 Thanks Tom Peters who's at he has a joint position with NDSU and University of Minnesota. Today he will discuss water hemp control in sugar beet. Go ahead Tom. Okay I think since since we have Europeans on the phone I want to introduce water hemp. So water hemp is in the amaranthus family. The species name is tuberculosis and tuberculatus excuse me and it's a dioecious pigweed. So there are male and female plants. Water hemp originates in the United States in the flood plains of the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. So in the states of Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, and Arkansas. And over the last 10 to 20 years water hemp has become our predominant pigweed in agriculture. I think the dioecious habit is one of the reasons why it's so common. We see a lot of diversity in plants but the dioecious habit has also resulted in some significant herbicide challenges and we have resistance to at least five families of herbicides. In sugar beet production in Minnesota and North Dakota it is absolutely our number one weed control challenge. And it is so important to sugar beet production that all of the weed control presentations this morning will focus on water hemp control. Now mother nature has an interesting habit of getting even and I've made a number of statements about water hemp that are no longer accurate and I'm going to go through some of these. So I frequently state that water hemp germinates and emerges in Minnesota and North Dakota the second half of the month of May. And that once it germinates and emerges it continues to germinate and emerge through the month of June, July, and into early August. Well in 2019 we had germination and emergence and seed production well into autumn and these are some pictures that exemplify that. These small plants made seed the seed landed on the soil surface and unfortunately we found some early germinating fields in 2020 and an example of that is on the left. It's a field that Greg Kraus identified near Mapleton North Dakota just west of Fargo. Now at first I was thinking well Greg found the needle in the haystack but I was absolutely wrong. During the next two weeks we had numerous other examples of water hemp germination and emergence in our sugar beet growing region. So my part of the presentation this morning is going to focus on data from three of the four experiments that I conducted in 2020. And I want to start by visiting about our water hemp control recommendations. So another one of my statements I've stated that if you plant before June April 20th that you don't necessarily need to use a pre-emergence herbicide that you can jump ahead to the lay-by program. Based on our experience in 2020 we are recommending that we use a pre-emergence herbicide on all of our sugar beet fields especially in areas where we identify water hemp as our most significant weed control challenge. So we would like for you to use a pre-emergence product either Esmatola clore but specifically dual magnum using our 24c recommendation and then ethafumazate or the combination of dual magnum and ethafumazate. And then follow that with the lay-by program and then scouting the rest of the season. So I want to focus a little bit on ethafumazate focusing using two experiments that we conducted. I've always been very interested in better understanding length of control from ethafumazate. So farmers will ask routinely if we can get season-long residual control from ethafumazate. So we conducted an experiment last year at two of our locations the Lake Lillian location and the Moorhead location. I'm presenting results from the Lake Lillian location here. So what you're seeing in the graph is visual water hemp control over time. And the different lines represent ethafumazate applied at one and a half all the way up to seven and a half pints per acre. So seven and a half would be considered our full rate. And the idea here, and you can see this line that I have at 85 percent, the idea was to ask the question, when do we cross that line? What calendar date do we fall less than 85 percent control? And you can see with the six and seven and a half pound rates that was at about 58 days, 58 days after planting. Now let's look at the one and a half and three. And unfortunately, we never got to 85 percent control with these sublethal rates. So I've made the statement repeatedly that with our pre-program, we want to buy time. That's my quote, we want to buy time. And these data question the accuracy of that statement. Are we buying time or do we get less than full control from reduced rates? Now mind you, at Lake Lillian, we didn't have early activating rainfall. So we're going to repeat this experiment and we're going to see what happens when we get rainfall immediately after application. David, I think if my memory is right, it was about two weeks before we had activating rainfall on this experiment. Now, a different question we were asking with the experiments is, do these higher rates injure our nurse crops? So this is wheat planted across the experiment and you cannot see any treatment effects on the wheat. There's absolutely no difference between any of these treatments. So even the seven and a half pint rate did not affect the wheat, which indicates that we just didn't get timely activation of the herbicide. So just a quick review of nurse crops in collaboration or combination with soil-applied herbicides. We believe oat is the most tolerant. It's certainly more tolerant to herbicides in wheat and barley. At the herbicide side, generally dual magnum is safer on nurse crops than at the fumazate. At the fumazate is taken up for the roots. That's how it controls weeds, but we see less root uptake on monaceous grass or grass species. So one of the strategies that we've talked about in our seminars is to wait with making the pre-application to give the nurse crops a