 We in very rapid time have become a very comprehensive research extension and teaching institution that crosses all of Oregon State University and we now are trying to touch all aspects of the hemp industry across not only Oregon but the United States and even globally. I got my master degree in biology and then my PhD degree in agroecology. In 2016 January I moved to U.S. and I did my first post doctoral research at Montana State University working on a field crop mainly on wheat alpha-alpha focusing on integrated pest management. In 2019 January I moved to Oregon State University working at a Hermiston Agricultural Research and Extension Center again as a postdoc working on a potato insect pest control mainly on a landscape ecology and trying to understand how the insect moved from in across the landscape so that's kind of my background and so I started my job again in 2004 months back so as like Jeff mentioned that I am a statewide guy so but my responsibility is 70% in the southern Oregon and then 30% across the state so I mainly focus here but also like you know across the across the state so in my program my my aim is to develop or build a extension focus program on a hemp production and integrated pest management and that will eventually help to the hemp grower to boost the economy or any kind of things. Since I started this job like a four month back and and my presentation title is updates so what's going on in the state and I think sometimes I feel it's very interesting and also sometimes I feel it's very challenging you know to cover what's going on so when I was kind of preparing handouts I thought why can't you why can't I divide this whole update based on the different sections like what's going on a crop improvement program what's going on a crop management practices what's going on IPM program so I divided the handouts based on the three category so crop improvement program or plant building program and then crop management practices and then an IPM program and what I'm trying to do it in the in this handout is just to give you the kind of brief info and then provide the contact information so that you know you can connect with that person so you know not only that particular research but also kind of you know because these are the expert on that area for example in agronom so you can connect if you have some questions so my overall goal here on this giving the update is just to give you an idea just to give you an idea what kind of research going on and and helping you to connect with them and that's my things so I'm going to start my talk on my first as a like prone building or crop improvement program so like Jeff already mentioned that one of the key program that we are doing is national cannabinoid varietal trials and that is kind of this is partnering with several university across the nation's like also already Jeff mentioned that there are several several universities that are been together and partnering on this big big task so the main goal of this study is to determine how different hand variety perform across the nation that's the one main key objective of this study and second is that does the hand feet can fit well in a rotation with other crop and and the third is like how the crop genetic and environment can affect the management practices so these are the three kind of a you know three-fold objective that overall goal objective of this kind of research and then we have the research location like already Jeff mentioned we have a two location here in central point the rich director from the the southern Oregon he's doing that part and and another is Ontario clean sock with a professional unit from OSU he's doing that part as you can see in the picture on the on the figure number one the clean sock is standing at the right side of the national varietal trial at the Ontario Oregon and also I mentioned the date so you can know when this picture was taken on the date so give an idea about the about about the plant so and for this study we have both full season and auto flowering type so this is kind of the one study that the way she's doing on a plant building and second is a hem germplasm project so this is the text is given by me from the from the Suzy and the robot who are leading this project I ask him can you give me the update about what kind of your things going on so this all text is written by by them so what they are basically doing what way she is doing is where she is a collab partnering or collaborating with University of California Davis Washington State University and USDA to obtain characterized and evaluated jump plasma so that is the kind of what what collaborating and now they are kind of pre-breeding program so they are trying to build the involve the development of jump plasma that can be distributed to farmers and breeders and will be made available publicly available through the USA hem germplasm repository so I think that at the end they will be available to the grower or everyone that's what this is and I have given her contact information so if you have any wanted to know about this project you can you know directly reach out or you can you or you can if they if or you can ask me that I can help you to connect with them about this project so that's what I have it from plant breeding and crop improvement program so I'm gonna move to to the crop management practices if you move on