 and resistant kosha that are estimated to affect 70% of the Sydney sugar acres. Here we have six chemistries used for soil residual sugar beet herbicides. We can see that there is fair to good control of waterhemp, but poor to fair control of common ragweed. So how do we go about addressing this? Well, Stinger HL, also known as Clopyrilid, is a group for oxen mimic herbicide used in sugar beet. It was first used in 1989 as a post control herbicide in the same family as 2,4-D, dicamba and starine. It provides effective control of composite solinaceae, legume, and polygonum family weeds. It offers poor or no control of other weeds. It is applied at 1.8 to 6.4 fluid ounces per acre to sugar beets, two to eight leaves. In a previous study conducted by Extension Sugar Beet on three inch common ragweed, we see that the two fluid ounce rate in a repeat application provides the highest amount of control with 10% injury to sugar beets. Here is a picture of three seed sources of common ragweed, one from our greenhouse source, one from the MNDAC source, and one from the ACS source. What I want us to take note of are the two rates we applied, six ounce rate and a three ounce rate. In the rear row here, that three ounce rate on the ACS source, look at that. That's seed heads forming. That's not good. So what's the situation we're looking at? Well, glyphosate is no longer an effective mode of action for common ragweed control. Stinger resistant common ragweed would be devastating to sugar beet producers. Our stinger use rates have been influenced by micro rates historically because it would otherwise cause injury to sugar beets. Common ragweed control recommendations are in the 2023 and ESU wheat control guide and sugar beet pocket guide and they will match the stinger HL label. Switching from stinger to stinger HL may further complicate recommendations because of the conversion factor. So the old formulation of stinger that two fluid ounce to the acre rate converts to 1.2 fluid ounces of stinger HL. The sugar beet rate lower than the label rate, two to six fluid ounces to the acre of the old formulation, 1.8 to 3.6 fluid ounces to the acre of the stinger HL, something to be aware of. So what were our experiment objectives? There were one, to determine sugar beet injury. Two, to determine stinger HL rate, sugar beet timing delivering greater than 95% common ragweed control. And three, to determine common ragweed control from repeat stinger HL and PowerMax three applications. The materials and methods that we use, we conducted this experiment in Ada, Minnesota in 2022. The field was previously sugar beets in 2021 growing season. The sugar beet was planted May 26th, ethofumusate and dual magnum were applied pre at two points and a half pint to the acre. There was an application made June 9th and June 22nd on the small ragweed less than two inches. There was another application made June 17th and June 27th on ragweed two to four inches. In the upper half of this table, we can see the growth reduction that was induced by the application made to common ragweed two inches or less. We did not know any growth reduction in the single applications, but we did see some growth reduction with the repeat applications of the 1.5 and 1.8 fluid ounces to the acre rate. In the lower half of this table, we see the growth reduction that was induced by the application to the common ragweed that was two to four inches tall. And in the single application, we see slightly less growth reduction. And the most growth reduction was caused by the repeat applications at the 1.5 and 1.8 fluid ounce to the acre rate. In this table, we have the average or we have the common ragweed control for the application that was made to common ragweed two inches or less. The greatest amount of control was provided by the repeat application with the 1.8 fluid ounce to the acre rate. It's important to note that the ragweed control declined lightly throughout the month of July when there was just one single application made. In this table, we have the common ragweed control of the application that was made to two to four inch common ragweed. Once again, we can see when there was a single application made, we have a decline of control throughout the month of July. But with the repeat application, we have consistent control. In this table, we have the average of all applications in the month of July to the common ragweed two inches or less and the common ragweed two to four inches. There is pretty significant difference between the amount of control between the applications to common ragweed two inches or less or two to four inches. In the second table, we have the average of all single applications made. If you take note, there is a decline in control throughout the month of July. In this third table, we have the repeat applications. You can see, look at that. The control stays consistent if not a little bit better, right? Here is a photo of our untreated plot from our experiment in Eda. You can see that the density and the population is severe, like there's a lot there. Here is four photos from the second rep of our experiment with our two rates and our two application times. What I want us to hone in on here is, it's, I know it's hard to see, but there are some small escapees right here at that two to four inch staging application. And there's some down here even too. I don't see any over here. So what are the best management practices for Stinger HL application and ragweed control? Well, Stinger HL at 1.8, fluid ounces of acre must be our lowest rate and 2.4 fluid ounces is preferred. Stinger HL at 1.8 fluid ounces of acre followed by Stinger HL at 1.8 fluid ounces of acre for repeat applications, especially on ragweed greater than two inches. Times Stinger HL application to ragweed size rather than sugar beet stage. We may need to separate glyphosate and Stinger HL applications if our growers are using nurse crops and want to delay termination before leaf sugar beet. We have to tank mixed Stinger HL with glyphosate at the fumesate and a chlorocetamide. We intend to conduct greenhouse experiments to consider Mustang, Max or Asana with Stinger HL and Stinger HL plus glyphosate at the fumesate or chlorocetamide since Lorsban is no longer available. Thank you for your attention and here's my contact info if anybody wants to reach out to me in the future and I appreciate your time. So our second presentation is gonna be from Ms. Emma Burt. Emma is a former graduate student and currently working at Mindak Farmers Cooperative as research agronomists. And Emma, as you know, everybody knows has been responsible for our programs with using ultra blazer in sugar beets. So Emma is gonna give us an update based on the results that we saw in 2022. So the idea of the presentation is to build on our experiences that we've had over time. And I can't, I would be absolutely remiss Emma if I didn't acknowledge that Emma was a very happy person on Sunday, her football team which resides in Brookings, South Dakota, South Dakota State. I think they had an upset victory, didn't they? Maybe against the team from Fargo. Might have. So welcome Emma and her presentation. Okay, so like Tom said, I am going to talk about ultra blazer today. So we know that Waterhemp is our most important weed control challenge with growers identifying it as such on 64% of their acreage in 2021. Layered soil residual herbicides are our best control program, but we need rainfall to incorporate them. And when we don't get that rain, our options are quite limited. So we're always looking for more options. Our work with Asoflorofen began in 2016 and then in late 2018, the decision was made to pursue commercialization. And I started a master's degree in 2019. We were granted our first section 18 in 2021. And as of now, UPL is progressing towards a section three approval. We still have a lot of work to do though. However, if you really study the data, we can identify patterns. Ultra blazer is effective really only on certain weeds and mostly just pigweeds. And it's very strongly influenced by tank mix partners and the environmental conditions when you spray. So today we're going to review what we know and then we'll end with what we still need to improve on. So we know that we're going to see injury. This is sugar beet injury data from the 2019 and 2020 plot research. Necrosis injury was greatest at the earliest application timing at our two leaps application stage. And then it decreased as application timing was delayed. Growth reduction injury also decreased as application timing was delayed. We also know that the adjuvant or the tank mix partner makes a difference when it comes to injury as well. These photos are from the 2022 experiments. You can see power max three, which we use this year appears to be our hottest tank mix partner or if we want to call it an adjuvant here, more so than both the NIS and the crop oil. Then when we look at some yield or quality data, this is recoverable sucrose again from 2019 and 2020. Ultra blazer can result in yield and quality differences. While we did not see statistical differences when we applied ultra blazer at the six leaf stage or greater as compared to the glyphosate check, we did see a numerical difference. This is also important that we know this is only ultra blazer alone. When we add a tank mix partner, especially glyphosate, we may see even more yield loss. But we also see more efficacy and activity from ultra blazer when we do tank mix, specifically adding glyphosate provided our best control. These images show the increased control as well as the increased sugar beet injury. We have the glyphosate check on the top. You can see sugar beet looks great, obviously no injury, but there's quite a few weeds left in there. Then as we move over ultra blazer plus power max, lots of injury, but it's the cleanest of those three photos up there. That let us ask, why is there more injury when we add glyphosate? So in 2020 and 2021, we did a greenhouse experiment to determine if the increased injury was the result of the salt, a K versus an IPA salt, or if it was from the adjuvant as a component of the formulation. What we learned was that neither touchdown high tech, which was a K salt with no adjuvant load, or the cornerstone five plus an IPA salt with a full adjuvant load caused as much injury, necrosis or growth reduction as power maps. This is the 2021 yield trial. This is one of the best data sets that Tom says he's ever developed with crazy tight data where each site said the exact same thing. We cannot mix ultra blazer with our chlorocetamide epifume safe glyphosate laid by program. When we did this, our injury was increased so high that it's too much of a risk to our quality in yield. Ultra blazer was applied on over 65,000 acres following EPA approval of a section 18 emergency exemption in 2021 and 2022. We were allowed a single application, a 16 ounce rate at the six leaf stage or greater. You could take mix with glyphosate and we recommended that you target water hemp that was up to four inches tall. 95% of our survey respondents in 2021 thought that the section 18 was useful and that it contributed to overall weed management in Minnesota and North Dakota. And then these are pictures from grower fields. So in the top left, you can see that we've got a dead water hemp but in the top right, we have water hemp dead in the foreground. And then there's a living plant that was sort of shielded by the sugar beet. And then on the bottom, we see regrowth, especially if we have incomplete coverage. So sometimes we kill everything and sometimes we don't. And when we don't, those weeds really come back with the vengeance, especially those that have been shielded by the sugar beet itself. Our 2022 experiment was more variable but