head start if you're using at the fumazate as a component of the pre-control strategy. Now we also wanted to better understand early season control both from at the fumazate and dual magnum. And we did a second experiment at the same two locations, the Lake Lillian and Hickson locations. And we saw very different results at Lake Lillian compared to Hickson. So first of all, at Lake Lillian, we didn't see any significant differences. Our p-value is greater than .05, indicating that there was no difference between our herbicide treatments and plots where we didn't even use a pre-herbicide. So the 81 indicates that 81% of the plot area did not have any water hemp emergence. Now compare that to the experiment at Hickson where we had a very early germinating phenotype. And there you can see that at the fumazate, especially at the four pint rate, gave us greater early season water hemp control as compared to ethofumazate at two pints or the dual magnum treatment. And no, I did not have the ethofumazate plus dual magnum treatment in this experiment. So here's the picture. Very unusual to have this much water hemp pressure in early May, but that's what we had at the Hickson site. Now I want to transition to a different topic. I want to talk about crop safety and this is with complex mixtures. So it's very common that our early post applications will be a combination of glyphosate at the fumazate, sometimes stinger herbicide, sometimes a chloroacetamide herbicide, and sometimes Betamex. So it's very common to see a five-way mixture and that could follow ethofumazate pre-emergence. And that recommendation has worked over the years, but it did not work at this particular 2019 location. So in the lower leaves you can see photosystem 2 damage from Betamex on the lower sugar beet leaves, the necrosis on the margins of leaves, and you can also see the damage to stinger. So my team has been working in the field and the greenhouse to better understand complex mixtures. We want to know if it's safe to be mixing these products together and what the impact is on sugar beet. So likewise, we had another experiment or another field observation that I want to talk about on the left, and these are pictures from southern Minnesota Beach Sugar. These are pictures from Steve Rail. The treatment was glyphosate plus ethofumazate plus outlook, and you can see the speckling on the leaves. And I would say that is extremely likely to occur with outlook and with esmetolachlor. I think that speckling is from the formulation. Now the question is, well, what if you add an insecticide, either a sauna or a lors band, are we going to increase the amount of speckling? And you can decide on the picture on the left if there's more damage. I would say that there's more solvent system, so there might be a little more speckling, but in my opinion, these are not unacceptable treatments, and this damage is very transient and disappears very quickly. But it does beg the question, do we need to add additional oil to those mixtures? You know from my recommendations that we often recommend high surfactant methylated oil concentrate. So what I want to talk about is complex mixtures. So the control in this case is glyphosate plus ethol, and then you can see the various admixtures that we're making. And we're looking at growth reduction and also fresh weights. And the data on the right hand side is grayed out. I just want to focus on the six-day evaluations. So you can see there's no difference between herbicides with or without oil until we get to the stinger treatment. And then you can see significantly more damage, growth reduction damage, and also significantly more damage associated with having the oil in the treatment. So what we've routinely seen in these experiments is stinger is an activator. I've called stinger a bully sometimes, where it seems to accentuate the injury from the other herbicides. So we didn't necessarily see a lot of stinger damage, but we saw other damage in this case growth reduction that we're attributing to stinger. So we're questioning if we should be adding stinger to these complex mixtures. So this is the main effects. This is just looking at the effect of herbicides. It's averaged over with or without oil. And you can see the step up in damage that we're seeing when we go from outlook to outlook plus lors band. So you can see we did see more damage in the grainhouse and then a stepped up amount of damage again when we put stinger in the mixture. So I want to ask a second question. I want to ask about with or without the ethofumazate preemergence. So the same idea of increasing the complexity of the mixtures. This time I want to focus on the beta mix line, the des metatham line, des metatham plus fen metatham line. And you can see that we had significantly more injury when we had ethofumazate pre when we added beta mix to the complex mixture. And this is exactly what Dr. Dexter taught us. He taught us that when we used ethofumazate pre, we had to be very careful about the rate of beta mix that we saw. So in general, in my opinion, we don't need to worry about ethofumazate pre with glyphosate with ethoh, even with stinger or with the chloralcidamide herbicide. But certainly if we add beta mix to the mixture, I think we need to consider the rate, especially in fields where we used ethofumazate. Yep. Very quickly pictures from the greenhouse. You can see there's more damage on the right than there is on the left. I need to thank all of the collaborators that we work with and my contact information. So today I'll be talking about the hooded sprayer for application of non-selective herbicide and sugar beet. So I wanted to talk about kind of the challenges that sugar beet producers face. The first challenge is we're kind of running out of herbicides. We have 17 active ingredient options for in season, which equates to eight sites of action