other page so here is the one Western US water you use trial that's the one one of the trial that is cooperative irrigation trial in Oregon California and Colorado so this trial I think we'll talk more Tom will talk more about it on later on but this trial has a four different level of water from and the rate is different based on the autoflower or full seasons so overall goal is that how much plant can you know take the what the how much water is demanding from the plant so that's what they are doing here and then from this study what they are doing is that they are all determining the flower yield cannabinoid content and cannabinoid yields that are recorded in this study so for this as you can look at I forget to mention you that on this is the if you look at there it's a autoflowering on the right side so this is the kind of water use trial at Ontario and and this is the this is the OSU this is the OSU Hermiston this is the water use trial at Hermiston and this is the kind of picture taken from the drone so I asked them colleague to take it so just to give you an idea about what kind of trial in the study is going on just to give you again the the contact person is that if you are from Hermiston or eastern side you can contact Scott Lucas who is the assistant professor there to know about what's going on there on that side and the clean sock with the retire professor immediate at Ontario you can talk with them in that particular area what kind of results they are getting and a climate fall here the Tom I think Tom will talk later on about his trials so that's kind of the overview of the Western US water US trial and also you can talk with the J on that point of what kind of things going on happening and then there is another study that we are doing irrigation and plant density trial at Southern Oregon and the rich will talk later that and he has his hand out so you you'll know more about that information from you so I'm not going to talk about that part so now I'm gonna talk about little bit about a hemgrain trial we have also on the agenda hemgrain trial Don Wasaki will talk about it but just to give you an idea about this study has two objective one is to know whether the hemgrain we can grow the hemgrain crop or not in a dry land we are talking about in dry land so if yes and then what are the nitrogen application rate to like does it impact the in-label does it impact the plant nutrient optics so these are the kind of two basic research he's doing and as you as you can see this big the picture that he and I did like almost spend a day on a sampling the plants for that you know the study and I think this is study you talk about this more study more about this results and finding but for this study that he use X 59 as a variety for this one so this is what kind of trial we have been doing on a hem crop improvement program now I will move to the IPM program that's what I think the that what's my also little bit expertise I have been working on that area so one of the the beauty of that you know what are going to state university have the research center maybe I can talk now yeah you know the Oregon State University has a one of the beauty is that it has a research center across the state actually it helps to kind of collaborate in working together the needs and a problem on hemp so we kind of started this summer the statewide hemp pathogen survey and and we did the survey on eastern central southern and western region of the Oregon so what we did what is the goal of this study just to identify what are the common problem what are the common pathogen and does it differ or does it be is there any difference between the region is there any same problem that we are seeing here is the same like he in the like in the eastern or in the central so overall just to understand the just to identify the common problem or specific to the region so that's that's a goal and what we did is that we survey each region at least three fields it's all in the farmer's fields and then for that study what we did is like we we plan we survey at a three time point early in the season meeting the season and now like in harvesting season so actually yesterday not yesterday you know on Wednesday I was serving the you know the hemp pathogen in the eastern Oregon so just to give me an idea about so we wanted to see we wanted to cover the all picture about what's going on on the disease or pathogen so what we did on this one is that we kind of identify the pathogen other by visually or kind of diagnostic assay or molecular method we are using the multiple approach to make sure that what kind of pathogen or what kind of disease problem we have it's a kind of yeah but any one of the I mean it's too early to share the results but I want to kind of point out some of the things that we are seeing one of the one of the common problem that we are seeing is that bit quality of virus as you can see in the picture that is mainly on a central and eastern side we have not found out in this area like in the southern just to give an idea about it and another thing is that like we have seen mainly the soil one pathogen that's mainly in the southern but just to give an idea this is kind of my assessment we need to sit down and kind of you know the whole working group and sit down and discuss the whole data set but this is just kind of first look that we have been seeing the