it was still very good. And it actually gave us quite a bit of hope for trying to increase the ultra blazer efficacy without adding glyphosate. As I'm sure most of us are aware, the glyphosate formulation changed this past year from PowerMax to PowerMax 3. In our trials, we noticed more injury using PowerMax 3 than just using PowerMax. However, we tried a split application of 12 ounces followed by 12 ounces. And that was statistically the same as the glyphosate check regarding yield and quality data. We also started to look at using crop oil with ultra blazer. And again, less injury than we had with glyphosate. So these are a few photos from those trials. These were taken down in Hendrum, Minnesota. These are four days after application. So on the top left, we have just ultra blazer plus NIS. The bottom left is ultra blazer plus crop oil. So you can see the comparison of safety there. And then if we go to the top right, that's ultra blazer plus PowerMax 3. Very, very heavy injury there. But the sugar beet do recover rapidly. This is 14 day after treatment photos on the left versus 23 days after treatment photos on the right. So what, what all have we learned? Environmental conditions at application and the advance influence the sugar beet and the water hemp response. Ultra blazer cannot be applied with glyphosate and effumosate and acoracetamide in our lay by program. We see more sugar beet injury from PowerMax 3 plus ultra blazer. And then ultra blazer use in sugar beet is just a compromise between sugar beet injury and water hemp control. So looking forward, sugar beet tolerance and water hemp control from that repeat ultra blazer application or using ultra blazer plus crop oil as an adjuvant will be components of this section 18 for this coming season. We'll continue to investigate other possible ways that we can reduce the sugar beet injury. And we'll continue to look at ways to increase water hemp control with a focus especially on spray quality. This is a little snippet of some of the spray quality data that was compiled this year. The data tells us that increasing spray volume is better regardless of your nozzle choice. If you do use more water then you probably don't have to switch your nozzles. However, if you choose to use less water then your nozzle choice becomes very important. And unfortunately, when you increase water hemp control you are most likely increasing sugar beet injury because better coverage, better control, more injury. With that, thank you for your attention and thank you to the Sugar Beet Research and Education Board for their support of this project. And then I can take a question if there is one. I want to transition to a different weed. We wanna talk about Kosha. And Ms. Summer-Reedle is going to present an update on Kosha. So Summer is an agriculturalist out at Sydney Sugars and she was also responsible for conducting one of the experiments that we did this year. I would also like to acknowledge a co-author, Dr. Charlie Lim. Charlie is an extension specialist based out in Williston and the combination of Western North Dakota and Eastern North Dakota, Northwest Minnesota, I believe is we're seeing more Kosha and it's something that over the next several years I want to investigate. So Summer is going to give the presentation today and update us on Kosha control and sugar beets. All right, good morning. So as you might have seen this slide before with Adam, to get a better idea of on-farm production challenges grower surveys are sent out by extension programs. Over recent years, glyphosate resistance in weeds has been a growing problem. So in the Valley of course, glyphosate resistant waterhemp is a major problem throughout. But as you can see, when you move north, common regweed becomes an issue in Crookston and Grand Forks. And once you get up to Drayton, Kosha's reported on 57% of the acreage. Out in the Sydney growing area, as Adam said before too, about 70% of our sugar beet acres are affected by Kosha. So it is a significant challenge for our growers to control. Here are some examples from Walsh and Peppermint County in North Dakota. Kosha's synonymous with dry years. And in a lot of respects, 2021 and 2022, we had our challenges with drought. One implication of this was poor small grain stands and the lack of competition to crowd out the Kosha. We saw crops and weeds emerging at the same time in these years which further contributed to the expansion of Kosha in row crops. In dry years like these, even on the irrigated ground out in Sydney, we have a lot of issues with either in the dry corners or the headlands where the crop doesn't get as much water there. The Kosha comes in from the edges and then moves into the main part of the crop as well. So here's some examples of our 2021 issue in Kosha or with Kosha. We had a flood, so to speak, as you can see in these beet fields. It kind of snuck up on us partly due to the fact that typically when we have Kosha issues, we tend to blame it on things like environmental conditions, maybe application issues or things like that. But as you can see, it became very prevalent and something we couldn't ignore when it's widespread, I mean, from top to bottom of the Lower Yellowstone Valley out there. So it also affected small grains as well, not just beets. We're not sure how much of our Kosha is resistant, partially resistant, or if the low humidity conditions that don't favor glyphosate efficacy just really overtook us there. Good Delta T values for spraying were really hard to come by that year. And then it was further complicated by us having to irrigate our crops up, meaning we couldn't get into the field as soon as we'd like with our ground rigs to spray. And out there, we don't have the aerial applicators available to us to use either. So you can see the drought stress in the top left picture there. You know, the beets are looking pretty rough. Cultivation was actually used a lot in 2021. You can see between the rows, it's really clean. However, Kosha really overtook even within the beets there. And then in these fields, I mean, it was just 100% crowded out. We had 50% reduction in production values there. I mean, a field that normally averaged 30 ton per acre, I think did 15 this year. So, and then one other challenge that we have out there is a lot of our row crops are planted on 24, 26 inch rows, which just further lengthens the time for the canopy to close those rows. Here's some more annual survey results. You know, 30 to 40 years ago, Red Rib Pigweed really dominated the conversation. But in more recent years, Waterhemp has taken over. But this isn't the first time we're talking about Kosha. You can see in 2000 and 2010, it also presented a problem even here. So, moving on to our program objectives. First off, we'd like to see Glyphosate-resistant Kosha become a program priority. How do we do that? Well, by redefining a program approach focusing on controlling Kosha within the crop sequence, especially in soybeans and wheat where we have more herbicide options available for use. We are also always looking for additions to Glyphosate as well as using an integrated weed management approach by utilizing other forms of weed control, such as cover crops and cultivation, like I mentioned before. So Dr. Peters has conducted Kosha research periodically during his tenure. Here's a study from Barney, North Dakota in 2015. A few highlights from it are that we haven't seen much sugar beet industry, injury from any sugar beet herbicides alone or in mixtures. PowerMax, even PowerMax applied three times, no longer controls Kosha. We do see benefits from combining ethofumazate with PowerMax for Waterhemp control. However, we are not seeing that same additive effect for Kosha control. Ethofumazate pre and preceding PowerMax improves control at least in the early season. And the most successful treatment from this 2015 study was Etho followed by a mixture of Etho, beta mix and upbeat very early post. However, of course, it's important to note here that beta mix is no longer available and upbeat is really not effective for anything besides volunteer canola at this point. So we need new options. This was a study looking at ethofumazate in Manville, Minnesota. It can be an effective Kosha control herbicide, but in Dr. Peter's research, it has been inconsistent and a little bit unpredictable, even when it does get incorporated with rain. It's clear, however, that full rates of Etho do need to be used when it is applied in order to get the Kosha. One idea for more consistency could possibly be earlier fall applications or early spring, which is something being looked at. And then here are a couple of plots with Nortron and PowerMax. You can see it's critical that we target Kosha less than three inches tall and use full rates. You can see here we got some partial control in comparison to the checks on the sides. However, clearly it's not an effective control. So we need a program approach for Kosha control both in the sugar beet year and in the years in sequence with the sugar beet. You know, in Sydney, we only use a two year rotation typically, some guys use three years, but we really need to use a full court press, so to speak, in that non-sugar beet year if we want to control that Kosha. So looking at controlling Kosha in the sequence, we have some solid options when it comes to soybeans and wheat. For soybeans, if a conventional seed is used, a herbicide program could use some oxygen metribuzin combinations, such as Valor or Panther, plus a metribuzin. In terms of a biotech seed, a post-emergence app of Liberty, dicamba, or flex star could be used depending on the trait or else a dicamba pre. Post harvest Valor could be applied after your fall work is done, but it's advised not to work the ground after that. And then in wheat, Kosha or Incluency are a couple of good options that do have two modes of action. Lastly, post-weed harvest, Kosha escapes could be handled with either tillage or grimoxone in order to burn it down before winter sets in. Here's a Kosha control study in a herbicide tolerant soybean in Carrington and Minot from Dr. Mike Hosley. And list one, two, four D doesn't control Kosha and power max is weak on it, especially in mixed populations. However, Liberty remains effective and because of this, we want to protect it. Therefore, we're advocating combinations such as Liberty plus enlist duo. So here's a greenhouse study that Brian Jenks from Minot researched. He collected group 14 resistant samples from multiple locations, mostly in Western North Dakota. You can see Minot, Berthold, Mandan, and Mott were the locations. PPO herbicides are still effective on Kosha. However, populations that tolerate sharpen have been identified and tested recently. One note here is that both sharpen at one and two ounces per acre failed to control the Kosha. You can see the one and two ounces on the left and then note the failure to control that Kosha there. So where does that leave us? Oh, we need to double down on our options in sugar beet. This list has some options that are currently being screened for use in sugar beet. Right now, as Emma said, we're using Ultra Blazer on under a section 18 exemption to control water hemp. A question that many have asked is that could it also control Kosha consistently? An older herbicide might be relabeled in sugar beet. Rinse core is a new oxen herbicide being evaluated. And then there are glufosanatin dicamba studies being looked at as well for the future. So during the 2021 section 18, there was a lot of interest in using Ultra Blazer for Kosha control, but that just wasn't the focus then. We have some research which indicates variable control with Ultra Blazer, mostly a function of the size of the Kosha ad application. The key here is applying it to Kosha