 And I'm going to work on or present information on root maggot management, obviously, but also springtails because we're kind of in a transition area. Growers in the Grand Forks area, certainly some do have some pretty significant springtail problems from time to time. So I'll cover that. If there's time at the end, I can answer a few questions about grasshopper management. I can throw a couple of slides up as well if there's time again. So we'll start off with springtails. I've showed a lot of this information before, but they're very tiny, almost microorganisms. They damage the plant in the early part of the growing season using chewing mouth parts. And so it's mainly an early season problem and depending on the year, what the spring weather is like, they can cause some pretty substantial yield losses. They're kind of unusual in that they live their entire life cycle underground, at least these springtails do. There are other springtails that live above ground. They produce multiple generations per year. So from one year to the next or even within the growing season, we can't really put a nail on exactly where we're at in their life cycle, because there's always a mix and a lot of overlap. They do quite well in cool wet springs, and it's not necessarily that they thrive in cool wet springs, but their impact on the plant can be quite substantial during those kind of conditions, under those kind of conditions, because if it's cool and wet, the plants aren't going to develop very quickly. And so they are that sort of sets the stage for the plants being very vulnerable to attack by springtails. And we've seen trends where high organic matter soils and the heavier soils tend to support springtails quite well. This is a summary slide that I've showed you some groups before. Just a it's a from a combined analysis I did, and I just wanted to show the kind of the dollars and cents of it. This is from a multi year trial that we did on a couple of rates of counter and then the three registered seed treatment insecticides. And you can kind of the data sort of speaks speak for themselves other than I want to the asterisks there want to point out that it's from the American crystal payment schedule during the years of that study. And then the other thing I want to point out is this is gross revenue over the gain or a gain in revenue over the untreated check. So it's not a true gross revenue in that we're not incorporating treatment costs because those are quite variable from year to year. So the two rates of counter shook out at the at the top, but the seed treatments as you can see easily paid for themselves. So this is a bit of a gear shift. I guess. So we've done a lot of trials in the river valley. But in recent years, the growers in the on the Montana North Dakota border have had issues with springtail control. And we've determined actually done some a lot of lab work to determine that they have different species complex of springtails out there. But I think this actually rolls nicely into what we're trying to do here. This is data that my project gathered from some trials out there. The last couple of years, actually, I'll just show you that the 2020 data. But it's sort of set it provides kind of a worst case scenario for springtail management, I believe anyway, because they've got some pretty tough critters out there. So this first slide, there's a lot of treatments there, but they sort of go in order. So from left to right, we've got three rates of counter from the highest to the lowest recommended rate. And then next we've got a poncho beta treated seed with mydac T banded. And then we have mydac T banded alone. And then we have mydac as a dribble in furrow DIF indicates dribble in furrow with microtubes. We have the same with with Mustang. Again, that's on poncho beta treated seed to application placement methods. And then we've got Mustang alone. Again, T banded or dribble in furrow but not on treated seed. And we have poncho beta alone cruiser and then our untreated control. This is recoverable sucrose per acre. We had very good yields there. And we got a pretty good response from counter as well as the poncho beta treated seed when we used mydac as well. But and these letters just to kind of give you sort of a refresher on the statistics here. Anytime any bar any treatment within here has at least any two treatments share at least one letter, they only have to have one letter in common to be not statistically different from each other. So everything in the yellow ovals or circles. All of those are not statistically different from each other. So those were better performing treatments. And then we took this to we used to actually use their payment schedule then as well. And this is gross revenue not including application costs. But we also didn't separate out the untreated check. So these are raw, just revenue out of these treatments. And and they followed very similar patterns. So the quality wasn't really, there wasn't anything sticking out that any of these treatments was causing a negative impact on quality. So just kind of take homes on springtail management. I think most growers says as the survey indicated, we're fairly happy with their springtail management. But a few did mention that they maybe are not entirely satisfied. What we've, you can see it's a very serious economic pest. I guess I recommend I wouldn't go lower than six pounds of product per acre if you're using counter. If you're using Mustang or my deck, that will likely perform similar. But we've have gotten reports of less than consistent results from Mustang max. We've gotten our best performance out of Mustang max when we've applied it with pressurized nozzles as a T band into the furrow. But I know growers are not too excited about having maintaining nozzles on their larger planters. If you do experience what you less than desired control, a two pronged approach might be needed. So maybe a C treatment with either my deck or Mustang max might be a way to go. And we've tested both of those products and they're safe to use with 10 30 40 starter fertilizer. So as Dr. Peters had done, I've got a similar format. This is chapter two. This would be a little bit bigger chapter. We've got a lot of data to go through. But I think it'll raise some eyebrows and maybe offer some solutions for the root mega problem that we have. These shots were taken at St. Thomas as the the