problem you know that I just want to read the name because I think it deserves to read the name we are involving on this project so Western region there's a Cynthia M. Ocamp sorry if I have pronounced wrongly I see the extension plant pathologist in working at OST Corvallis and that is Hannah Rivetal we as we is the USDA research plant pathologist in Corvallis and since at southern region Atsala Nepal from southern Oregon research and extension center see the plant pathologist in Gordon Jones here is he is agriculture extension specialist and myself I have been involving on that and the central region is Jeremiah Dom which a plant pathologist on the OSU Madras and eastern region Cain Frost and myself so Cain Frost is OSU plant pathologist at Hermitstown I'm so sorry actually in the Rogue Valley Jackson and Josephine counties because there is such a high concentration of the hemp organs hemp acres that we are putting Oregon State is putting quite a bit of effort into hemp research and extension and I did want to mention in addition to Govinda whom you've heard from and Gordon Jones who you'll hear from in a second he mentioned our plant pathologist at Chala KC who primarily works on wine grapes and pears but she is is helping and doing some work in the plant disease aspect Rick Hilton right here in the front row is our entomologist research entomologist at Sorak for many years and he primarily also works in pears and wine grapes but he's been involved in in some hemp issues as well and and hiring Govinda as a full-time hemp person has has really helped so there's quite a bit of quite a bit of effort of Oregon State at Sorak and we cooperate with all the other stations and other locations as Govinda and Jeff have been describing previously so so the last two years have been a steep learning curve and I just wanted to briefly mention a couple of research things there's no time to go through a lot of detail today but on the second page I just want to show you there's an aerial picture of our hemp hemp experiments from last year actually this is not quite all of the experiments there's some that's not in the picture but the lower several rows that's that is the national variety trial location at Sorak the location we had at Sorak last year six different varieties replicated there and then above that sort of towards the top of the picture is where we did a density trial and I wanted to look at what is the effect of you know wide spacing versus very closely spaced plants both auto flower types and full season types and and how does that affect the plant architecture the flower production and ultimately the CBD in this case the CBD is the essential oil that we were interested in and I want to give you just the two-minute version of the the data results from a couple of these agronomic trials because that's my background I'm a soil scientist by training and so agronomic aspects are what I know a little bit about and so I couldn't couldn't let a field day go by without throwing a little bit of data at you so and so in two minutes I'll try to go through this but on the first page that has a graph in that handout and that is a irrigation study or basically we were looking at when you dramatically in when you go from two inches of irrigation up to a ridiculously high amount I think for the Medford area about 40 inches of irrigation what happens in that range that's too high of course and two inches I think it's too low but we want to see what happens to the plants and big surprise when you put more water on the plants get bigger up to a point up to a point right and on that graph that upper line the green line that's the stem and the leaf biomass per plant in this study but but we also pick up more flowers more secondary flowers that's the pink circles tertiary flowers that's the blue circles we also increase so so so can you increase can you increase CBD production by by increasing irrigation yes you can up to a point and that's shown in the lower graph where the yellow sort of goldish line and dots show the CBD yield per acre how many piles of CBD per acre you can up to a point but then the question becomes okay I've doubled a little over doubled my CBD production but I've gone from just a couple inches up to a ridiculously high amount of irrigation and so then that becomes an economic production question is really how much water do I have first of all in a year like this that's the first question do I have any water and then second of all what value is there what is the value of that water relative to the increased value of the CBD and then on the back page the last thing I'll talk about before turning it over to Gordon is a density study that we did again an agronomic idea looking at the idea if you have plants and they're widely spaced and they're not interacting with each other what happens if you squeeze those plants closer and closer together and have an extremely high density how does that affect the plant architecture the number of flowers and of course ultimately in this case the CBD yield so on the top graph where it says plant density that was a good one yeah nice it's kind of like fireworks on the 4th of July which ones are going to be the big boomers and which ones are going to be just so anyway that's where that is so so the plant density study basically we started with a very low density 4,000 plants per acre those are those are