less than three inches tall while sugar beets are at least at the six leaf stage. This can have to be a tricky timing situation for applicators. For Kosha control, we do recommend glyphosate plus Ultra Blazer and adjuvants to get the best control possible. Here's some data comparing Ultra Blazer alone as well as mixed with adjuvants and PowerMax for Kosha control. You can see adjuvants provided value in mixed here, but notice a significant drop off from the one and two inch Kosha applications to the four inch applications. It shows that size matters and gone are the days of being able to control that six inch Kosha with herbicides very effectively at all. Here's a greenhouse picture from the study on the last slide. You can see the difference here between using Ultra Blazer alone versus Ultra Blazer with a non-ionic surfactant. So here's the row with Ultra Blazer alone. And the NIS provides additional control. And then as you combine that with PowerMax, you get complete control that Kosha in this situation. Same study here, but this is the Kosha when sprayed at four inches a significant contrast and control versus the previous pictures. So welcome crop protection recently purchased Fen Medifam or Spinade from Bayer. It's currently being used on spinach and red beets. However, they are looking at registering it for sugar beets if it provides value to growers and is effective for controlling Kosha or weeds. You can see we do have some historical data from the seventies from Schweizer and Weatherspoon showing that it did provide Kosha control. Dr. Peters intends to evaluate Spinade in a variety of ways and see what it does with our modern sugar beet varieties. If effective, we feel that a section 18 exception in 2024 might be our best path forward for controlling Kosha at Sydney sugars. A few other ideas that we will either promote or research coming up here in 2023 include Gramoxone applied after Kosha emergence and before sugar beet emergence. Fall and early spring applied Etho cover crops such as fall-seeded rye integrated with herbicide treatments and fall applied panther applied after field prep is complete where you would plant sugar beets in the spring into undisturbed soil. Part of these are being researched already at Nessan Valley and then we actually do have one grower that is currently practicing that last one, the fall applied panther, but they are in a no-till situation. It needs more data and more studying before we could recommend that with confidence. So beta mix taught us that size matters and the same is true for glyphosate-resistant Kosha. The difference between dime size and quarter-sized Kosha makes a large difference in control just as the two-inch versus four-inch Kosha showed us in the previous slides. Then I did mention a few bear crop science products here in this presentation. Thank you for your time today. If you have any questions, feel free to ask now or else here's my contact information. We're gonna change it up slightly. We're gonna move away from herbicides and we're gonna talk about strip tillage. So Aaron Hoppe, Mr. Aaron Hoppe has been a graduate student for the last couple of years. He's been conducting on-farm research in the northern part of the valley and this morning, Aaron's going to update us on his work. The title of this presentation is does strip tillage maintain sugar beet production? Mr. Aaron Hoppe. All right, good morning, everyone. To begin, I wanna share a few pictures, but let's focus our attention on the left half side of this presentation first or this slide. Basically, this is kind of the conventional way of producing sugar beet here in this region. So with intense conventional tillage, we disturb the soil very heavily and when we get drier conditions, that soil is certainly prone to wind and water movement. And we've all seen pictures like this where that soil is susceptible to being moved in the wintertime into the ditches and it becomes a very big chore to move that all back to the field and you're never gonna move 100% of it back to the field. So can we take an opportunistic view over to this right side of this picture and look at strip tillage for growing sugar beet? So the two pictures here in the bottom right are sugar beet grown into corn stubble with one of my locations here in 22 and sugar beet into standing spring wheat stubble, which most of the locations were conducted in. Objectives of this research, four main ones. Number one, probably the focal point, determined yield percent sucrose and recoverable sucrose in sugar beet with conventional tillage and strip tillage using on-farm techniques. So a lot of this or some of this prior research was done in small plots, but we wanted to investigate this specifically collaborating with growers on-farm. Number two, estimate plant stand and plant vigor across or between the two systems. Number three, see what soil temperature and soil water content are between the two systems. And lastly, estimate the economic comparison with growing sugar beet in both of these systems. The main point I want to point out there is if we can maintain sugar beet production but ideally save field passes with strip tillage, that's where we see some of the savings coming in. Materials and methods. So this project got underway in 2021. So we have two seasons so far. In season 21, we had five locations within Walsh and Trail counties in North Dakota and Polk County in Minnesota. So the picture here on the right, the blue icons show where those five locations were. In 2022, I had four locations that are now shown here in the red. So many of the same growers participated, the one that did not chose to do the whole field with strip tillage. So I did not have conventional tillage as a comparison. When we got this project underway, we asked the growers, we don't want you to change your production practices. So after sugar beet planting, we came in and we established our data collection locations where I would then collect data in season. So within, or basically to set up the data collection, we had six collection locations within each of the four reps. So six times four, we have 24 observations in conventional tillage, 24 then in strip tillage. Moving right into the data for stand counts. So left half I have 2021, right half here I have 2022. On the Y axis, I have plants per 100 feet. So for Hillsborough, we had two different counts. The initial counts were taken at the four leaf stage, but 2021, you probably remember being very dry after planting. A lot of the locations or two of the locations really didn't get decent adequate rainfall for germination for about four to five weeks after planting. So the initial counts were very low that we chose to do another count about two weeks later once we did get rain. So when the letters are similar, that means that the mean comparisons are similar. So the stands were similar for count one and count two and then Park River, the initial counts were similar, but then you could see that the second count strip tillage was actually less. But we had that freeze event around Memorial Day in 2021 and with the early emergence in the strip tillage, we felt that that was causing some of the lack of stand there in strip till. Warsaw North, you could see where strip tillage had more plants, okay? And then the average across all those events was similar. The last two bars here, we had two locations in 2021 that did not have conventional tillage as a comparison, but they wanted to participate. So I only have those there as reference. 2022, we had three locations where a stand was similar across the tillage treatments. Warsaw did have fewer plants and then the average across we did have a little bit less stand in strip tillage in 22. Soil volumetric water content. So one of the questions is, is there more or less water content between or in strip tillage, I should say? And so on the Y axis, I have volumetric water content and it's gonna depend between sand to clay, but generally around like 40 to 50% you're gonna have pretty saturated soil. So I have three different bars for each location and so the blue bar is conventional tillage between the orange being strip till right in that seed furrow and then the gray or the light blue is strip till between. So Hillsborough, we can see is similar, but that grower chose to use their field cultivator in the springtime. And so that kind of in my view, even the playing field out. So you'd have a lot more evaporation than in the strip till. Park River, we could see there was more water content in the strip tillage, Warsaw North, same story. And then the average there was more water content across the three locations. Week of July 26. Now you can see the Y axis here has a lot lower values as we've had more evaporation through the season, but then certainly the plants are using water as well. We had Hillsborough similar, Park River, more water content available in the strip till, Warsaw North, same or more in the strip till and then the average came out similar. Soil temperature. So hopefully this shows up okay. But basically to walk you through this, the Y axis temperature, the left hand, left half here is Park River. I did two different locations and Park River was more my medium textured soil where Warsaw was the clay textured soil. So you're gonna kind of see some unique differences between the two locations. And so the time or the day of the year is slightly different between just based on when we got the sensors installed. The first week of June was extremely warm into the air temperatures were in the 90s. So the average air is shown here in this yellow line. The blue is conventional tillage, the orange is strip till and then the light gray is strip till between. So we could see that when the air temperature certainly warmed up, that strip and the conventional till warmed up. And yes, the strip till between likely would warm up too but you gotta remember there's previous crop standing residue that's gonna be shading some of that solar radiation that's hitting the soil surface. So as we progress through the year we could see that conventional tillage kind of ends up being warmer over time. So in the strip, remember the sugar beets gonna be growing too. So that's gonna be shading that surface too. So this doesn't really surprise me. Warsaw North, the clay location I was telling you about now you could see these three treatments where we had the sensors placed. They really stack on top of one another. So there's not as much change in temperature and a heavier textured soil because of more water content likely existing. And so sometimes what's interesting as I've kind of looked at this from day to night in the daytime it might may warm up but at nighttime it might cool down a little bit more in that strip because of there being less residue on the actual surface. So for harvest results in 2021 so I mentioned the earlier counts having 24 observations this data was hand harvested. So we did not have 24 observations in this because of lack of labor. And so this data for yield is you're gonna see is gonna kind of jump around a little bit. For Hillsborough we had greater yield in strip till at pre-harvest time. So around September 1 for Park River again strip tillage had greater yield. Warsaw North was similar. And then the average across the three strip till did have higher yield. For harvest timing around the end of September we had similar yield now for Hillsborough. Park River was also similar. Warsaw North similar and the average was again similar. Certainly for looking at 2% sucrose my two top graphs we across the board we had similar sugar between each tillage treatment. And then for harvest timing same percent sucrose for both treatments. Recoverable sucrose certainly follows the yield. So Hillsborough at pre-harvest strip till or strip till was higher at Hillsborough. Park River strip till higher. Warsaw North was similar. And then the average strip till was higher. At harvest time here we can see now that conventional tillage did end up yielding more recoverable sucrose. Park River was similar. Warsaw North similar. And then the average across the three was also similar. So a couple of last slides I just wanna talk about some of the experiences. And so 2022 spring a lot of rainfall. Many of us are gonna understand that. So I pulled this data from the end on site at Grafton and we had about a little over twice as much rainfall than normal. A lot of the growers were like, how are we gonna get into these strip till fields? But they also asked themselves, how are we gonna get into these conventional tilled fields? So the two pictures here, this picture is conventional till. This one is the strip till. Some of the growers elected to use a rotary hoe or a sulfur or a field cultivator to scratch the surface. So that was one of their ways to adapt to still be able to get into the strip till fields to be able to plant them. Now, one of the questions that Dr. Peters and I are asking is if strip tillage becomes more common here in the Red River Valley, are we gonna see potential weed spectrums shift? 