title indicates here had kind of a unique opportunity in our plot area. This was a large area that was unfortunately had not gotten treatment yet. So it's it's all untreated. And this shows the the economic severity that the root maggot is possible capable of of producing. And on the far right here, you can see these are mummified dead sugar beet seedlings that just plain didn't make it. So that's that's what that looks like it does. It can indicate that symptomology can indicate other things. But this is pretty classic root maggot injury as well. So what's happening with the root maggot? And what can we expect? Well in 2020 or excuse me 2021, we had a fairly normal single but very significant peak in fly activity around the ninth of June. Give or take depending on your latitude. But we had very hefty numbers at that time. This is this is valley wide. And then this this is probably one of those eyebrow razors. This is you've seen this data data set before we add data to it each year. This is the results of a collaborative effort between American Crystal and MNDAC as well as NDSU. And and what we do is we have a this this part of that work anyway generates a Red River Valley average on a per flies per trap basis per year. And unfortunately in 2021, we surpassed all of the previous 14 years. So this is the highest fly counts on a valley average value wide average in the last 15 years. So we've got work to do, including me. Next up, there's this is a little bit of good news. We've also been tracking for a number of years, root injury ratings, we go in and we do follow up surveys and a lot of those those fly count fields these are all from fly count fields that we were monitoring throughout the growing season. And thankfully, this this suggests that growers that were had that high fly activity did a good job of protecting roots, because there was actually over a 20% decrease in root injury incidents in those fields. This next slide, I'll animate it looks like a typo. We start with 2018, I'll animate it through every other year to what we're expecting in 2022. So this is what we kind of we're facing in 2018. There's what we grew in 2020 for 2020. And this is what we're expecting for 2022. So despite that reduction in root injury ratings, there are still a number of fields within there that are high risk. And so the the extent of of root maggot fly activity that we anticipate this year, and I like to view this as a risk map, this is not necessarily a population prediction, but it's really about risk. And it's to help you manage risk. This will be provided on various websites as well. But this is these are the specific locales that we expect high risk. North Dakota on the left, Minnesota on the right. And then moderate risk. And this will be this is in the pocket guide as well. So this information will be made very, very available, readily available for you. Similarly, here in North Dakota on the left, Minnesota on the right. I hope we don't have too many additional talents in the future to add to these lists because I'm running out of room. So with that, I've been working for a long time trying to find you options to manage this very difficult past. So I'm not going to go through all the details of these materials and methods. But I did want to point out the highlighted portion here. A lot of the data that you'll see is not just a single one time run of an experiment, it's a combined analysis. And so it'll be multiple years. And in each case, I spent a lot of time going through the data and making sure that I could validly combine those data sets. And to combine them sort of legally pseudo legally, with regard to statistics, you need to have no significant treatment by year interactions, meaning the treatments should behave similarly across years or else you can't combine years. There's something wrong in there. So anyway, these are pretty solid data sets that you'll see. So the first one is the results of a five year combined analysis from and pay attention to we stopped at 2019 because these were treatments that were common to all those years. I can't combine data sets of with years that have don't have this share of the same treatments. So the data includes, I guess I should go through the treatments first, we just have one of the maximum rate of counter at planting time. And I probably should have a red line drawn through these Yuma. These are chloropyrifos formulations that are an issue we all know will not be able to use this coming year. But I wanted to include them anyway, so you can see where something like Mustang might shake out. So what this initial first table is showing us with regard to recoverable sucrose per acre and the blue box indicates that as you can see here, all of these treatments are sharing an a as are all of these. Sorry, except for tonnage. I'm sorry, right here. So that's the only difference. But with regard to recoverable sucrose per acre, none of these are significantly different from each other. The revenue was quite good. Again, this is similar to that first slide you saw where it's revenue gain over the untreated check. So compared to doing nothing. So it kind of teases out so you don't have to do the math in your head. So the best return was out of those couple of Yuma treatments at the maximum rate of Yuma. But in with regard to revenue, this is not a statistical comparison, but dollars are dollars. And because of quality issues, and pounds of sugar per ton, this one ended up providing slightly higher. Again, not statistically outperforming, but pretty decent revenue. So that was good news. Then that brings us to the next one where we this is just the last couple of years where we had very high root meg pressure at our St. Thomas location. Similar treatments other than because five populations were so high. This one includes the full rate of counter at planting for all of the insecticide treatments. And then we've got some dual applications of chlorpyrifos. And then we have a single at the high rate. And what we found as far as treatments that were statistically not different from each other were the top two, the Yuma treatments where we're doing repeated applications and we got very good revenue per acre above above the untreated check. Mustang didn't shake out quite so well in this scenario. Again, 2020 and 2021, where we had very severe root meg pressure and you'll get to see some pictures of that shortly. This