pretty widely spaced plants and all the way up to an extremely high a higher density about 32,000 plants per acre and looking at that graph we can see the plants do compensate as they spread further apart they will produce more stem more leaf more flower and that's not you know not too surprising but I was a little surprised that they continue to compensate even at a very very low a very very low density when the plants are widely spaced they produce a lot more secondary flowers more tertiary flowers more so than I was anticipating actually I guess and so then the last graph at the very bottom of that again looking at the CBD yield per acre it gets at the question can you increase the CBD yield per acre by squeezing those plants together and having more plants realizing that each of those plants is going to have gradually fewer flowers the answer is yes you can increase the CBD yield you can double it in in the range here but the data is very widely scattered first of all and second of all if you think about the logistics of either direct seeding which is what we did or even more complicated is transplanting you know we went from 4,000 plants to 32,000 plants so eight times the number of plants and we only ended up with roughly a double of the CBD yield so that so that's real those numbers are real I believe but it gets back to question what does it cost me per seed what does it cost me to plant these things how does the plant spacing affect my other management activities things like how humid is it am I going to run into powdery mildew problems near harvest time if I don't have good air circulation all those kind of questions so I'll stop there and I'm going to turn it over to Gordon Jones who has done a very interesting study looking at harvest timing and are there cues the plants are giving us to help us determine the best time to maximize essential oil yield. Thank you Rich and I guess I would want to encourage us to pause at this moment I'm seeing many folks have left their chairs likely because of the coldness of the shade I think I'm going to vote that we all stand up and we go walk over to the hemp planting and lay eyes on that and it'll be quieter over there I'm sure the state to deal with it it comes to my desk and have spent quite a bit of time on hemp over the past few years and glad to see a strong team forming forming recently so let's see survey question how many folks have grown hemp raise raise your hands in the past couple years grown some hemp see a small handful maybe five or six folks so look into those folks how do you make a determination on when your hemp is ripe for harvest if you are not thinking about the weather not thinking about labor or drying facilities but just thinking about optimal timing to harvest a hemp particularly with CBD or quality flower in mind what's what's you got a rule of thumb white hairs no more white hairs you're talking about the female floral part of the flower there's a called stigmas they'd like reach out and catch pollen and hopefully not catch pollen in this case and so wanting to see those senes from being fresh to be in dry and sort of brown and crunchy other cues on density of flowers certainly I do like lots of time out in the field and watch even people as we walk over like just give them a little squeeze link how full is that get the new these are not that mature to my mind are pretty light to the touch vocab word is a larphy I don't know where that comes from other than must be the marijuana industry any other cues on when to harvest colors of leaves what are you looking for see yellowing of some of some of the older leaves in the plant yep absolutely and so I think those are all reasonable methods and folks who have been in the hemp or cannabis industry often have a way of looking at a crop and saying yep this is about ready or give it another week or hope you had your pre-harvest test done because this needs to get harvested tomorrow we have a chat an academic challenge as we start to work on a variety trials where we want to plant a dozen varieties right next to each other and like all plants there'll be a little bit of variation in the maturity some all be ready a week earlier some will be ready a few weeks later and so now I'm trying to do a sort of fair and scientific trial on when do I harvest all of these at the right point if I harvest them all on one date some will probably be immature and some will be over mature and how do we like sort of sus through that through that question so that we've got something scientifically valid and so I was pretty pushing pretty hard at Jeff and the folks from the global hemp innovation center on like no seriously what are you going to do how are you going to side went to harvest this and they turned back around to me as sometimes happens in the world and said Gordon that's a good question want to just see if you can cook up a project to figure that out and I said sure I'll work on it and so used one of our variety trials back in central point last year and went out weekly from about the time when you see the first floral tissues when flowering is initiated all the way through what I would call very late almost the first of November and each week took flower samples one of the visual cues that I had read about or some growers might tell you is the status of trichomes the color of trichomes and trichomes are sort of hair like