and one being phased out, which is beta mix that Tom was talking about. Another issue is weed herbicide resistance is increasing, especially in water hemp. And sugar beets are just poor competitors. It takes them a good part of the summer to close the canopy. And even when they do, they're pretty short. So weeds can kind of grow past them really easily. And another unfortunate event that happens is soil applied herbicides, if you put it on and the rain doesn't activate it or there's little emerged weeds in there already. That's when you have to start looking at post control options. So some of the options I've listed are upbeats, interrow cultivation, and then I have ultra blazer with a question mark because that's not a commercial option yet. So the weeds I kind of want to highlight in this presentation are water hemp. It has lots of resistance to different sites of action that I've listed on there. And then common lambs quarters. And in the turning point survey conducted last year, 59% of the acres listed water hemp as the most important weed control challenge. So that's what we were focusing on with these experiments. Next slide. So the hooded sprayer is a new equipment we tried out this summer. It's designed by Wilmer fabrication and it's a concept used in cotton. And the goal is to post direct applied non selective herbicides in sugar beets. And next slide please. You can see in the picture these hoods run pretty much on the ground and there's spaces between them. So the herbicide is getting sprayed between the rows and then the sugar beets just go in between the gaps there and protects the crop from the spray. And there's one nozzle above each hood. And yeah, that's just kind of the setup of it. Next slide please. So we had two different experiments we were looking at. The first was tolerance and the second was efficacy. So the objectives of the first was does sugar beet tolerate liberty or gramoxone applied through the hooded sprayer at different timings. And then the second was does liberty or gramoxone applied through the hooded sprayer at different rates and timings control weeds and sugar beet. So in the next slide I have the materials and methods. The first is for the tolerance. It was a randomized complete block design. Our locations we had three Lake Lillian Crookston and Prosper. And those experiments had six replications with seven treatments. And then for the efficacy it was also a randomized complete block design with locations at Lake Lillian and Moorhead. And these experiments had four replications with nine treatments. And so the treatment lists for the sugar beet tolerance experiment was a glyphosate control treatment. And then we had liberty at three different sugar beet timings, which were the two to four, six to eight and 10 to 12th leaf. And then we applied gramoxone again at the two to four, six to eight and 10 to 12th leaf timing. And then in the next slide I have my weed control experiments. So we had our glyphosate control again. And then we had liberty with two different rates, 32 and 43. And they were timed to an early application of three to four inch weeds and then a late application of six to eight inch weeds. And then we had our gramoxone at 21 and 32 with those same timings. So some of the evaluations we took first for the tolerance, we did sugar beet injury. So that was just a visual percentage, zero, meaning there was no sugar beet injury and 100% meaning complete sugar beet death. We took some sugar beet stand, and then we harvested all of the tolerance experiments to find yield parameters such as tons per acre, percent sucrose and then recoverable sucrose per acre. And then for the weed control we did that visual scale again, zero, meaning there was weeds everywhere and then 100% meaning there was complete weed control. And then we also did sugar beet leaf damage, which was counting the number of sugar beet plants within the plot that showed any damage on their leaves. So I just kind of wanted to go over the different damaged phenotypes we saw. So first looking at liberty, these were damage shown from sprays made at the six to eight leaf stage and we observed chlorotic and necrotic lesions and they started to show up around five to seven days after the application was made. And what we saw is that these lesions kind of diffused a little bit on the leaf, so there's the spots, but then they spread a little bit. And then there's also the leaf curling, which we think was the leaves trying to grow around these lesions. And then in the next slide I have phenotypes of the gramoxone and these are from treatments made at the six to eight leaf stage. And they were, we saw similar damage with these lesions, however with gramoxone they were more spotted. They didn't really diffuse like liberty. You can kind of see exactly where the spray landed on the leaf and that's what's shown here. And then in the next slide was another phenotype we weren't really expecting to see, but we did and that was wheel track damage. So in the big picture and then the picture on the bottom, you can kind of see those older, bigger leaves and the sugar beet plant kind of got trampled from the wheel tracks. And then in the other picture, this equipment kind of is similar to interrow cultivation where you need to keep focused because if you get out of the rows, for example up at the top the hoods went over the sugar beet row and it was kind of a chemical cultivation. So moving on to the results, I wanted to talk about the growth reduction and then the damage. And again that damage was the number of damaged plants in the treated rows. So just to kind of give you an idea of the total plants within a plot, our stands were about 200 to 250 per 100 feet sugar beet stands and there were four rows per plot. So these numbers in the damage column was just us counting those sugar beet plants. So we did see some growth