2021 was very dry after planting I mentioned. I hardly saw any weed pressure that made me concerned. But in 2022, these are some of the pictures that I took at one of the locations where we did have certainly more weed pressure in the trial area. So certainly needs to be something that is on our mind and we likely need to attack this a little bit sooner than in a conventional till system where we are able to kind of control weeds with tillage. Some personal thoughts on strip tillage to this point. Data comparisons have been mostly neutral, which is good in my mind. I mean, we're not necessarily expecting strip tillage to yield more, we just don't wanna see it yield less. Lower stands across locations in 2022. That's not ideal, but perhaps the soil temperature may be cooler in that strip till than we originally kind of hypothesized. May I say conventional tillage is not always ideal either. We have times where we have crusting in conventional tillage where stands are not always ideal either. With strip till, we leave residue on the surface to protect the soil movement. So in 2022, we saw some events where planting had to be or we had to replant. So can we sacrifice a little bit of initial stand to leave more residue on the surface to prevent replanting later? With strip tillage, fewer field applications can be made to achieve a similar goal. And I certainly wanna investigate the economics a little bit more. I haven't gotten to that at this point of the research. With strip tillage, we can also ban fertilizer to possibly be more efficient with our fertilizer inputs. And the last point there, I'm optimistic with strip tillage for sugar B production but I'm not ready to run a marathon yet. So with that, thank you. I'm gonna be delivering the next presentation. So the title of the presentation is going to be Water Hemp Control. We had an experiment in 2022 that we conducted at multiple locations. And I wanna talk about that experiment. But I need to acknowledge my co-authors. So I already mentioned Alexa. Alexa is, she holds our team together. So we can't wait for her to come back. And then I need to call out Mr. David Metler. David Wave at us. David runs our sites in the Southern Minnesota area. And I can't tell you how important his assistance is to the program. So if we would have to run our planter and other equipment down to Southern men, we would be a lot less efficient than we are today. So David, thank you for your work and your commitment to weed management. Okay, I guess I have the pointer. Oh, excuse me. This is data from American Crystal Sugar. So I wanna remind everybody about our average planting dates over the last number of years. And it's interesting to me, there's years when our average date is April 20th, April 21st, April 22nd. But contrast that to 2022. You know, that's the latest date for average planting that we've had in the last 20 years. We didn't get our planting done on average until after May 20th. Now this is crystal data, but I would venture to guess the data from MnDAC and Southern Minnesota is similar to this. Okay, now I wanna add on to this rainfall. So this is data from meteorologists, Sven Sungard, Minnesota Public Radio. And it's looking at our June and July precipitation anomalies. So red here, red and brown are bad news. It means less than normal rainfall for those periods of time. So let's back up, we planted late and we didn't get rainfall after we planted. And by the way, our soil residual herbicides are our number one program for controlling water health. So that's not good. There's a lot of signs that are pointing in the negative direction from these two scenarios that we played. So I wanna remind everybody of some historical data. And this is data that was developed by Dr. Schweitzer and Dexter. So the first one is important. The weeds that germinate and emerge around planting time cause significant yield loss. So before planting, four weeks after planting time. So again, I wanna point out, we planted in 2022 when weeds were emerging. Number two, and this is back to the early planting. If we can plant early, we can fend off some of those weed challenges because once sugar beets get to the six to eight leaf stage, in general, we can do a pretty good job of competing with weeds, especially in fields where we have a full sugar beet stand. Number three, and this is data from Dexter and Schweitzer and a graduate student, Rick Evans. And what it teaches us is that even a few weeds are going to cause a yield loss in sugar beets. And then finally, the last data is it reinforces that sugar beets don't, in general, compete very well with yields. And if we look at all the sugar beet growing areas combine weeds, rob, yield from us. And we certainly saw that in our fields. I don't have to show pictures. You all know that we struggled to control weeds, especially water hemp in 2022. So I had an experiment that was done or conducted at three locations. That was one of them was David's trial at Bloom Kiss, Minnesota. And then we had two experiments in the valley. And we originally had conducted these experiments really for training purposes. These are our best programs for controlling water hemp. But as the year evolved, the purpose of the experiments changed a little bit. So looking at the treatments, the first set is a post-program. So we wanted to look at roundup. And then we wanted to follow that up with roundup plus blazer. And then we wanted to compare that to outlook and warrant. Either outlook warrant or outlook first and following by warrant. And by the way, our data would say that our best program, our best lay-by program probably is that outlook followed by warrant program. So this program was done alone without a pre-herbicide. And then it also had a pre-herbicide. So we did it in both ways to see the advantages of pre-herbicides. So I mentioned the objectives. It was mainly a training experiment that we wanted to use for our agronomy ag staff teams. But over the season, we evolved this experiment because as you're gonna see in the data, we had very different weather outcomes, especially at the Southern Minnesota location as compared to the more northerly locations. So these are the data from the experiment. There's a lot of numbers up here. So I'm gonna pause a little bit, but I want you to see that the results that we saw at Moorhead at my Moorhead location and our Saban location are much different than the results that we observed at Southern Met. And quite frankly, it didn't matter at Moorhead and Saban if we used a pre-emergence herbicide or if we didn't, and it didn't matter which herbicides we used. We got good control at those locations. Now contrast that to Southern men. We didn't see control. Quite frankly, we had a failure and we control at Southern men and it didn't matter if we used a pre-herbicide or if we didn't use a pre. So it's interesting to me at Southern men, our best control was from our post-emergence programs. That hasn't happened in a while. So I wanna just call out these treatments. I'm gonna spend a little more time with them. So the outlook warrant program with and without a pre-herbicide. And I want you to just, I want you to see those numbers because we're gonna talk more about this as we dig deeper into the presentation. Before we get to more data, I wanna show you pictures. So the way we do our experiments, if you're not familiar is we spray the middle four rows of a six-row plot. So we always have a running check on both ends of our plot, both sides of our plot. So you can see that the post-treatment here on your left would be the outlook plus followed by warrant treatment. And then on the bottom, it would be the pre-program and that would be followed by the post-program. So the outcomes they're seeing at Saban is very similar to Moorhead, very good control. Contrast that to Southern men. And unfortunately my pictures at Southern men aren't as good, but I trust you we had a lot of weeds that came in our plots in Southern men. So the first thing we did is we said, let's take a look at the rainfall data. Will rainfall explain these results? So our idea is as we knew when we sprayed our pre, we knew when we put out our post-treatments, let's look at the rainfall records for 10 days that follow those applications. And that's what's in the table here. So after our pre-treatment, we had an inch of rain at Moorhead. We had a half an inch of rain at Saban and we had nine tenths of an inch of rain down at Bloomclips. And you can see the rest of the numbers. So what we're getting here is Moorhead had pretty favorable rainfall and it did. It was almost like a garden at Moorhead this year. Saban, it was really interesting. We were very dry early and we didn't get any weed germination and emergence. And I was starting to wonder if there was any weeds in the field. But once it rained, we started to get weeds. And quite frankly, the controls were just as bad as we'd want them to be. Southern men was really interesting. So the rainfall data would say we should have got activation of our pre. So let's dig into that a little bit. The main rain event at Bloomcast occurred on May 27. So the table on the left is hourly rainfall data in a 24 hour period of time. So you can see, even though it rained eight tenths of an inch of rain, most of that rain, at least the intense part of the rain came between eight o'clock and nine o'clock in the morning and it was only a quarter inch of rain. And my opinion is, is we had enough rain to get the weeds germinating, but we didn't have enough rain to get the Ethol. And in this case, we also had Esmitolachlor in our mixture. We didn't get our pre herbicides activated. So you've seen these data before. You know how much rain it takes. We've talked a little bit about factors that influence herbicides and the activation of herbicides. I still believe in this Ethol dual magnum treatment, but I just don't think we had enough rainfall at Bloomcast to get it activated in 2022. So why do I think that? Well, you know, if you go to chemistry, there's two factors that are important. Both the water solubility of our herbicides and also the absorptivity. So what the absorptivity it teaches us is the herbicides affinity to either wanna attach to soil or to be in the water solution. So for example, dicamba has a very low absorptivity value, meaning it doesn't wanna bind to soil and it moves into the soil quicker and combine that with the water solubility. And you can see that it takes hardly anything to get a pre