appendages that occur on cannabis plants and I don't know that you can see them very well here but if you got in close and really appeared you'd see these little sort of what look like droplets you can if you've got the handout you can see that zoomed in photo and on if it's a little bit blurry there's some little sort of like crystal like droplets those are the glandular heads of trichomes that is the location of a cannabinoid production within a hemp plant that those trichomes are are like the spot where it happens and marijuana growers tell me that they're expect to see a progression of clear trichomes to cloudy trichomes to sort of amber or golden colored trichomes and I can read that in lots of like how to grow some great marijuana at home books find really very little science that indicates that that would correspond to something related to the cannabinoids in the hemp or its physiological status so harvested hemp flowers each week from a several different full season and several different auto flower varieties go back to the lab do my best in the sort of like arbitrary activity of guessing at a proportion of clear cloudy and amber trichomes dry those samples send them to the lab USDA lab in Peoria Illinois that the Innovation Center has been been working with somehow took six months to get test results back they arrived at my desk just like two months ago on the cannabinoid results from from last year and so on that handout on the right hand side I presented you some full season this is Lifter one of the Oregon CBD pretty high cannabinoid yield full season varieties I think the upper graph is the total CBD and the lower graph is total THC I want you to bear in mind that I was not looking at the whole plant I was not looking at all the flowers I was taking samples of the top two inches of flower and I chose top two inches because one of the previous versions of the USDA's final hemp rule was that pre-harvest testing was going to happen on top two inch samples that has now changed several times and they've moved back to the an eight inch sample or approximately eight inch sample for for current rules but regardless so those numbers are correspondent to what must be a pretty concentrated part of the plant primarily floral tissue something that strikes me as I look at those cannabinoid data and whatever a sort of week one is is probably the last week in August and week 10 if it runs that far is I think the last day of October that in the course of about four weeks you go from I'm not looking at my sheet but it goes from maybe like four percent CBD up to 15% CBD in about four weeks I would call that a very fast accumulation of cannabinoids if you look at the two charts and just sort of squint at them they really do follow the same pattern where and we know that that should happen in a hemp plant of the cannabinoid production being sort of all happens in parallel if you get more CBD you should expect to have more THC some of the minor cannabinoids behave differently than that but certainly for CBD and THC that is the pattern to expect and there's not much data that is published like this and I am frantically trying to like unplug my phone at my desk so I can sit down and write up a journal article on this but have not had much luck yet but I do think that this is is interesting to see how quickly those cannabinoids do rise they rise to a plateau and that sort of makes sense that most plants at some point are mature they basically stop growing and from that point on particularly if you look at the CBD content you see a very slight decline in CBD content after that once you sort of reach that plateau it's a little bit declining and I really think that that's because the plants are basically rotting in the field and they are losing losing tissue leaves and material are falling off I guess the other thing that I puzzle about as I think about just those cannabinoid data I drew in our point three percent total THC regulated line even though ODA won't get you in trouble until you're above point three four nine because they like to take a loosey-goosey rounding approach to to those kind of values that lifter will not pass at least the lifter that I grew last year would not have passed the up a we're not have sort of passed as legal hemp if you had grown it to maturity it is like halfway to maturity or less that it crosses that line I've got some like questions for our regulators on their 28-day pre-harvest test that we need to take a pre-harvest test on one date and then begin to harvest in earnest within 28 days and you need to pass that pre-harvest test have less than point three percent total THC in order to legally be able to harvest that crop have it be sold as hemp in Oregon do your little counting there on those on that table that in one two three four weeks we go from like point one percent THC to point five or point six go flying through that threshold all in that legal pre-harvest window and so yes you can take a pre-harvest test that will pass that will pass ODA's rules will you harvest a crop that is less than point three these data and plenty of other anecdotal data from breeders across the country and other research says like no most hemp varieties that are high CBD will not will not be legal given the sort of genetic and metabolic nature of how the cannabinoids are produced so I think that is all interesting outcome and worth