reduction at Lake Lillian, but this summer was kind of a battle with the wind and so when our treatments needed to go on, it was a little bit windy at Lake Lillian and we thought the hoods would offer a bit more protection than what they did. So the numbers for growth reduction and damage were a little bit higher and we credit that to the wind and then for damage it was significant across each location. However Crookston had more wheel track damage that was observed and then again Lake Lillian with the wind. And then the next slide just shows our yield parameters. So we have tons per acre, percent sucrose and recoverable sucrose and there was no differences across treatment. One thing we did see was there is a trend with injury and yield reduction with applications made at the two to four leaves, but overall there was no significant differences across treatment. Moving on to the Waterham results. Again we made the early and the late applications and we didn't combine the two locations because the Lake Lillian site with the wind, we were spraying about four to eight inch species and then at Moorhead it was two to six inch so different heights there, but the results were similar. So for Liberty we saw that the high rate of Liberty made at the early application provided the best control and it was much better than the glyphosate check and then for the Grimoxone treatment we had the early and late and the different rates and overall we concluded that it didn't really matter which rate or what timing was sprayed. Grimoxone just provided really good control of Waterham. Moving on to lambsquarter control. Moral of the story is that glyphosate controls lambsquarter so whether you're spraying with a hood or you're doing a broadcast spray the glyphosate control was our best treatment at both locations and then I just kind of wanted to show this image to show how fast acting Grimoxone is so this application was made at Lake Lillian and this is just after one day this is what the plot looks like after the treatment was made and then in the next slide you can see here that the hooded sprayer is controlling weeds between the rows and it's protecting sugar beets but it's also protecting the weeds within the rows and so these experiments were really designed for us to understand what the hooded sprayer can do so we understand that it can control the weeds but future experiments will look at implementing all of our weed control program and trying to control both weeds in the rows and outside of the rows and then I just wanted to show this picture to show that the picture on the left was the control of lambsquarters with glyphosates and then on the right was a Grimoxone treatment and we did see some regrowth from the Grimoxone treatment so in conclusion Liberty and Grimoxone are not approved for post-directed application and sugar beet that will take regulatory action applications made through the hooded sprayer did not reduce sugar beet yield parameters and then when controlling water hemp we found that Grimoxone 21 fluid ounces or Liberty at 32 fluid ounces applied early improved 4-6 inch water hemp control compared to glyphosate alone and then when you're trying to control common lambsquarters in these experiments glyphosate was superior to Liberty or Grimoxone so in my next slide I would just like to acknowledge and thank the sugar beet research and education board for funding this work thank you to site personnel University of Minnesota Crookston Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative and KJAG Services who aided in the planting and managing and harvesting of these experiments and then also a big thank you to the NDSU team Tom, Ryan, Brad and Peter and then other colleagues for their work in conducting and maintaining these experiments um so one of the questions was could chemical damage be reduced through the use of different application nozzles in the hooded sprayer what water rates were you targeting knowing both Grimoxone and Liberty are both requiring a lot of water for good coverage so um I'll just say it when we sprayed we were applying 22 gallons per acre and we used an 802 EVS T-jet nozzle and Tom if you kind of want to jump in with anything that you have off the top of your head I know we did do some work with different nozzles and this is the one that we decided we liked the best okay our next presentation is by Ms. Emma Burt um Emma is a research agronomist at at Mendak Farmers Cooperative but she's also working on a master's degree so she's studying the feasibility of of using acid fluorophon in sugar beets and Emma did her work in collaboration with myself and my team and also David Metler down at at Southern Minnesota Beach Sugar so Emma the floor is yours and I will advance the slides for you okay thanks Tom so as Tom and Alexa have both previously noted waterhemp is classified by growers as the most important weed control challenge so we're obviously emphasizing waterhemp control and sugar beet and that is the basis for this project so their current waterhemp control program utilizes a pre-emergence herbicide followed by a split application of chlorocenamide herbicides the applications are made before waterhemp germinates and emerges usually at the two leaf and at the six leaf sugar beet stage um the use of these herbicides is widely adapted by more than 90 percent of our sugar beet growers however there are environments where waterhemp control does not reach 80 percent and so then additional methods are required to achieve acceptable control um in previous years go back Tom sorry in previous years um they had beta mix but with that being not re-registered and inventories dwindling we need some sort of first post-emergence herbicide option okay Tom previous research has indicated crop tolerance of sugar beet to acid fluorophon so acid fluorophon is a contact herbicide that is currently used