is some shots of of what those plots looked like in 2021. Here's our untreated check. Pretty good indicator of the capability of the root maggot to literally kill plants on the far left here in the middle. We've got counter at the high application rate, but as a standalone, which we wouldn't even recommend that being a standalone in this growing, this part of the growing area. We do have a little bit of missing plants here and I'm not sure what happened there, but it just abruptly stops. There doesn't necessarily to me say to me that it's root maggot, but there is some pressure there. You can see the canopy is not closed very well. We move over to the right. We've got that same at plant plus Mustang. And we've got probably similar canopy closure, maybe a little better, maybe a little better consistent stand. But when we applied that Mustang twice, maybe we got a slight response here. But as the data indicated, it wasn't statistically significant. Next, we were looking at granular materials and the reason I call it additive is because we have both a plant application of counter and a post emergence band, similar to how some of the growers use thymet. So at the top, we've got the maximum rate of counter followed by the maximum rate of thymet. The reason we don't apply counter again is because that would be off label. You can only apply counter once per growing season. But we got very good responses out of the combining a seed treatment at planting with a granule at planting or the seed treatment with a granule at post emergence. And it performed very well. As you can see here, this is very nice and clean where the recoverable sucrose and the tons for acre were not statistically different from for any of these top three treatments. And we got excellent revenues. Again, that's just above the untreated check. And this is what some of those plots look like. Again, this is 2021 untreated check, good pressure, counter plus thymet that typically does pretty well. Poncho beta alone, a straining a little bit. Again, we don't recommend poncho beta to be a standalone. If you've got moderate to high risk, you really should be planning on some form of additive protection. As you can see here, adding counter at planting with that poncho beta worked quite well as did the poncho beta, where we combined it with a post emergence application of counter at that same rate. And you can see along the side here, these are four row plots. And the alternating two rows are untreated buffers. You can see it looked like somebody went through there with a weed wacker. There's not hardly anything left. Next, this next one, we're looking at other post emergence options because chlorpyrifos is no longer a post emergence option for for us to manage maggots. As far as we know, it'll it's gone for good. Hopefully it does come back, but I don't have a lot of faith in that. And so this this trial is a five year analysis. These are treatments that were common to the that this trial over the years. Mustang max after poncho beta treated seed or Movento HL. And you can see here that the Mustang max centered program did not only statistically outperform the the Movento, but it was also not outperformed by the old standard. And that is just to just remind you that is a single application of chlorpyrifos. This what some of those plots look like. Again, very good pressure. Poncho beta looked similar to those those the previous study. As we move over to the right, we've got a plant of just the moderate rate of counter at 7.5 pounds. That's straining these two treatments poncho beta and the moderate rate of counter tend to perform at about very similar levels. Here's poncho beta followed by Movento, which was applied around six days ahead of peak fly on average. Then we have poncho beta and I didn't include I wanted to show you this picture from 2021. We we looked at both one pint and two pints in 2021. And you can see a nice rate response here by going with a high higher application of that product. Now you may say why are you even including the Yuma in there? Because we have a fairly good body of data that indicates that things like Mustang Max and to a lesser extent we have some data on Asana as well suggesting that it probably works at a level comparable to one pint per acre. So you can see if we were to repeat that application. It's a kind of a wide extrapolation and maybe more statistical go license than I should be taking. But I would suggest this points in a severe year or severely infested infested location that a second or maybe even a third application of something like Mustang or Movento may be warranted. And that brings us to our next data slide. This is the results of a six year combined analysis. We're looking at here at the first column we've got the plant regime whatever that was poncho beta or counter at planting and then using if we you know combining counter with poncho beta and do so making it either a dual application at plant or there are some dual applications where we have at plant plus post emergence. And we have as I'll to steal the term from Dr. Peters kind of a nuclear nuclear treatments. I guess I wouldn't call these quite nuclear because we just went with one pint of bloresband for E in this particular trial. But I think that's actually good information because it may at least give us a hint to how some of those more moderately performing liquid insecticides like Asana, Midak and Mustang or excuse me my Asana and Mustang might work post emergence. But by tripling especially with a good solid at plant regime these treatments worked really well and then adding a post spray easily paid for itself as well. And you heard me mention Midak a little bit that's a product we've been working on for a few years. And but we've been kind of playing around with placement between T-band and modified or excuse me dribble in furrow. And so we're settling more on the dribble in furrow because we know that's what growers prefer. And as this table indicates so I guess I should explain some of the treatments here. We've got counter at the high rate by itself. And then poncho beta is in here a few times, a couple times, either as a standalone with fertilizer or with Midak at planting. And that treatment in particular did quite well relative to the high application rate of counter as a standalone. Again these are not recommended treatments in this area but we kind of need to look