thinking about in detail I did find that on lifter that in that progression of trichomes that go from basically clear to pretty cloudy to turning amber that that point where my chart or where the cannabinoids level off I was looking at trichomes that were mostly cloudy they were no longer in the clear sort of immature status and only a very few of the trichomes had turned amber which indicates to me is maybe sort of over mature and so I'm not I am not telling you if you have a crop in the field to just go look for clear trichomes and you're gonna be good to go to harvest I'm saying in one location in one season with one strain there appears to be a little bit of a visual relationship between sort of maturity status what those trichomes look like and answering the question of if I wait a week longer will I get more trichomes or excuse me get more cannabinoids seems like there may be a relationship to be figured out there see a really similar pattern with white CBG another Oregon CBD variety though the CBG varieties do not accumulate such high levels of THC and repeating this study with lifter white CBG and pine Walker one of the new triploid CBDV varieties on farm over and near the table rocks this year been working with grain hemp just a couple of years and the reason I got into grain hemp was I didn't know anything about hemp but I was getting a lot of questions so I started doing a lot of reading and the type of growers that I work with are dryland wheat growers and how are you going to fit hemp into a dryland cropping system and about two years ago a colleague of ours at OSU voucher last calf came up with an experiment that was done about I think eight locations or nine locations around the state I grew that experiment and it had some of the same treatments at all locations and that was my first experience with grain hemp and last year I got to connected with IND hemp and they are contracting grain hemp in Montana and in a state of Washington while there was some grain hemp being grown just across the state line in Walwale County in Washington and we visited those fields and I saw a chance there to really learn something just on this growers field now if you if you look at grain hemp is there a grain hemp in this industry anywhere in the world Canada Canada has a grain hemp industry Ukraine Europe other places so I've worked with canola the better part of my career where's most of the canola grow Canada grows 20 million acres so I have a lot of Canadian colleagues so I just called them up and started asking them questions to learn something can you transplant Canadian technology into Oregon you know it doesn't work really great why day lengths are different heat units are different soil types are different so you can gain some information but you can't directly transplant it when I talk to my Canadian colleagues and tell them we grow 100 bushel wheat they're in awe so they can't use our technology we can't use there so we need to learn how to grow grain hemp in our cropping systems and where do you start you know seeding rates fertility insect pests varieties those are all questions those are all things we need to learn and you know we're taking baby steps at a time here and because I'm a soil scientist I chose to concentrate on the nutritional part of this so a in 2020 we did some sampling on this growers field near wall wall of Washington and in the handout it's this table one I'll just review some of the numbers on that table you can study it in detail at your leisure but we went there and sampled that field at the early part of September when it when the grains just starting to mature male plants were completely dried down you know so if we're gonna study that in in better detail we might do sampling different times a year but we did just one sampling we sample the male plants just ground the whole plant females we segregated into leaves grain and stamps and that's the data that's on this table just to point out a couple things the grain yield on that field and it's in a about an 18 inch rainfall 2020 was probably a little better than normal year 1800 pounds of grain on this field and you can you can look through this from a fertility standpoint a little less than half of the nitrogen is in the in the seed the rest is in the tissue and the stems and you can go through this and look at you know the partitioning of nutrients in the in the plant this grower planted about 30 pounds of seed nominally that's about 15 seeds per square foot the stand that we counted was about eight plants per square foot so you know a successful plant ratio is about 50 percent half of what you plant makes a point or half to seed you plant makes a plant that grows in maturity and so yeah there we know a little bit about sitting rate this year we we worked with the grower and I designed a randomized complete block experiment with seven treatments on nitrogen you know I thought that is one of our major crop inputs is nitrogen and you know we need to know nitrogen rates to grow this crop we know nitrogen weights for wheat for corn we don't know anything about hemp so that's the soil scientist approach learn about the main nutrient first nitrogen so our experiment consisted of you know no nitrogen added 50 pounds 100 pounds 150 pounds and 200 pounds of n per acre I thought I thought that covered the range we arranged for the grower to seed this about in