um in soybean for post-emergence control of annual weeds in sugar beet it would not be a standalone program but it would just provide some sort of post-emergence option UPL acquired acid fluorophon in 2003 and they market it with the trade name ultra blazer we've been working very closely with UPL and they are extremely motivated to get ultra blazer registered in the sugar beet market okay Tom so we conducted experiments this summer with multiple objectives the first objective was to evaluate sugar beet tolerance a randomized complete block design with six reps was used and trials were conducted at four locations across minnesota and north dakota these post applications were made to sugar beet at three different growth stages and we did take this experiment to harvest and then the following data that i'm going to show you was analyzed across locations using proc mixed with an alpha of 0.05 so acid fluorophon was applied post to sugar beet at the two leaf four to six leaf and 10 to 12 leaf stage three rates were tested eight ounces 16 ounces and 24 ounces per acre and then a glyphosate check was included as well this trial was kept weed free throughout the growing season so that we could focus only on the effect that acid fluorophon has on sugar beet um this table as a summary across all four locations ratings taken seven and 14 days after treatment each plot was six rows wide but we treated the center four rows only so when we evaluated percent visible necrosis injury we compared the treated rows in the center to the untreated border rows using a zero to 100 percent scale with 100 percent meaning that the plot was completely brown the percent visible stature reduction injury ratings were collected then in the same way so based on this we can see that necrosis injury was greatest at the earliest application timing and it decreased as application timing was delayed also as acid fluorophon rate increased necrosis injury increased as well stature reduction injury decreased as application timing was delayed and sugar beet that was sprayed earlier took much longer to recover from both necrosis and stature reduction injury so this image was taken seven days after application this is the 16 ounce acid fluorophon rate applied at the six leaf sugar beet stage so these white lines indicate the boundary of the center rows that were treated so if you look um in the plot there you can see both necrosis and stature reduction injury next so then compared to this slide here same 16 ounce rate um but applied at the 10 to 12 leaf stage um and stature reduction is reduced here but we can still see necrosis injury now this graph shows the sucrose content of the sugar beet at harvest um treatments on the x axis there and then percent sucrose is on the y axis while there's numerical differences we did not have statistical difference in sucrose content at harvest so early injury did not translate to significant loss in fact um the 16 ounce rate applied at the four to six leaf stage had the highest sugar content across treatments okay so now this is root yield um again no statistical difference here even though we can see numerical difference um and the 16 ounce rate again applied at the four to six leaf stage is just slightly less than the glyphosate check here and finally we have recoverable sucrose um this is in pounds of sugar per acre uh this is a function of percent sucrose content and root yield so again we can see the trend of the 16 ounce rate applied at the four to six leaf stage being the closest to the glyphosate check and while we do have statistical differences here the 16 ounce rate applied at the four to six or the 10 to 12 leaf stage was not statistically different from the glyphosate check so we did see in the crosses injury and stature reduction from acetyl fluorophane the high rate caused more stature reduction injury than the standard rate when applied at the same growth stage because of this acetyl fluorophane should not be applied to sugar eat smaller than six leaves root yield percent sucrose and recoverable sucrose measurements were not affected by acetyl fluorophane as compared to the glyphosate check if you applied at the four to six leaf stage or later hey tom so in addition to the tolerance experiments we also conducted efficacy experiments to evaluate sugar beet injury and water hemp control in response to acetyl fluorophane rate and adjuvant use this time um three locations were used go ahead tom just to briefly summarize those experiments acetyl fluorophane at eight 16 and 24 ounces per acre with nis provided 38 percent 55 percent and 66 percent visible water hemp control respectively 14 days after treatment crop oil concentrate methylated seed oil and high surfactant methylated oil concentrate with acetyl fluorophane did improve water hemp control as compared to using nis however these oil based adjuvants also increased sugar beet injury okay tom so our final objective was to evaluate sugar beet injury and water hemp control in response to acetyl fluorophane when used in a tank mix because this is where we can where we see as fluorophane being utilized most likely on our last lay by application these efficacy experiments were conducted in fields with known high water hemp populations so that we could evaluate the percent water hemp control as well as percent sugar beet injury and applications were timed to water hemp height rather than sugar beet leaf stage and we did not harvest these experiments so this table summarizes the results from three locations sugar beet injury was a combination of percent visible necrosis injury and percent visible growth reduction evaluations were done the same as in the tolerance experiments comparing the center for treated rose to the untreated border rose acetyl fluorophane plus glyphosate and nis resulted in 76 water hemp control as compared to 55 percent control from