emergence dicamba application activated in soil. Treflan's different. Treflan binds very tightly to soil and it's not very water soluble and that's the reason why we have to incorporate it. So you can see our four chlorocetamide herbicides are somewhere in between. And as we've talked previously, ethofumazate is probably the one that binds tighter to soil than the other three chlorocetamides and it takes more water to get activated because it's less water soluble. So we've been learning a lot about ethofumazate and in my opinion, ethofumazate is a fascinating herbicide. A few years ago, I thought it was the solution to all our problems. Put two pints out, three pints out free and don't worry about it. But more recently, we've learned a lot more about it. Etholites rain. In the spring when we get a lot of rain, I think we're gonna do a real good job of pre-control. In the seasons when we don't get as much rain, it's gonna be more problematic and we have to look at other things like maybe tillage to incorporate ethol. And by the way, I support that. I support using tillage to incorporate ethofumazate. The other thing that we've learned is, you know, the textbook would say that ethol is an eight or 10 week herbicide. I don't think so. I think if we get 35, 40, maybe 45 days of control from ethol, that's probably gonna be about all. So for that reason, we gotta use it in a program approach. Ethol isn't going to be a standalone herbicide. We need to use it in conjunction with the soil-applied herbicides that we have. Pre-emergence. You know, I went back into some of Dr. Dexter's data and this is really interesting to me. So, and these studies were done really for KOSHA, but what he found is when he set the equipment to one inch and two inch, we got better pigweed control than when we set the equipment to four inches. And the point of the work is don't get it too deep. Remember, pigweed germinates from the surface, maybe surface to one inch. So don't set your equipment too deep. You're not doing tillage. You're just incorporating the ethofumazate. And the other thing, again, from Dr. Dexter's work, it reinforces this point about performance in dry years versus wet years. So in many respects, my story is similar to some of the previous stories. Our environmental conditions, especially rainfall, is going to dictate the overall control we have. I strongly believe that we've got to start clean because when we have post-emergence weeds that come up, especially watering them, we can't control it. So we've got to stick to using a pre-herbicide to ensure that we have a clean start. Tillage is a way to reduce the risk, especially in years when we don't have timely rainfall. So incorporating ethos, especially when you're using four or five, six pints of ethopree, to me, that makes a lot of sense. And I still believe in that combination program. So ethos at the lower rates, in combination with dual magnum is a nice one-two punch because the dual magnum is easier to activate than the ethos. And then finally, I'm really starting to believe that it's not only the amount of rain, but the intensity of rain that ultimately is going to define the control that we've got. So that's the end of my presentation. Peter has not given me the red, well, now he is, but I'm going to try to take, I'm going to try to take a question or two if anybody has it. Okay, I'm going to introduce my colleague, Dr. Anna Cates. Anna is from the University of Minnesota. And I'm going to let you, Anna, use your time while it's loading to introduce your co-authors and your topic. Great. Hi, everybody. Looks like you pulled up the right talk. So that's a good start. I'm Anna Cates. I work on the St. Paul campus for University of Minnesota Extension. I work statewide in Minnesota and I'm the soil health specialist. So I've been in my position about four years. I got degrees in soil science and agronomy from UW Madison. And my research is mostly about soil organic matter and soil structure, how cropping systems change those properties and how in turn differences in those properties drive outcomes in cropping systems, things like resilience to different kinds of seasons. You can see my collaborators up there. I think many of them are in the room. So feel free to follow up with any of them, especially my grad student, then that Osterk who's doing most of the on-the-ground research as usually the case in these things. I also wanna thank some collaborators with the soil water districts, West Polk and Randville and also from Southern Mid and American Crystal Sugar who have helped me identify growers and set up some of our field trials over the last couple of years. This work is funded by a state pool of money in Minnesota, the, what is it called? The environment natural resources trust fund. So it's a water quality pool of money. And we're trying to figure out whether we can use cover crops to reduce some of the erosion damage that Erin Hoppe showed some nice pictures of a few minutes ago. I'm gonna start by just talking about the, what is soil health and how do we think that something like cover crops can reduce erosion on the landscape? What evidence do we have so far? We're in the beginning of our research. So I'm not gonna show a lot of data or significance, but I wanna let you know what the setup is and also why we think this is an important practice. So the Minnesota office for soil health is the name of the office where I work. It's also funded by the Board of Water and Soil Resources. And since soil health is in my job description and my title, I wanted to start by talking about what is soil health. So in these two pictures up here, the light isn't perfect. Do you, would you guys have a guess as to whether the left hand picture or the right hand picture would be qualified as as healthy or soil? Let's see, raise your left hand if you think the left and your right hand if you think the right. Let's see if I can do my mirror imaging. Okay, so we're all pretty much in agreement that visually that left hand soil looks a little healthier, but the qualities of healthy soil tend to be a little ambiguous. It's not unlike human health in that way in that it's a metaphor that encompasses a whole bunch of different properties. So my blood pressure might be great, but my, you know, heart health might not be perfect or my, you know, joints might be terrible. So you can have various qualities of your soil that are either more or less healthy as well. So I don't get too hung up about a specific organic matter level or a specific kind of microbes that leads you to a healthy soil. Instead, I think it's more about the functional outcomes of your soil that tell you whether your soil is healthy or not. So I like this flow chart for deciding whether or not a soil is healthy. This was largely developed by Kaylee Gash here, used to be here at NDSU and extension agent out of Washington Andrew McGuire. And it takes you through a series of yes or no questions and depending on your answer to the question, you could qualify your soil as healthy or not healthy. So does your soil blow or flow away? No, probably healthy. Does it water soak in quickly? Yes, probably healthy. Does it drain? Does it cross? Again, these are some issues that we have heard about already in terms of the crop production seminars that you've heard so far this morning. And a lot of these are related to crop production. Crop production is a function that a lot of us care about from our soil. I'm going to focus a little bit more on these first few functions, whether the soil is blowing or flowing away, whether water is soaking in quickly. Those are the functions, I think, that are really driving the crop production outcomes and related to our soil health properties. But what I like about this is that you can tailor your definition of soil health to the functions that you're most interested in the soil. So in the case of crop lands, we want to preserve our soil for future generations. We want to be resilient to some of the extreme events we see in the climate, the very dry conditions, the very wet conditions that we've seen over the last couple of years. And we also want to maintain our yield so that we're economically productive and able to stay in farming. Okay. So I think erosion is one of the sort of primary first things we need to control in order to have a healthy and productive soil. If your soil is blowing or flowing away, it's not healthy. This is happening all over the state and it's happening in every crop. It's not just happening in beets before and after beets in rotation. So it means it can be a real culprit, again, because of low residue on the surface. So beets are not the only part of this. I'm talking about beets today because this is a group interested in beets. But I'm working on this in other areas as well. So this shows the effect of a cover crop on changing how much water is moving soil across the landscape. You can see no cover crop on one side and some radish residue on the other side. So radishes are a little brassica. They didn't grow very big. They died in the winter. They tend to winter kill, but they're still slowing down the movement of water and soil across the surface. And so I like this photo because it shows that a small amount of residue could potentially still make a difference in terms of how much your soil is moving around. One way that I've been testing this around the state is using these little mats. So erosion is hard to measure, right? Soil moves all over the place. How far does it move? Where is it coming from? That stuff is really hard to track down. I'm using these little mats, which you pin on the field for a designated amount of time and then measure how much sediment lands on them to just show how much soil movement there is within a field. It doesn't tell us that soil is leaving the field or anything like that, but it tells us how much soil is moving. Once the soil is moving, it's more likely to leave. If it's not moving, it's less likely to leave. So it's a good start to telling us how much erosion is happening. I collected some data in some studies where we had rye cover crop planted before soybean and we looked at the spring window, sort of after soybean planting, but before any major canopy cover. So we had them out there for about a week and we saw this real strong signal where we had no cover crop. Oops, there we are. No cover crop in the system. We saw a lot more soil movement than where we had a rye cover crop in the system. This is a pretty heavy rate of rye. We haven't looked at a bunch of different rates to see whether the control of sediment movement declines kind of linearly with that. The other thing I'm looking at this with is in different tillage system. So this is a Southwest Minnesota on farm study where we had a guy doing strip till in one part of his field and replicants and field cultivation in the spring in the other part. And just that small difference in tillage, field cultivation isn't the most aggressive kind of tillage out there by a long shot, but just that small difference in how much soil was disturbed, made a difference in how much soil moved onto our mats. So we're able to use this to kind of detect some differences even with some small differences in management practices. I know that a lot of you guys know this because you're using nurse crops in order to prevent soil movement that can damage beet seedlings. So these show the data and the recommended practices from American crystal sugar. It's showing that in general, when they're using a nurse crop, they're able to increase profit because they're protecting those seedlings during the most vulnerable time. So you guys already know this. The question is, can we incorporate cover crops into a sort of a wider part of the rotation? And can we grow