 Today, I will discuss some strategies for efficient and profitable management of sarcasm for a least spot. I excuse my voice. I got a little bit of a itchy throat. I will share with you some of the control measures and what works and what doesn't work in dry and wet conditions. I will briefly discuss the efficacy of some individual funding sites as well as some mixtures. And probably most importantly, what I would like you to take away is the principle of mixing funding sites and how effective they are in a rotation program. I would like to stress this because what happens if you have two funding sites, one of them is effective and the other one is not very effective. In a rotation program, if you use effective and non-effective ones, those programs at the end will still look pretty good for the most part, especially in a year like 2021. What happens over time, however, is that there is higher selection pressure and those that were working suddenly they become ineffective and then the whole system crumbles. I know in 2021, American crystal didn't have CR varieties, but you will start having this in 2022. So I'd like to share some information as to how best we manage these varieties when they become available to you. I will also touch briefly on an experiment with pillage and crop sequence that the board has funded. And I will conclude with a take home message. So leaf spot, as we all know, is damaging to the leaves. Once you kill the leaves, we have reduction in tonnage, reduction in yield. And some years, like in 2021, you may have really good control in June, July, August, even into September, early September. But then in mid to late September, we may decide to stop spraying our fields. And if you have a year like 2021 where it's wet, where you still have high inoculant pressure, your field can become brown. And you probably won't lose much in terms of tonnage, excuse me. But your sugar, you can lose very quickly a half a point to 1 percentage point reduction in sugar concentration. So we need to be careful about that and maybe take some, make sure we leave some money towards the end to manage a fund decide at the end of the growing season, especially at American Crystal. Now, Sarkozy's release spot has been wrong more or less from the beginning of the sugar beet crop. It's happening worldwide. In a lot of European countries, they do not have as many fund decides, especially the multi-site fund decides we have. So they have resistance issue, and they are having difficulty in controlling, excuse me, their disease. Fortunately, they too are now having some improved varieties, and that is what is going to take them out of this crisis. You indicated in your survey this morning that leaf spot is still our number one problem. And as you go more south at Mindak in southern Minnesota, it's even more damaging for them. What has happened over time is that the fungus has developed resistance to the QOI fund decide, so they are no longer working very effectively. And the triazoles are becoming less and less efficacious. And it doesn't matter that you might have four or five triazoles, they are not all equal in terms of their disease control. And I'll show you some data with that. In 2020 at Wapitun, it was very wet in that from July through September when we are harvesting. Nearly every time after we finish our spray, you will have a rainfall event. Sometimes a few hours after application, sometimes a few days after fund decide application. So no matter if you put four, five, six applications of fund decide mixtures, unless you had a very, very resistant variety and none of those treatments were effective. I show you a picture of 2020. If you look at that site, the only green that you really see there, which are more or less these ones here, are where you had CR plus variety or some tolerant varieties. Everything else that we had were normal commercial varieties with least spot rating of four or higher. And as I indicated, no fund decide applications, no matter what we did or how many we applied, were effective because it was too wet, not so much because of resistance issue, but because the fund decides were washed off. In a wet shear, this is what happened. A non-treated check very quickly had a CLS rating of 10 by the middle of August. The sugar concentration, excuse me, was only 12.8%. And the recovered glucose was just over 2,000 pounds. The best treatments were in one, two, three, four, five, six applications. They were looking fairly good by the time the check reached 10, but by the end of the season, the treatments with six or seven applications had the same least spot rating. And I'll show you a few more pictures as the check. Their sugar was somewhat higher, but the tonnage was very low. And the highest recovered sucrose, the best treatment, was just over 5,000 pounds per acre. So in a wet shear, no matter how many applications you made, the fund decides were being washed off and we could not control the disease. These are some pictures of some of the treatments at Foxo. As you can see, none of the treatments here were effective. This particular one I show you, and it actually has 17 treatments here with four reps. You have untreated checks. You have treatments with five applications of fund decides with or without adjuvants. And the reason why I bring that up, we were trying adjuvants to see if they can improve the efficacy of fund decides, especially, especially in wet years. And you can see in 2020, when it was wet, we could not tell the difference between the check or any of the treatments