at them individually and sort of take baby steps into this to make sure we're getting activity out of these materials. One other thing to point out in this slide is, if you'll notice this treatment, the third from the bottom counter at the moderate rate and then this is not plus. So we applied it in a band as a band and then we followed on the planter at the same time. Actually the tenth or fourth row is going down dribble in furrow first. The furrow was partially closing and then we banded the counter over the top but we did see it wasn't statistically significant all the time or over the years we haven't seen it but in this case it was that we had a significant dropping yield when we added that 1034 O. So that's something to watch out for. I think that's because we had a dry year this past year that really pushed that down. That 1034 O can be kind of hot in a dry, a warm dry year and that's illustrated also when you compare the two checks. The plain untreated check and then the fertilizer check. We had a slight depression in yield also and the gross revenue above the untreated check was actually below the untreated check and this is what some of those plots looked like, an untreated check here. Here's poncho beta alone, midak alone and then we go to the bottom row far left poncho beta with midak. Now that doesn't look stellar but you have to remember again that we probably wouldn't recommend this as a standalone treatment that you'd a grower in a high-risk area would still need to come back with some form of post-emergence program. Our counter at plant by itself at that moderate rate actually looked pretty decent here again with very good pressure along the outsides of these plots and then when they added that fertilizer we had a little issue with stand establishment. Okay just a couple more slides getting close here. I wanted to show you a little bit of this. Some of these are experimental materials so I don't want you to take too much of this as gospel get. This is just a two-year trial where we were looking at and these are single applications. That's one really important thing to keep in mind here which again we don't recommend. This is the high rate of counter, moderate rate of counter and we've got a sauna XL with exponent which is a synergist that can enhance the toxicity of pyrethroid insecticides like a sauna and like Mustang and we did see that here. I can't declare it as being statistically significant but the interesting thing here and this is a T-band at plant of a sauna either with or without that synergist that it did push the a sauna performance up to where it was not outperformed by the max rate of counter fit 20g. This is what some of those plots looked like again and just remind you these are single applications that we don't recommend but we need to look at anyway and here's where that asana is by itself and then with the synergist so without any at plant protection we are seeing stand protection it's very obvious there. We're getting some activity out of diabrome but it's got a very short residual so it might fit into a program where you're having to spray two to three times on the same field that could be one of your applications. So to summarize root megat control we've got a pretty serious situation on our hands so we we need to maybe change our thinking and look more at maybe consider the concept of population management more than just protecting roots because you saw from the fly activity to the root injury surveys that we did that roots are being protected but populations are still at the at least in 2021 at almost explosive levels so 2022 is lining up to probably be a challenge not only because of those populations but also because we won't have that very efficacious tool for purefoss so we have the data that I showed you suggest that things like asana and Mustang and Midak can be helps and especially if we integrate those materials with other other tools so those of you that are in the root megat range so from moderate to high especially but know your risk in your area so pay attention to that forecast I would urge you to keep an eye on your your individual fields and to pay close attention to what's happening on the on the website with the posted fly counts and if you're in a high pressure area you're probably going to have to start looking at integrating either your at plant or post-emergence tools for kind of a combined approach just going through the insecticides asana XL we've mainly looked at it as an at plant but we have some old data as a showing that it's somewhere in the ballpark of a Mustang post-emergence a counter 20g thankfully continues to be an effective tool and it can be used at plant or post-emergence just can't be used both in the same field Midak dribble in furl tends to perform similar to that moderate rate of counter but it's not a standalone tool Mustang max and movento I think we still need to do more work on them uh they're probably not going to be as effective as uh chlorpyrifos so in high risk areas heavy areas heavy pressure areas at least two and potentially a third application of something in there uh pre-peak ride-on peak and maybe even a post peak fly uh to again to manage populations I'm at 20g I didn't show you a huge amount of data on that but we've got a large data set that shows that timing is very flexible if you have the equipment to apply at post-emergence it can be very effective between five and even 15 days ahead of peak fly so it's very flexible that way with that and I'm just about out of time here I think I want to thank the R&E board for funding much of the work that we do and I also want to thank the cooperators that have allowed us to research on their land Darrell Collette Wayne and Austin Massard as well I want to thank American crystal ag staff uh this last year they really beat the bushes and increased our coverage a lot on the fly counts seeing our ventures out of St. Thomas for allowing us to get water from them often for our spray tanks germane seed technology for treating our seed many in the seed and crop protection industry for allowing us to use their use and test their products I want to thank my summer crew especially Jake rickus my technician who makes sure a lot of the stuff of the project is done right and done well and and then I want to thank USDA NIFA and acknowledge them for partial funding support my project as well with that I thank you