them a little bit bigger perhaps to protect the soil for more of the year outside of this narrow window during seedling emergence? And this figure is sort of a schematic of how that might work. Along my X-axis is cover crop biomass and along my Y-axis are different benefits. And I think what's really unclear in a lot of the cover crop research right now, we tend to think of just, do we have cover crops or not? And my ongoing question is how much cover crop biomass do we need to get the level of benefit that we're looking for? So Tom is looking for water ham control with cover crops. He might need a whole lot more biomass than I need to get erosion control with cover crops. So different levels of cover crop biomass might provide you with different benefits. And depending on your priority, again, the function you're looking for, you might kind of target a different level. So this is an ongoing question. And the nurse crops are providing a specific benefit in a lot of the cases. But if we get more biomass, we might provide different benefits. Okay, the real question, of course, with beets is how to squeeze them in, right? So this is showing a beet harvest. It's happening late in the year, it's cold. There's really very little that we can grow after the conventional beet harvest. And in this case, there's also a whole bunch of other agronomic questions to get in there because when you're growing cover crops, you're probably working in a strip till system, growing your cover crops and then tilling them up completely tends to negate a lot of the benefits in terms of residue and building soil structure. There's a whole lot of agronomic stuff to work out. And I acknowledge that I'm not doing all of that work in this study, but I'm talking to people and trying to understand those challenges and give the best recommendations we can on the agronomic pieces as well. So we're looking at both pre-beet and post-beet cover crops. And I'm sorry that yellow turned out looking crappy. And we have both on-farm and research plot location. And our idea was to try to do a little bit more extreme efforts at our research plot locations where we can afford to take more risks and do kind of the minimum possible at the on-farm location so that we weren't endangering the growers beet yield. So our on-farm experiments include before beets where strip-killing beets into a cover crop. So this means people are planting cover crops either after they're born in the Southern Bend, Renville area or after they're wheat in the Crook scenario. And the research plots, that's very similar. The post-beet is where we really see a difference again because that window to get something in is so small. We're trying at the research station to intercede the cover crops into growing beets. And I know this has been tried a few places in a few different ways and it continues to be a real challenge. I'm gonna show some pictures of that. In our on-farm post-beet cover crops we're doing something much more conservative. We're just trying to understand whether having strips of cover crops in the pre-piled parts of the field can actually slow that sediment movement down. So could that be enough if every single pre-beet acre in those strips was seeded to cover crops? How much is that slowing down the sediment movement? Could it be enough to give us some protection especially from wind erosion? This is some data that Joni DeYoung Hughes presented last year and it kind of echoes the things that Aaron Hoppe talked about a few minutes ago. Essentially we're working in strip till systems for this because they're more compatible with cover crops and we see that they're competitive with yield bouncing around a little bit as Aaron showed but we think that a strip till system can often yield similarly to a conventionally till system. This data is all from the Southern Minn area to the Green on farm locations. The cover crops in this case had no effect on the yield either. Okay, this is our research plots up in Crookston and here you can see the 22 inch intercedar working in our little pots and you can see the little plants growing up there. So kind of a harsh environment under that canopy of beets and so those cover crops did not all survive until the end of harvest but we are continuing to try and see if we can figure out other species or other seeding rates that might make this work a little bit better. This is a real challenge though trying to get the cover crops to stay alive under there. The on farm question though is whether the pre-pile cover crops could be enough. So this is from a growers field where he did plant cover crops between his beet rows but you can see here he's done his pre-pile pass and there's some cover crops left there. So most of the experiments we're doing the growers are planting their cover crops after that pre-pile harvest but I wanted to show a picture that a few growers are experimenting with this interceding on farm as well. So as I said, we're mostly measuring wind erosion here. This is a little picture of the sediment collectors that we're using in our on farm sites. They're a little bit like a wind vane that you see on the top of a building and that they spin around because of that sale that metal sale that you see on the back but this front part, I don't know do I have a laser on here? So this little hole is where the dust goes in and it's captured on top of a screen or falls through the screen inside this box and we have these at different levels. So down here at 15 centimeter, at 50 centimeter, 100 centimeter, so up to a meter and we're collecting the dust at those different levels because dust is traveling different distances when it is at different heights off the ground. So we're able to collect that over the course of the year and we're doing that in systems where we have a cover crop planted in your pre-pile acres and where you don't. Again, just to see how much sediment is moving. And what we see so far is that there's not a big effect of the cover crop. We've only had one month of data collection at one site up in Crookston but we have these installed again near Renville and near Crookston. What this does shows the different colors of the different heights of dust moving and we see a little bit more moving close to the ground which is about what we'd expect and then less moving at the 50 and 100 centimeter heights. So like I said, this is one month of data from one location. We might see something different after we look at it for a couple of years which is our intention to look at it this winter and next winter. Again, just to see if we see any increased protection over the course of that, the time of year when there's a lot of vulnerability to soil loss. Let's see, I also, how am I doing on time? Okay, I'm gonna skip this other preliminary data and just say that we did see when we looked at this with just a few collectors out there that increasing crop residue was really important in terms of sediment movement. So again, the question being with the cover crops is isn't enough residue to slow things down? And then as I said, we've got a couple winters of this post-feet data collection. We'll have research plots running this summer again in Crookston and in our on-farm locations. So I hope that next winter I'm able to share a few more results with you about all this. I wanted to point out that he's in the back of the room. He's kind of the primary data collector on this. So you could ask some questions of him. And then I guess I also wanted to say relative to the question that we came up earlier regarding changes in soil properties with these systems, we are measuring some things like that, aggregate stability and infiltration especially because aggregate stability or how much of the soil is in larger particles versus just fines changes a lot of water functions. So we're directly measuring water function with infiltration tests and then we're indirectly measuring it with changes in aggregate stability. Those tend to be properties that can change quickly. The microbial properties, it's like they change too quickly for us to measure. The microbes are living right there on the cover crop roots for sure. But to what extent that changes your carbon cycling or your microbes over the course of the season, it's usually really minimal after just one year of a cover crop practice. Our next presentation is going to also be a University of Minnesota presentation, Dr. Melissa Wilson. And Melissa is going to visit with us about liquid separated dairy manure in a sugar beet rotation, Dr. Wilson. So you can click that on and this is for our Zoom audience. And this is for our room. All right, everyone, it's your favorite time of the day. We're going to talk about manure. We started this study back in fall of 2019. So if you've been here for a couple of years now, you've heard me talking about this project. Our goal was to see where can we apply this liquid separated dairy manure into a sugar beet rotation. And this rotation includes soybean, corn and sugar beet. We're getting a lot more of these larger dairies moving into this region. They typically have a liquid solid separation system built in. And what they do is they're actually taking these solids and recycling them back into the barn so that they can use it for bedding. The liquid then is sent out to the fields. And the liquids typically will have a little bit of a different nutrient concentration than the raw manure before it was separated. So the goal was to see does this manure which tends to have more of a slow release nitrogen affect sugar beet yield. And where should we put it in the rotation? If it does. We have two rotations. We started our first site, like I said, in fall of 2019 in central Minnesota, near Murdoch, Minnesota. And then unfortunately our more northern site got flooded out that year. So we actually had to start that in the fall of 2020 where we applied manure up near Nashville, Minnesota. So we're about a year off from that location. We just completed our third year of the study. So we've done the full rotation now for our more southern site. And we just finished our second year of the rotation for our more northern site. This is actually how we applied manure. We didn't use application equipment in this case because we were trying to get small plots. So I made my technicians apply it by hand with a tube. So that was fun. And fortunately David Metler had to do it one year too. So we dragged him into applying manure. What we did is we wanted to do all three crops in every year. So that way we could apply the manure once. We applied the manure in the fall of 2019 in the one site and then grew corn, soybean or sugar beets right after that. And then continued the rotation so that we could see what the second year credits of the manure look like and what the third year credits of the manure look like. We applied two different rates of manure. Typically these dairies are offering two rates. You either get a low rate which is roughly about 10,000 gallons per acre and it changes based on the year or the barn. And that is to supply about enough nitrogen for the corn if it's following soybean. They also offer a high rate and the high rate is for corn following corn. So typically we recommend more nitrogen in a continuous corn system. So that's about 15,000 gallons breaker of this dairy manure. And then we compared that to spring fertilizer. So in that case we soil tested and applied nitrogen needs based on the different crop rotations. Like for soybean, we obviously didn't apply nitrogen but we did for the other things. Second and third year of the rotation we took manure credits for nitrogen and we soil tested and then we applied fertilizers for everything based on that. We did not apply manure again in the second or third