with or without fund decides. I want to also add that several of these fund decides here, or most of them, will have some kind of adjuvants to help them to spread and to stick to the leaves of the sugar beet plant. We did add additional adjuvants. And for the most part, if you compare the treatments by themselves, we use an EBDC, a copper, a triazole. And then we did what we normally recommend, a fund decide rotation of mixtures. You can see in 2019, both years, the fund decide mixtures did much better than individual fund decides, especially so in 2019. The check was only 5,000 pounds in 2019. In 2021, the check was over 9,000 pounds, which was higher than the best fund decide treatment. And the reason was that you had really good conditions. It was dry, but it was warm and it got very wet towards the end of the season. And we had very high yields at the Fox home site. But with regards to the adjuvants, preference, complex or transfix, by adding them to the fund decides, except for complex onto a badge where you had a bump in recoverable sucrose. None of the adjuvants increased the yield recoverable sucrose compared to using them alone. So in 2019, as I indicated earlier, it was dry. We use fund decide mixtures and rotation. You had excellent disease control and high recoverable sucrose. In 2019, the check was only 5,600 pounds. The fund decide treatment provided significantly higher recoverable sucrose because you had better disease control. However, the price for a shake was not great in 2019. And our growers still made more money by applying fund decides after subtracting the cost for the fund decide and the fund decide application. Take note of the amount of money they made in 2019 compared to 2021 when the price was higher. So this is just showing you that if you have drive conditions, you use mixtures in a rotation program, you had excellent control. This particular treatment here, we applied the first treatment just before closure as well. So what should be the principle when we're applying fund decides in mixtures? I indicated that because of the fact that the population has become more or less resistant to the QOI fund decides and either resistant or less sensitive to the Q to the DMI fund decides or the triazoles we shall always mix. And we're saying mix two different fund decides and when you want to evaluate them you evaluate them individually to see that they're giving at least fair to good control when used alone. These are examples tops in by itself is a very weak one but rather than putting tin alone and I'll show you some data we're tin tops in consistently is one of our top treatments. And that is probably more so because of the fact that the tin works very well by itself. You can use a triazole and an EBDC or a triazole and a copper as well. I wanted to reason why I kind of put it like this here is usually the triazole and the EBDC journey look a little bit better than the triazole and the copper but you can mix and match. In areas where these possibilities low or where there's a high resistance to both the QOIs and the DMI's that means they're not working. What you can do is just use tin as your base one, two, three applications and then use a top sim, a copper and then EBDC's just mix them together. So you don't have any QOIs and any triazoles. One of the reasons for doing this here if you continue to do that for some time we may be able to eliminate or significantly reduce the population that is resistant to the QOIs and the DMI's and we may be able to make them more effective again. Right now the population is still very high so we have to be careful when we're using those funding sites. Now I'm gonna share with you some of the data from 2021. You can see in 2021 compared to 2020 we have lots of green plots. We also have brown ones where you have they're either non-created check or some treatments for not working but most of the brown ones are where you had effective funding sites. In 2021, I had started inoculating some of these plots from the middle of June to see if we'll get disease and we didn't get disease here severe disease until late July. The entire area was inoculated on the 13th of June. We started spraying some treatments before that on the 28th of June and a lot of them were applied the 7th of June. Some treatments where we had improved varieties we applied funding sites only when needed. I will share that with you as well. Now we didn't get much disease severity until around the middle to late August and this is what the check looked like where we had severe disease with a variety that had a leaf swap rating greater than four. So keep this picture in your memory. This is what the check looked like what will happen if you do not control the disease. What we saw like in previous year 10 again was very effective and EBDC was very effective as well as badge. So these treatments by themselves, five applications and this is illegal. So don't you go doing this here. You can apply multiple applications of man's date and copper but this is just to show you what happens individually compared to a check. What else worked? The triazoles were not equal. The best of the triazoles were in order proline followed by inspire, followed by Minerva. Unfortunately, the other triazole or triazole plus SDHI by the end of the season they were just as ineffective as a non-treated check. It provides some control already in the season but very rapidly in September, they became like a check and their recovers so close were not significantly different from the check. So these are your