early May he calls me up the 20th of April and he goes we need to seed because we're in a drought year and we're losing moisture if we if we don't seed now we won't be able to reach moisture and we won't get a stand so but you know that was on a Friday that Monday we were there we planted I have a eight foot wide no-till plot drill that you can vary fertilizer rates and and starter rates so we planted that experiment at 14 PLS pure live seed per square foot calibrated a drill planted that and we had to seed about two inches deep to hit moisture the grower came in right after us planned the field around it unfortunately it didn't rain again for most of the season and our stand to me was not uniform enough to harvest individual plots we did harvest you know segments of row within our plots you know where we thought the stand was uniform enough so that the nutrition that we had applied we thought would be valid to harvest those areas where there's not or too few plants it just doesn't make sense to try to measure nutrition on the system like that so we don't have any data yet we've harvested bundles and we will be processing those to learn what our nitrogen rates and some other nutrient uptake curves are in that information so that that's kind of the stage where we at now to me the challenge with this crop is like any new crop seeding rates weed control harvest issues I mean the challenge for this grower is how do you drive this crop down and harvest the seed on it the plant stays green and the seed is shattering out the grower tried to desiccate this with the sodium chlorate didn't work so the next choice was this crop was swath wind road which dried it down but tried to pick up windrow of big hemp stems up how are you going to do it yeah and the grower here used a pickup rail like for grass seed you know pickup fingers and he thought he did a fairly good job and and I think in his mind compared to trying to harvest a green crop he did a good job I was there when he was harvesting the first year then he kept plugging up his recleaner there's a green stuff just fill it up and it this the there was so much green it you know had to be dried down at the that the elevator there sure he swath it picked it up you know he didn't get a hundred percent of everything but you got most of it the grain when he took it to the elevator five percent moisture so did a good job of drying down is that perfect now we'll perfect that over time so there to me there's challenges to grow this crop as a grain crop and the way we're going to do it is fit it in with our wheat cropping system handle it like a grain crop you know I'm not sure I understand what you're asking oh okay what's the cropping rotation okay the where this grower grew this his last crop was winter wheat and you know hampers of spring crop so the following year after he harvest his winter wheat plants planted the hemp the is normal rotation and you know that it's not a whole field it's you know about a 10 acre or 20 acre area within a field where you know he's experimenting with this but the rest of the field are garbanzo beans so you know he's fitting in his cropping system where he would plant a spring leg you it's just another different spring broadleaf crop there's a lot of guys like us that have a lot of things we've done but you know there's no everybody's kind of just trying to figure it all out yeah we're we're learning to fly the plane as we're building it yeah we're definitely we've been talking about it for a while in this last year this drought really kicked everybody's butt here is we have two types of plantings we have the full season on your right my left did I get that right and then we have the autoflower on this side and then what they were planted that the full season was planted with transplants they were shipped to us by air we planted them following week or within a few days of planting them we got them like on a Wednesday Thursday and then planted them the next Monday and then the autoflower was direct seeded same day so they're all planted the same day the spacing on the full season there are 36 inch rows and they're 30 inches apart so that's about 8500 plants to the acre and then the planting rate on they wanted to get a high density on the autoflower so we planted them we were shooting for 30 to 35,000 plants to the acre I think we hit that target the plants are about a foot apart and there's four rows in each bed here and then each of those beds if you just look at thousand population at that rate it's about 45,000 but we have some area between them and if you take that area into account we're about 32,000 so we're about like corn planting corn so it's a pretty good density it did pretty well direct seeded it came up in a few days it was pretty much fully merged in a week you can see on here there's a fertility we had a pre-plant amount and we have done some injections we did a mid-season we did a leaf tissue analysis and realized we were a little low on a couple things so we put in some phosphorus and some potassium to kind of help bring it up to normal levels and have continued to kind of do that we're done with autoflower we harvested it week before last and irrigation's off it's been off for two weeks on it it's just sitting here we left it for the field day-to-day so it's done so that the experiment it was just water use if you look at your other page with a map