year. Again, this is kind of a picture showing us that we have four replicates and each crop was in each replicate. And it was a pretty fun project. You can see within each one of these and in some of these plots you can see the differences pretty clearly. We have each of those three treatments and then we have six border rows as well. Everything was planted on 22 inches. And then since I have three years of data I'm just gonna dive right into it rather than showing a lot of pictures. Our first year of corn, this is averaged over both sites. So remember this is 2020 crap year for our more Southern Murdoch site. And it's a 2021 field season for a more Northern site up in Nashua. On average corn yield was statistically the same across the different treatments. So fertilizers yield about 218 bushels per acre and our high rate of manure yielded about 220. Our lower rate yielded a little bit less but statistically there was enough variability that we didn't see a significant difference. But overall we saw what we wanted to see, right? We were aiming to apply the same nitrogen rates and fertilizer rates across the board and we saw similar yields across the board. We had some issues with soybean though. So soybean you typically don't apply manure in front of soybean, but again we just wanted to see what happened. And sometimes I like to joke that my research program is doing dumb things so you don't have to. This is one of the things that we found that you should not do. So at our Nashua site this has a more neutral soil pH site. So we actually did not see any issues with soybean. In fact, our minority plots actually had slightly higher yield interestingly though statistically they were not the same because we did see a lot of variability across this field. At our more southern sites we have a field with a high pH, it's above eight. And typically when you have high pH and then high organic matter and then also high nitrate in those soils you really drive iron deficiency chlorosis. And so our crops or soybeans really got burned up and you can see to the line where we applied manure in those plots. So you can see that our soybean yields were significantly like drastically reduced. It was kind of sad. We had like a few plants in the plots left in some cases. So again, do dumb things so that you don't have to. This is one of those things manure in front of soybeans on top of a high pH soils maybe not a great idea. Our sugar beet though looked really good. We were pretty pleased with everything. Our tons per acre, we're all statistically the same. We did get a slightly higher tonnage for roots with our high dairy rate manure. Extractable sugar in pounds per ton was all very similar at around 285 on average. Extractable sugar in pounds per acre was above 10,000 and everything was statistically the same. We did see slight differences in purity though. So with our high manure rate we saw a slightly lower purity at 90.8%. But our fertilizer plots were only about 0.04% or 0.4% higher at 91.2. So we did see a slight difference in that first year with sugar purity. So depending on where you are, what's co-op you're with that may or may not impact your calculations for economics. Moving on to the second year. So remember manure was not applied again but we did apply fertilizers as needed. We started seeing some statistical differences interestingly in this year. So this is corn following soybean in the rotation. Our fertilized plots yielded a little bit lower than we were hoping for in both years. So this was 2021 at the Nashua site in 2021 at our Murdoch site. So we're seeing a little bit lower or a little bit of a drought year. Overall our fertilizers yielded about 140 bushels per acre but our high manure rate yielded 158. So 18 bushels per acre higher from those manure credits and potentially some of the other nutrients that were released with the manure as well. Soybeans in this case, yields were very similar across the board and this is averaged over both sites. So we weren't seeing as many differences with the iron deficiency chlorosis the second year after application for our soybeans like we did the first year. There were still some lingering issues in some plots which is why we see high variability across these with these error bars. But overall we're pretty pleased that we didn't have quite the issues that we did in the first year. And sugar beets looked really good again. We actually with our high dairy rate manure our root yield was statistically higher at 33 tons per acre versus about 31 and a half with fertilizer or the low manure rate. Our extractable sugar was statistically the same roughly about 304, 305 pounds per ton. Our extractable sugar was a little bit lower this year but we did see statistical differences again where we had higher extractable sugar for our high manure rate plots. Again, I'm saying the high manure rate but again, this is two years ago. And we did not see any differences in this particular year with sugar purity. Now for our third year, we only have one site so this is Murdoch in 2022 here. So we'll finish up our third site at Nashua this upcoming year so only have one year but so far we're still seeing differences with that lingering manure effect in our corn where our high manure rate actually yielded 162 bushels per acre versus our fertilizer only plots yielded 137. So again, we're still seeing those lingering effects which is great. I always extoll the virtues of manure and again, we're seeing this especially in these systems where nutrients are playing critical factors in getting yield. We're seeing that manure can be beneficial. With our soybeans, we didn't see much of a difference although we tended to have slightly higher yields following the manure where we had manure in the rotation. Again, this is the third year after rotation and that was interesting again because we did see such a yield hit that first year. Again, we're surprised to see that we didn't see that through the next three years. And sugar beets looked really good again. Again, our high dairy manure rate which had been applied three years ago had higher yield, root yield about 35 average versus fertilizer was about 32 tons per acre. Extractable sugar in pounds per ton was similar. Our sugar purity was very similar across the board. In fact, even maybe slightly the tiniest bit higher in our manure plots and our extractable sugar in pounds per acre was significantly higher with our long-term manure plots. So overall, a lot of people were certainly concerned with applying manure into the system because we don't want nitrogen late in the season and sometimes manure provides nitrogen late in the season but we're not seeing negative impacts on sugar beet. Maybe soybean, that might be something to avoid but overall, we're pretty pleased with the results. So we will again continue or finish up this study for this year and we'll see in the future. We're hoping to maybe start some plots where we can look at the long-term effects with manure. So manure had been only applied in these fields like this is the first time in a long time. So we'd like to see what happens when you apply manure several times in the rotation over the long term. So our next presentation is from Dr. Dan Kaiser and the title of Dan's presentation is Know Your Nitrogen Inhibitors, Daniel Kaiser. So what I'm gonna talk about today is this would essentially be year three of one of the projects we have looking at different nitrogen inhibitors specifically focused towards urea. And that's one thing that we've seen is in a general trend for increasing urea use. And one of the things that we see or get a lot of questions from growers is looking at, particularly with some of the different timings with fall application, what are our best options? And if we look at urea in terms of a nitrogen source particularly for fall application it's problematic. Particularly since urea has two separate when we start looking at loss pathways that it can hit. It's different from anhydrous that when you're injecting it, yes, we can get nitrification and get nitrate leaching. But urea essentially will go through this process called hydrolysis which is that first initial step where urea is converted to ammonia gas. Then hopefully that ammonia gas is in the soil where it can form ammonia which is the positively charged ion that is held in the soil. But we know that through that process that those two loss pathways that we can, when we start looking at a lot of the data particularly for fall application there becomes more issues with urea than we get with anhydrous. So a few key concepts here hydrolysis. Again, this is the initial step where urea is converted to ammonia or it's ammonia gas. An enzyme is what's responsible for this and this enzyme is in all your soils. Where this enzyme comes from is from plant material. So where we look at really more of a substantial issue with volatility of urea, it comes to situations where we have high residue where there's a lot of urease that's leaking out of that residue that more quickly hydrolyzes ureates themselves. So if we look at surface applications without incorporation saying continuous corn, we know that's likely gonna have a bigger effect on the rate of hydrolysis versus say, post-sugar beet or soybean where you would have less residue out there where we can have potentially less issues. But that's not always the case but we know that particularly for high residue situations that there can be some problems. The other concept is nitrification. This is the conversion of ammonium to nitrate. Again, with urea, we know that this process happens much quicker because we don't have the impacts that we see with anhydrous on the soil biology. So we know that with urea, even though urea has a high salt content that you're not gonna see that delay in microbial activity that you would have and that processes happens a lot quicker. One of the things that when we start talking about hydrolysis that I really tried to point this out to a lot of growers is that we know that cold slows down the nitrification process. So when we start talking about that 50 degree rule, we know that at 50 degrees in the soil, we see a substantial drop in the rate of nitrification. However, if you look at the hydrolysis process, this is not true. So this is a graph showing two different temperature regimes showing looking at 35 degrees Fahrenheit and 80 degrees Fahrenheit, the rate of hydrolysis from an 80 pound application of nitrogen as urea. Looking at about at 80 degrees, about four days, we see full hydrolysis of that 80 pounds at 35 degrees Fahrenheit. We're looking at roughly 10 days slowing. So it's doubling the time, but still it's relatively rapid where that hydrolysis is occurring. And where this comes into play is with fall applications. We're not necessarily safe from that volatility issue with the fall application. And I'll talk about this when it comes to incorporation depth towards the end because that's what concerns me with more and more vertical tillage or more shallower incorporation this product, what's gonna happen. There has been some studies out there looking at loss of nitrogen with following urea application on frozen ground. The key points here, this is looking at urea plus versus urea plus agritane is that the loss potential is much greater in the winter as we get to the spring, looking at a much lower loss potential and a much lower benefit from that agritane application. So again, cold can slow the process down, but it doesn't eliminate it moving forward. So the project we have in place has two components. One is a rate trial. I'm not gonna talk about that data this year. I talked about that last year. The study we had at Crookston in the Northern growing region, we had a lot of residual nitrate. So