best triazoles. I'll show you this graph here. The red line indicates the leaf spot rating. So in the check, the leaf spot rating was 10 and the individual fund decides such as tin, man's date and proline had effective control. Usually I use a leaf spot rating of six or lower. If it's six or lower, most of the time you don't get economic damage. Inspire, you're probably losing a little bit of yield here. The treatment with the highest leaf spot rating was a check and the yield here was just over 9,000 ponds where you had significant disease control. The yield was anywhere from over 11,000 to about 13,000 ponds recovers so close per acre. So once again, you can see these are your main ones, your tin, your man's date, proline, your badge and another triazole. These are giving you your best treatment when used alone. Now, what happens if you mix them? So when you mix, let's say an EBDC and a triazole, you can see you still have really good control, a tin and a proline, good control or a man's date and a proline. So two different multi-site tin and an EBDC with a triazole, good control. And look again, these are the treatments here compared to the non-treated check. So individually or these mixtures, when you use them five times, this is what you get. So what we recommend is that you set up a rotation program where you're having mixtures. And when you do that, let me give you these data first. Here again, the check here is under 13,000 ponds. When you have the mixtures, you can see the leaf spot rating now is even lower. All of them are lower than five. There are four or less compared to previously we were using individual fundicides. So individual fundicides were good, but mixtures are better in terms of better disease control. And in most instances, numerically, higher yield, not always statistically significant. So if you go into a routine, oh, before I forget, there are some fundicides when you use them individually, they did not provide effective control. I don't want to go into more detail with this, but just that individually, they were not very effective, starting early and going five times. I put this slide up here for you just so you can kind of compare what happens with some of the treatments compared to the check. So 9,500 ponds in your recovers sucrose in your check. Supertin was the best followed by manzate, proline, your badge, you inspire, you maneuver. Unfortunately, the Lucento and provisal, which are also either DMI or DMI and SDHI, the disease control became less efficacious and over time, they were not significantly different from the check. Now, we have to be careful here. We are already starting to lose these fundicides and very soon, if we do not do something well with mixtures, these other triazoles will also start to go. It's just a matter of time. I selected a few treatments from our rotation program to show you that once you use fundicide mixtures, in 2021, you could abuse four, five, six or seven. And once you use mixtures, and in some instances, you could just use one product. For example, here I use seven applications, starting with a manzate, before reclosure, a manzate and a tin, a manzate and a proline, a manzate and a tin, inspire. This is like what Southern Mint recommends. And of course, you had excellent disease control, high-recovered sucrose, and significantly among money more compared to the check. So this is starting with one or Lee. This is starting with a mixture already, but now rather than seven applications, I started about a week or so later, but with a mixture, always here with a mixture, now I only use one treatment. Next, this is more or less like something like American Crystal would recommend. Six applications, you also had really good disease control and high-recovered sucrose. The reason why I'm showing you some of these here, sometimes you will put treatments, let's say treatment number five. All treatments here have two treatments and you may have a fundicide that is not working well, but if you have one that is really working well in a rotation program, you will still have good control and high-recovered sucrose. But by doing that, we can put higher selection pressure and over time lose some of those fundicides. These are pictures of a rotation program. Again, you can see where you mix the fundicides in a rotation program. You have good to excellent control and high-recovered sucrose and you make a whole lot of money more compared to doing nothing. I indicated earlier, you can just use what I call the multicides, no QOI, no triazoles, especially as you go maybe north of Crookston area or even in the Crookston area and going north. You can have good control and you will probably be the first to get those triazoles back working well and maybe even prioxor. In all of those treatments that I showed you that were working well, we use 17 gallons of water per acre and 60 PSI. We did an experiment whereby we use five, 10, 15 and 20 gallons of water per acre. We just use different nozzle type here. And you saw, you can see here that the five gallons per acre, statistically you had the lowest recoverable sucrose and visually the poorest disease control. As you increase the water volume, the disease severity became less and we had a treatment with 25 gallons of water per acre and that looked visually the best compared to the other treatments and the check. And in terms of recoverable sucrose, statistically it wasn't higher than let's say the 15 and the 20, but numerically it was much better than any one of the other treatments. So we like to continue