acetyl fluorophane alone and 44 percent control from glyphosate alone in fact when both acetyl fluorophane and glyphosate were added to the tank mix water hemp control improved in all instances acetyl fluorophane plus glyphosate plus ethyl fumosate resulted in 90 percent control as compared to acetyl fluorophane and ethyl fumosate at 86 percent control acetyl fluorophane and glyphosate and propyrolid resulted in 85 percent control as compared to acetyl fluorophane plus propyrolid with 75 percent control but again injury also increases when acetyl fluorophane and glyphosate are in the tank together okay Tom this image is taken 14 days after application the this is the glyphosate check here applications at this location were made when sugar beet was at the eight leaf stage and water hemp was roughly four to five inches tall the orange lines here show the plot boundary so the center four rows that you can compare to the untreated border rows okay Tom so now this is the standard 16 ounce acetyl fluorophane rate with nis um so just acetyl fluorophane plus nis had increased lead control as compared to the glyphosate check from the previous image okay now this is acetyl fluorophane plus glyphosate plus nis so you can see this treatment provided great control not many weeds are seen in between the rows here but necrosis injury still visible okay and then this is glyphosate acetyl fluorophane at the fumosate and nis this treatment provided the best control across the experiment you can see that this plot is quite clean but still necrosis injury is visible and a bit of stature reduction as well now this is an overhead drone shot of the same location again 14 days after application this is just a really great visual to compare the tank mixtures you can see weed control is most definitely better in some plots as compared to others but you can also see injury differences as well with more gaps between the rows and even some necrosis from from the drone okay so to conclude tank mixtures with acetyl fluorophane improved waterhemp control as compared to acetyl fluorophane alone or compared to glyphosate tank mixtures with glyphosate resulted in the highest levels of control however injury was also greater as more herbicides were added to the tank but this research does indicate that acetyl fluorophane can be a valuable sugar beet herbicide for post-broadleaf weed control all right so finally the next steps um there are experiments planned for 2021 with the the objectives of determining if acetyl fluorophane is safe to sugar beet when it's applied with glyphosate at the fumosate and the chlorocetamide as part of a waterhemp control program as well as if acetyl fluorophane is safe and if it contributes to weed management by controlling the later emerging waterhemp so more of a rescue treatment we will continue to work closely with upl for guardian support for a section three label as well as support for a section 18 is being discussed with the co-ops listed there that would most likely be submitted on a county by county basis in minnesota north dakota and michigan okay so thank you for your attention and thank you to the sugar beet research and education board for their support of this project next presentation is by mr ryan borgan so ryan completed his bs degree at nds u in the summer uh our spring of 2020 uh he worked for us all summer and he's transitioning he's taking a look at maybe starting a graduate program and ryan worked with the the weed zapper so ryan's presentation will be about weed control using electricity ryan okay thanks tom uh first of all i'd like to begin with an introduction to the electronic discharge system i want to introduce and talk about some past and now the present form of this technology so some of you may have heard of the laska lightning wader a few you might have personal experience when you're operating these machines well for those of you who are unfamiliar with this technology was developed in the late 1970s against the popularity in the early 1980s this machine was capable of producing 50 000 watts and the entirety of the machine was operated and powered on the rear of the tractor the machine works by providing the copper bar electricity from the pto power generator when weeds make contact with the copper bar translocates electricity through the plant heating the moisture within the stem of the plant creating explosions within the cells that provide the structure the plant over time the popularity and the use of this machine started to diminish so here we are to 2020 and 2021 and eds is back but it's bigger and better than ever before i'd like to introduce to you the weed zapper this new form of old technology is manufactured in the state of missouri the weed zapper is driven by a high horsepower front wheel assist tractor there's a few different or improved safety or features this machine offers for example as you can see the boom containing the copper bar is now much bigger and mounted on the front of the tractor the generator is much larger and capable of producing around four times the electrical output this machine also includes many advanced technical safety features for operator safety a couple of components to understand and remember about electricity voltage is the amount of electrical pressure the generator produces to be pushed through the copper bar amperage is the rate at which electricity flows and wattage is a combination of voltage and amperage equating the total output the weed zapper contains actually three voltage settings that are specifically designed for target species of weeds and efficiency uh for example low and medium are broadleaf settings and grass is the high setting and the large numbers on the right of the screen just indicate how much electricity this machine is capable of producing even though it's generally not practical to run the machine at these rates due