there wasn't a lot of a, much of a rate effect going into this year. We had about 140 pounds of nitrogen in the top four feet in that site. And we maybe saw a response to the initial 40 pound application looking at it though it was non, the whole data was set was not significant. So I'm not gonna show that data. I wanna focus more on the source portion of this because that's really kind of the nuts and bolts of what we've been trying to do is to get some initial idea on some of these products, whether or not they're giving us any potential benefit, particularly fall application. So this study, we had 10 products to control, 100% urea, we had blends of ESN ranging from 33, 66 and 100% of ESN anval, which is a urease inhibitor. Agritane, we're using a low rate. It's just only about a quarter of the recommended rate. And this is to mimic the rate of agritane that's in SuperU. SuperU is a combination of DCD, which is a nitrification inhibitor plus a low rate of agritane. So it's trying to tease out if we do see a benefit from that, is it coming from the agritane or is it coming from the SuperU? When you look at in terms of the company UIs, I know they're really pushing more sales of anval right now because that's the new product that's out there to replace, potentially replace agritane, but we know agritane, we've got a lot of data that says that it has a lot of efficacy. The other product, instinct next-gen, the difference in instinct next-gen versus agritane, agritane is a rate per ton. Instinct is like NSERV, it's a rate per acre. So if you start talking about variable rate nitrogen applications are varying in your nitrogen rate becomes more problematic since it's also gonna vary that rate, which is meant to be a rate per acre. Then ammonium sulfate, I wanted an ammonium source. So we didn't balance out the sulfur, but I haven't seen sulfur responses on beets based on some of our past information and we see a lot of that data carry true with some of our studies. So what I'm gonna show you is the average data. I'm only gonna show four different data sets. The one on the left is our emergence. So I get a lot of questions still about that with urea, spring urea, we see it consistently a decrease in emergence with sugar beet. The data I showed last year though, if we look at yield that doesn't seem to impact yield though. So we see that the sugar beet, even though we have reduced emergence, particularly spring rates of urea, the higher we go, it doesn't seem to impact yield. It seems like the beets will tend to compensate for themselves. Looking at our source data, you see a lot of bouncing around the blue is the fall, the red is the spring. The thing is here, it's completely non-significant. So in terms of the sources, the sources really, this is a low rate of 45 pounds really weren't giving us any benefit for reducing emergence. And some of that may be because of the low rate because we know that with some of the other data that's a very trials of those lower rates weren't giving us as much of an impact on emergence as it was once we got closer to that to 90, 100 pounds of nitrogen as urea. Root yield, no significant response. This is again a three site year average. There's a fourth site we had in there. I've been sorting through that data yet. So I didn't include it in that. But overall, if we did get a response, it was pretty similar across most of the sources. You'll see a few of them where it looks like it's lagging. The main effect that we saw here was about 1.3 ton breaker increase in root yield with the spring application. So there was a difference in timing, but there was really no impact or interaction with timing and source right now. So that's where having additional sites has been official. And that's why we've been running this multiple years. And I'm hoping to run this for an additional two years just to get more data in to try to tease out some of these differences if there are any. That's one of the reasons we also run the low rate is it's better to be on the responsive side when it comes to some of this testing versus putting a too high of a rate on it. We're not gonna see any differences. So the only difference we have seen, there's a slight drop in the extractable sucrose per ton. We're looking at it's less than a 5% drop. It's pretty similar for all the sources. The only one that was slightly less than the rest of them were SuperU, which was just a slightly greater drop in recoverable sucrose. The other thing we've been looking at is petiolitrates. And I didn't have this data last year. So some of this petiolitrate data we're taking these samples 40 to 50 days after planting just to try to see whether or not we can see any increases in the nitrate concentration of the petiol that may indicate where some of these products are providing nitrogen later in the season. The big thing on this, if you look at the data there is roughly a 60% increase in the nitrate concentration from spring application. So this would kind of bear what we were seeing for root yield as we're seeing a greater availability of a spring versus fall. And a few of the products, so we look specifically at anvol and also instinct we're seeing higher nitrate concentrations than the rest of the products. Everything essentially increased nitrate concentration the petiol is over the control. It just seemed like those two products were slightly higher. And this is one of the things that I'm interested in seeing is is any of these classes of products more consistently increasing nitrogen concentration because that's one of the things I'd really like to know is on the loss pathway side. Since we have two potential loss pathways with nitrogen as a urea is can we separate out which one may be more important because it would essentially go a long way into figuring out what the recommendation for growers might would potentially be for some of these products moving forward. So wrapping up the petiol nitrate right now, I did combine, we have had all the data done actually through last year and I combined the one site that I didn't have the data in these, the graphs. I was still looking at it roughly around 850 to a thousand part per million. It's kind of where we tend to maximize yield. The issue is with root yield though, it's kind of a wall beyond that. So you get anywhere from about 40% maximum yield to 100% maximum yield within that 850 part per million. So this is kind of something we see with something like the basal stock nitrate test for corn is where it's a very good qualitative test. It'll tell you if you've got too much or too little but not necessarily tell you what to do beyond that. The source data right now, it's not clear. And again, that's kind of what we're looking at in terms of moving forward. So a few things I wanna leave you with before I wrap up here, one is this depth issue. And this is one of the things that concerns me looking at some of the data, particularly with a more reduced tillage going on and with fall applications of Urias that shallow incorporations almost worse than no incorporation based on a lot of the data. So this is just showing data, looking at surface application, looking at the amount of loss of nitrogen as Uria in terms of days. So this is going from zero to 25 days. One thing you'll see here is if you compare the surface application, you're seeing a slight loss within the first week, but more loss within that one inch incorporation. If you look at total loss over the 25 days, this data set says, you're still better off with that one inch incorporation. But one of the things I stress to a lot of growers if you're looking at Uria, this is maybe where you wanna look at a Urias inhibitor because this is all loss coming from the volatilization of ammonia. And you can kind of see with two and three inch depth how much that loss potential drops off. And that's one of the reasons our best management practice is really focused on a two or at least a three inch or incorporation depth to try to minimize some of the loss potential of Uria through volatility. What's new out there? I wanna talk just briefly about this. Lemus, we don't have that product in our setup right now. That's a Urias inhibitor by BASF. I don't have a lot of data on it. That's why we're using it. Centuro, that's a nitrification inhibitor by Coke. Again, this is another one that I get a lot of questions from growers on because we see some retailers switching to Centuro versus NSERV. And some of this is because it's less corrosive than NSERV, the data, although it isn't always where we start looking at it being much better or even any better than NSERV right now. So that's one of the things that we've been working on. It's a lot of work's been done in the South, central part of Minnesota looking at this. I don't know if it's a perfect switch when we start talking about Centuro versus NSERV because we've got a lot of data out there that shows the benefits of NSERV. Anval, again, that's the product we had that has Duramide which is Urias inhibitor and NBPT. So it's got both those two and NBPT is the active ingredient in agritain and then instinct. This is the one again we had in this, it's micro-encapsulated nitropyrin. So it's the same active ingredient as NSERV. It's just micro-encapsulated to make it work better with Urias particularly since the NSERV is highly volatile and can volatilize with a near surface application. The last thing is when you think about a lot of these inhibitors, it's just like anything. We sit here and hear a lot of talks about weed management and with inhibitors, it's the same type of concept that your rate of your active ingredient is important. And one thing that we've seen with agritain coming off of patent is we've seen a lot of generics of NBPT which is the active ingredient in agritain out there. The main thing that you wanna focus on is that you wanna make sure that you have roughly 1.3 to 1.8 pounds of NBPT per ton of Uria to be most effective. And that's one of the things that products can contain a small amount of the NBPT but it may not necessarily be effective. So you're gonna treat a lot of these inhibitors as you would with any of your other chemicals that a small amount, it might do something but it's not gonna give you the most desired effect. So there's some other stats out there. I don't have them for all these inhibitors but I wanted to bring this one up because I see this one more often, I get more questions from growers on some of these generics that are out there. But again, NBPT, we know it works and even with some of these generics, they should work as good as they should with agritain as long as the rate of active ingredient is important. And then also with ESN, realize that ESN is not an inhibitor itself. So ESN is a coating, it limits the release of Uria to the environment but once it gets out beyond that coating, it's gonna be effective like any other Uria source. So that's one of the things that I'm looking at it, we know that it does very well, particularly with cold conditions it should hold the nitrogen inside that coating. So that's one of the reasons we're looking at this more for fall application because it would give us probably the best option. Although what we're seeing with this product is if you look at across a number of our studies about 30 to 33% blend of ESN to Uria seems to be kind of where that sweet spot is, particularly for corn, beets will kind of see, looking at the data we had it looked pretty consistent at least for the nitrogen availability side. So that I do wanna thank the research crews from Southern Men, Dave Metler knows in the back and then also from Crookston from the Northwest Research and Outreach Center because without their help that it'd been very difficult to get a lot of these projects in place.