax is worth $30 at Bushel, the flax did really, really well. I had to kind of do a double take when I was thinking about it, but so our monocrop flax between 2018 and 2020, 780 pounds in a year with nine inches of rain, or sorry, about 800 pounds per acre in a monocrop flax with nine inches of rain in the growing season compared to 780 pounds. So very, very comparable. And excuse me, and then that flax again just showing its drought hardiness really stepping up and yield as its seeding rate was increased. And I just noted that between the chickpea intercropped with flax at the 40 pound rate between 2018 and 2020 really just kind of flip flopped, which I thought was interesting. So okay, and so I'll wrap it up here. So for the optimal seeding rate of flax, that question, you know, did we find something that can reduce asco chytoblite, but then also maintain chickpea yield? I think that 10 to 15 pounds of flax appears to be kind of that sweet spot to balance reducing asco chytoblite pressure with maintaining chickpea yield. However, in a dry year, that could certainly reduce the chickpea yield. Five pounds of flax wasn't enough to consistently reduce asco chytoblite while 20 pounds did consistently reduce chickpea yield compared to the monocrop. The rate of chickpea dry down, if that's something you're interested in, did seem to be a little bit more consistent, the 15 pound rate of flax and higher. But we do need growers to test if this holds true at a production scale. And then finally, you know, again, flax is much more competitive with chickpea in a dry year. So just something certainly in the western part of the state or eastern Montana, we need to keep in mind if that's what the growing season is like. So with that, we will take any questions you have. Myself, Mike and Audrey are all available for your questions. Well, Claire, I'll pick it up with a question of my own, if you don't mind. So if I'm interpreting this correctly, in the 2018 trials, the row spacing between chickpea was all the same, you know, across your, your intercrop and monocrop. But in, but in 2020, your, your row spacing in your monocrop, what was greater, right? You have, you have an increased row spacing. Do you think that that could have played a role in the reduction in disease you saw in the less that the reduced difference you saw, essentially between that monocrop and the intercrop, given that you did have a wide row spacing in your monocrop chickpea? Right. So there were 15 inches between chickpea rows in 2020, whereas there's only 10 inches between rows in 2018. But then also I'd say two confounding factors, two rows of flax between those two rows of chickpea in 2020 versus only one row of flax between the rows of chickpea in 2018. And then throw on top of it just a much hotter and drier growing season. So I think back to your question, yes, that wider row spacing could, could be one of the factors why just overall severity incidents, severity and incidence ratings were less in 2020 than 2018. You know, but, but I guess I don't, I don't have a real confidence in whether I would attribute the overall lower ratings to that different planting configuration or just to that much drier growing growing season. Yeah, I'm just thinking maybe you would have seen a bigger difference between the treatments in 2020 if you've been on like a eight inch row spacing for the monocrop compared to what goes chickpea flax, chickpea flax in eight inches. Sure. Either way you saw the difference. It's interesting. Okay. So we've got a question looks like in the chat. Could you talk about any potential benefits or disadvantages to planting and alternating rows versus planting both crops together in the same row? I did, I never even want to take that. I have to be you guys. And I think later on when a shot has some information that'll help with that too, but I think Claire you had some, you had a more of a comparison for this, didn't you? I had tried. So it ended up being a trial that didn't work out in 2018. I also tried planting some long strips of chickpea and flax in either same rows or alternating rows. Actually right next door to those plots that you saw pictures of to with the goal of tracking asco chido over the season and seeing if the mixed row versus the alternating rows made a difference. And unfortunately we planted that. Might have been a week to 10 days later. I don't really recall. But we had, let's see 2018. Yeah, 2018 my planting conditions were really ideal. That single row planter is not very heavy and doesn't really have good depth control. So when we planted the the trial that you saw data from, it all went in the ground nicely and germinated nicely and we had good stands. But those mixed row versus alternating rows that we planted next door going just a week or 10 days later, the surface had dried out enough that the chickpea just didn't get deep enough. And so there was a very poor chickpea stand there. And I ended up not not collecting data on it. I think sorry for rambling, but I think I'll probably defer to Elena who has better data on that just to my limited observation in 2018. I don't recall is pronounced differences in Asco chido between say monocropped chickpea and the intercropped or sorry monocropped chickpea versus chickpea and flax either in the same row or alternating row in those strips that I put out. But my issue there is there were just very few chickpea plants in in both places. So I don't really have a good read on that. My sense is that alternating rows would have an advantage for Asco chido control. Again, knowing that that row spacing and you know if we're yeah that row spacing can have an impact on Asco chido incidents in monocropped chickpea than I would expect if you can have essentially an architecture where you're putting lots of barriers between chickpea plants. So in the case of my 2020 trial where you have row of chickpea two rows of flax row of chickpea two rows of flax certainly you know in that same chickpea row there's there's contact between leaves but you're putting barriers there side to side that would help limit physical spread. But I'll certainly defer to Elena as I think she's played with that more than I have. And I will say you know it is a trade-off because you know again when you're doing these intercropped you're usually picking two crops that have very different seed sizes and so you know of course the big advantage of alternating is that you can set each row to plant the crop exactly where it likes to be planted. When you do a mixed row you have to do something in between in most cases and so you're usually planting your small seeded crop deeper than you normally plant your big seeded crop shallower than you normally plant. So the conditions have to be a little more sensitive when you're doing the mixed row. Yeah and Mike there's another question in the chat that's a good follow-up to that question for Mike since you seeded in the same row did you go at the full chickpea seeding depth or shallow up somewhere in between? So yeah when we do our chickpea flax I think we usually target about an inch and a quarter and then when we do our field peat canola we usually put it right around an inch or maybe just slightly more. And you know usually we've found that the smaller seeded crop comes up easier if it's in the mixed row because you know it does have that large seeded crop to help it get out of the ground. So you do have some synergy there but you know if you're worried about the moisture conditions though you know and you have different things to plant I would definitely be planting your mixed row inner crop at the right timing for what your soil moisture is. I would say that much at least.