to susceptible target species or potentially overheating the generator so the two videos on the right of the screen I took this summer while I was out doing evaluations uh I apologize if they end up a little shaky but I wanted to provide you an up close example of the machine in action while recording I remember actually uh feeling the immense amount of heat these machines produced I thought that was uh pretty crazy and especially when I was out on some 90 degree days uh in the video on the right I actually was a video I received from a grower via text message while he was making an application at night and I figured it'd provide a very cool visual so a couple things to remember or keep in mind while you're watching these videos is just look for the point of contact between the copper bar and the weeds you should see small flames also listen to the tractor and you'll notice how much horsepower it actually takes to power this machine when the tractor encounters a dense amount of weeds or the machine encounters a dense amount of weeds you'll start to hear the engine pull down so what are our objectives growers may have experienced the introduction of invasive weed species or potentially experience life-state resistant weeds over the past couple growing seasons early weed escapes from soil residual herbicides may have also been experienced growers have been creative and open-minded when it comes to possible weed control strategies on their farm this machine is now available for consumer purchase there's currently three local sugar be growers that I know that have already invested in this machine we felt the need to become involved to help answer questions and figure out how effective the weed zapper is and what its potential capabilities are so there's a few questions we felt we needed to pursue an answer determine water hemp and kosher control using the weed zapper and determining if increasing pass number will enhance overall control and then we needed to determine the viability of water hemp seed at sugar beet harvest i'll get to that later so materials and materials and methods i collaborated with three local sugar beet growers who purchased the weed zapper i actually conducted my research in eight commercial sugar beet fields as part of a non-farm research experiment the weed zapper was operated consistently by each grower in each of the fields except for the individual experiences she'll talk about later so tom and i had to develop a system in which and how we were going to contain obtain consistent data from each field so we ultimately determined five by five square plots or quadrats that are placed in different areas of field that happen to best represent the weed density within the field would be appropriate i evaluated these plots one three seven and 14 days after treatment i measured visible necrosis wilting phenotype and percent control i'll explain the seed samples later on in the presentation so weed control with the weed zapper across time locations in 2020 so this is where the data collected from water hemp locations was combined and analyzed so percent wilting phenotype so wilting a phenotype actually occurs immediately after application and remains relatively consistent as you can see one to 14 days after treatment percent development or visual percent necrosis this you see the steady development necrosis one to 14 days after treatment see a significant difference in development at each evaluation period along the way and here we have percent water hemp control so this is overall control to receive overall control it takes a combination of wilting phenotype and the development development on necrosis well we also believe the development and necrosis mimics overall control by comparing the graphs visual development of injury after treatment so these pictures will give you the audience a better image of the development of symptomology one to 14 days after treatment on day one you can see all the plant is showing symptoms of wilting or phenotype wilting phenotype occurs immediately day three and four some bronzing becomes appear as possible necrosis starts to develop day seven wilting phenotype remains consistent and black lesions will begin to appear on the primary stem um day 14 as wilting type continues to remain consistent necrosis continues to develop and then here's a picture of an untreated plant compared to a 14 day treated plant and you can just see the significant difference and discoloration and growth reduction so all these images were collected in the same field and relatively the same area or same plots near Hillsborough North Dakota this summer so water hemp control across treatment in cragness minnesota so this is where we begin to investigate individual treatment applications our treatments consisted of one pass down and back two passes and down and back four times which is four passes just looking at the bar chart i notice we didn't have any significant difference in control on day one and 14 but the data suggests on days three and seven we had a little bit of variability so this particular location in general provided immense weed pressure many weeds per plotted area to evaluate compared to other fields so water and control across treatments and felt minnesota so we conducted evaluations using two treatments this time one and two passes found a little found a significant difference in treatments one to 14 days after treatment this felt location provided far less weed pressure which may have contributed to the different result than we seen at our cragness location here we'll compare kosher to water hemp so we talked a lot about water hemp earlier um kosher is a little bit different and this might might have had to do with just the overall structure biology of the plant so here we see that wilting phenotype occurred immediately but we see in a steady reduction over time necrosis ended