this particular trial again for another year or two to see if this is consistent. If adding a few gallons of water will help us to get even better disease control and make the funding size work better, that would be a benefit to all of us. Now in 2020, this is 2020, the only treatments that work, these are all conventional varieties. The ones that are green are either CR plus variety or a tolerant variety. And what we saw in 2021 was we had two conventional varieties with leaf spot rating of 4.8 and 4.3, a tolerant variety of less than four and a CR, this is an experimental variety with a leaf spot rating of two. For all these varieties, we had some treatments had five applications, we just used different combinations. And you can see five applications, you had excellent disease control for all of these varieties and high recoverable sucrose. Some of them with two applications, you didn't have any significantly lower yield compared to five for variety A, C and D especially. Sometimes you even had one application which was later in the season and for variety D especially, it didn't matter. For variety B, for variety C, and for variety A you had some numerical reduction in yield. If you didn't do anything, you had significantly lower yield, especially in your non-treated check. I'll show you a video, hopefully to show you what happened. This video will show you those four varieties. Each variety will have six treatments. So it will be four row plots, you will have a row to the left and a row to the right with a non-treated check. So for example, here, these four street treatments will be five application, the next one will be two, the next one will be one, and then the last one will be a non-treated check. So this is variety A, coming up variety A, five treatments each, two and one. Two is okay here, one is probably not good enough. This is a check. Variety B, five treatments, two treatment, one. So you need at least two treatment for this one. This is your check. A more tolerant variety, three treatments, five applications look very good. Two applications look good, one not good, and a non-treated check. Variety D, an experimental CR plus treatment of the treatments with five applications look good. Two applications look good, one application look good, and this is the check, and this is compared to a conventional variety non-treated check. As you saw the yield with the CR plus variety, even in a year like 2021, where the disease pressure was really high. How high was it? It was, I'll show you some pictures to kind of show you how high it was in the conventional variety. So that was a CR plus experimental variety. We were able to get two varieties from Minda that were approved. They were ACH 973 and BTS729, and we're learning how to manage these new varieties with fundicides. The picture to the right is a non-treated check, and these were inoculated. Remember earlier I showed you the plots that were very brown? These new CR plus varieties are still green. One of them still had significantly lower yield than when you applied fundicides. Here, this was just one application. Here, these were four applications. I'll use this graph to explain the CLS rating for all of these varieties, as you can see, was probably two or less excellent control. Alone or without, with fundicides. When you apply the fundicides, in some instances, the yield was higher, the recouples through cross was higher, especially in this one BTS variety here. So when we get these new varieties, we will need to apply fundicides. What it looks like, we'll probably need one early and maybe more so in our area, we may need one later on. We still have to do much, much more work because these varieties, if you look, the recouple sucrose was 15,000 pounds. So some of these, both of these varieties, this one had about 42 tons, this one had about 45 tons per acre, and about 18% sugar. So to protect this kind of yield gain, we need to make sure that we manage the population so they do not overcome the resistance in these CR plus varieties. How severe was the disease? This is Fox, so we can see, look at it back here. Good plots with good fundicide treatments, plots that had no treatment. So the disease severity is high, the population was high. So these new varieties are doing something real good, but we have to protect it. This is a slide showing you your representative, this is the resort site, so they know what's happening. And I will touch here very briefly and something that was very easy to absorb in some fields for the past several years. Some growers do a phenomenal job. They start early and they continue. For example, this field here was green trout until this was harvested. A few miles down the road or up the road, you had this other field here, and I'm sure this was looking good earlier. This picture was taken around the middle towards the end of September. This field here became brown because it was warm and wet in late September. The growers stopped applying fundicide, and very quickly I told you, you can lose a half to one or more percent in sugar. You don't want that to happen because you then lose quality. So early season application is important. In a dry year like 2021, you can probably delay some application, but when it becomes late in September, you don't need to stop because that, for example, last year in October, it was warm, it was wet, we delayed harvesting, and this disease took off. It can severely impact your quality and your big payment. I also want to share quickly with you an experiment that the Arnie Bowl