on there if you orient the north you see the north on the right if you look everything is reading normal for you you're standing right in the middle between those two and each of those little arrows that are pointing up are these orange flags and in the little star in the middle that's the middle of a rep that means all four treatments are around you in that so that little that orange flag without a that orange post without a flag on it if you stand there you can rotate and see all four treatments all right so what we did was our lateral we those four laterals each set goes to a particular irrigation treatment so we are taking a we have a reference ET then beginning of the season the whole group that was working in California here and then in Colorado decided on it's a conversion factor from the reference ET and we use that to kind of we're trying to figure out how much water it is and we take a ET each day and we track that through the week and we try to keep up with that ET what we think it's using for the week then we take 80% of that 60% of that 40% of that for the full season then we press a little more on the auto flower because it was conversation that it just by time it was done we weren't really in the full irrigation system we hadn't run it long enough so we started at 100 and we went to 75 50 and 25 percent irrigation and if you look across here I bet any of you be hard-pressed to tell me what treatment had 25% irrigation and I bet you'd be hard-pressed to find out what's 25% of that over or 40% over here so what we're thinking is that this plant doesn't need a lot of water and what happens we'll be harvest we harvest these for biomass we take the colas and we weigh them and where they'll be analyzed for how much you know what the productivity is though so we'll get both by a total biomass and T8s TBD production if you look back on the other side of the page what I want to point out to you on that bottom on the irrigation date is this is today so when we first planted this we didn't have the drip system running at the point and when you first start a plant the drip system was buried about six inches deep and about six inches offset so we didn't have problems with root interference well when the plants first go in and when you're seeding you turn it on they're not going to get any water so we had to irrigate initially for the first few weeks until the full season got fully established and the autoflower was germinated and growing once we did that we made the transition over during that period of time because we were hard we were putting on sprinkler maybe a quarter inch at a time half inch at a time or whatever over a period about three or four weeks so the plants there wasn't really a lot of water added to the soil because a lot of that dries up during the day but that's all about five inches once we got into our irrigation regime for the season we started going and so far to date the full season we put at a hundred percent of our estimate about twelve inches of water if you know anything about crop water use that's not much corn uses three feet alfalfa uses two or three feet and of water and so this is a I look at that water reduction use I mean we can use less water or you plant a few more acres with the same amount of water and the autoflower seven inches of water all right that's almost dry land I mean how much water would be in the soil so we have these plants that we're we're learning a lot and I know you heard a lot this morning about research research is like a grinding stone it grinds slowly but thoroughly and and so you know the last few years has been a lot of what do you call a gold rush mentality everybody's trying to do too many things at once we don't do that very well it's going to take time for us to ask the right questions set up research this is to answer one question how much water does this use not only here but how much does it use in Fresno how much is using Davis how much is it using Hermiston or Ontario or in Colorado and with that information we kind of got a sense of how much water we need to be applying to this so that's a that's a real important thing I mean that's this one question for all these trials we'll pull out other information from it as far as growth habit and diseases and stuff but that's our big question and so it takes time to do that this is the second year we did this at another location here last year and I haven't seen all the data from that but we've everything's been in and we're kind of what we learned from that last year we kind of added to this year but still keep the focus on what we're doing on the water use because that's a real issue especially over here where if you don't have irrigation you aren't going to grow very much here again want to encourage you to stay engaged with our research centers whether you know we happen to have the location here but some of you are from up you know up in the valley so you know feel free to reach out the SOAR Act as well you've met the various extension and researchers that we have please give us feedback and let's get into the conversation we will be doing some more formal outreach about getting input from growers as we move forward with a new project soon and I guess last thing I would like to say can we give a hand to all our speakers in their preparation today okay so thank you yeah well there was a lab director before I start