funded whereby we're trying to find out whether we can use no-till or stripped-till in sugar beet because of the fact that in the very near future, we'll be encouraged to reduce tillage. We have four major crops, sugar beet, corn, soybean, and wheat. I will look at the tillage type. We want to see when we have different crop sequences, how it impacts disease severity. The name of the game these days is carbon and carbon sequestration. How do we reduce our carbon footprint? How do we reduce our amount of energy that we're using? And how we can use the microbial population to our benefit? So this is a long-term research as it's indicated, three-tillage type, four crops. This is the crop sequence. We have more or less an American crystal, corn, soybean, wheat, sugar beet. These rotations are more or less common in southern Min and Minda. We want to try to find out what happens. So this started in 2021. We were able to get stripped-till equipment at no cost to us. We set up the trial and we knew that with no-till, this can be a problem, so we need to make sure that the residue is cut up much smaller. We planted and it didn't matter if it was no-till, stripped-till, or conventional-till. Or we were able to get similar yields in our soybean and in the corn because of the fact that we had more residue with the corn, the no-till had significantly lower bushels per acre, but I'll take 178 bushels any day. And the best treatment at the conventional and the stripped-till 197 to 214 bushels per acre. This coming year, we'll have the soybean, the sugar beet in the rotation, and then we will follow that through. This information will help our producers to determine which sequence to use, what type of tillage we can go to. We'll try to get the cost for the different tillage type, and hopefully, most importantly, to get information from this trial, especially with the microbial benefits, the carbon sequestration, and how we can kind of manage our environment. So to get information to guide our policymaker so that you, the producer, do not have to pay anything extra. If anything, you should be able to get some benefit. So with that, I will see my take-home message to all of us today is that when you're planting sugar beet, use a holistic system. Based on last year, I say do as little as possible tillage as you can in the spring. If it's wet, daily planting. If it's dry, do as little planting, do as little tillage as possible, go ahead and plant. I tried to get 175 to 200 plants per 100 foot of row. You'll get a good tonnage and high-recoverable sucrose, even if something goes wrong with your population. Do what the other speakers encourage you to do in terms of the recommendations, crop rotation, controlling the weeds and insects, and once you get least spot, the ideal thing to do until we get more CR plus varieties, use fungicide mixtures. Use fungicide mixtures in our rotation, start early, and you may need to go as late as September, I will say 15 to 20 seconds to put another application there to protect your hard-earned earnings. When we do get CLS improve varieties, hopefully by next year I'll have some more information as to how best to manage these varieties. Having these varieties, it will help us to break that vicious cycle of increasing our CLS population. Once we can have a reduction in our CLS population, we can then have more varieties that we can use with high genetic potential to give you a good crop and to make us economically viable. With that, I would like to say thank you to you the producers for funding through the irony board. Most of our research, thanks to chemical companies, seed companies and others who provided funding and a lot of inputs. Thanks to Luke from KWS for taking some of our, a lot of the panoramic views, Kevin Etzler for allowing us to work on his farm, American Crystal Tier Lab for analyzing all of our samples. My many colleagues at NDSU for doing the back breaking work of the harvesting and loading for Peter and the students and interns. They do all the hard work of making sure the resort is done in a highly scientific condition. With that, if you have any questions, I will take them. If not, put them in the chat box and I'll be happy to answer. Thank you. So Mohammed for the CR plus varieties with one or two applications, what was the timing? With the one and two, okay. So where I did one and two application, let me go back a little bit. Some of them we had five applications starting July the 7th. And the ones where we had two and one application was when we started to see a few spots in those plots. So the one where we had the two application that was towards the middle of August and the one where we had one application that will have been the first week or so of September. Questions? And I saw a similar results more or less at Southern Mint where they had a CR plus variety. The rating was two or less. And if they put on three applications early, three applications late or five applications, they all look pretty good. Dr. Khan, you have one question. Wayne is asking why you use Topsin at all? And the only reason for that is Topsin is a systemic and in about 23 years of using a tin Topsin mixture, it consistently is one of our best treatment. That's the main reason why. And we usually recommend it as the force application and the reason is tin is a protectant and Topsin is systemic. So if you start your application and there are a few spots there, that Topsin will have the ability to have some curative effect. Just one time per season early in the season and then no more.