up developing slower which resulted in overall control ending ended up becoming less than water hemp is expected and unfortunately we only had one kosher locate kosher control location in 2020 so at our next steps farmers operated the weed zapper from the middle of july in the early september so one of our questions we have yet to answer is how the weed zapper performs late season when weeds are flowering mature and contain viable seed i collected seed for each location beginning or before sugar beet harvest began the seed received a 30 day cold treatment to simulate to simulate or influence vernalization and i'll begin my greenhouse experiments in the coming weeks to see if the weed zapper potentially devilizes seed or provides evidence that application timing is critical so in conclusion the weed zapper kills weeds providing better water hemp control than kosher the weed zapper kills large weeds where herbicides may not or without potentially injuring crop operating speed didn't seem to be a factor and the data suggests that one pass across fields with heavy infestation provide a better control where multiple passes provide a control in fields with less infestation so the big question should a farmer make this investment well along the way we experience some pros and cons we believe the weed zapper is an effective tool when approached and used correctly it's not going to provide a replacement for glyphosate or other soil residual herbicides our project has previously investigated internal cultivation and the use of a hooded sprayer for application and non selective herbicides the difference between those tools and the weed zapper is the weed zapper can control large weeds when those tools are designed to control smaller weeds the weed zapper may reduce the amount of weed biomass in fields improving harvestability and potentially the quality of be stored in piles that could make your cooperative happy unfortunately we believe you already experience yield loss by the time an application can be made with the weed zapper there's already been competition and interference the sugar beet grows so i was fortunate to have been able to collaborate and work with a great group of sugar beet growers this summer so i'd like to thank them and also like to thank tom for providing for providing me the time and resources to conduct this research okay okay well we transition any questions for ryan any questions about the weed zapper i have one question did you are you planning on doing any work on on actual viability or did you do any measurements on that go ahead ryan uh you just talking about the seed mark yeah uh yep we're gonna begin working on that last part of the experiment in the coming weeks here so planting and working with emergence and germination so we're gonna do that experiment two ways we're gonna we're gonna see see if we have uh germination in an incubator and then we're also going to plant the seed in pots to see if we have germination and emergence in a in a greenhouse soil media so two different ways of estimating the viability of the seed okay let's let's keep moving um um the the next presentation is is uh by dr bolton um the title of the presentation is molecular basis of fungicide resistance in leaf spot pathogen cicostra betacola and dr bolton will be making the presentation and we also acknowledge his team rebecca jonathan and then vivian and and dr ccort okay so today i just want to give a quick update on our work on the molecular basis of fungicide resistance in cicostra but before i do that i'd like to give a quick plug to our upcoming ass bt meeting um so on behalf of the american society of sugar beet technologists i would it's certainly my pleasure to invite you all to the 45th party first biennial conference as you can see the board of directors had to make the difficult decision to to make this a virtual platform but i think as you can see here that uh this virtual platform does work and i think it will open up the possibility of getting a lot more um people involved in the meeting so uh for those of you who haven't been to an ass bt meeting you know i really think it's kind of the world series of sugar beet research we have the latest research on on a variety of topics agronomy physiology genetics plant pathology as well as processing we have some great forum topics so i really do encourage all of you to uh to participate if you can registration is open you can either jot down that web address or just google ass bt uh meeting and uh register there so i hope to see you all there is registration free this year uh there is a cost to registration i don't have that off the top of my head okay thank you we'll see we'll get into here good thanks thanks mom okay there are a few questions in the uh q and q and a uh section to you previous speakers so if you could check those out and answer those questions please okay so sucosper batikola is the fungal pathogen that causes sucosper leaf spot so i mentioned here that it's a hemibiotrophic pathogen only because i think it sometimes is lost on folks that this pathogen when that spore lands on that on the leaf it actually grows inside the leaf for up to 12 days where you don't even know it's there okay and maybe even longer maybe in june when it's a little cooler that that pathogen is is growing inside that leaf for quite a long time we no one's really investigated how long the the pathogen is is inside these leaf spots especially in those cooler temperatures so after about 12 days it switches over to this necrotrophic stage of development where you start to see those leaf spots it is considered a polycyclic pathogen meaning that we can have several disease cycles and growing season provided the environmental conditions are conducive for disease and as a pathogen it is genetically diverse so even on a single leaf you will see different genotypes of the of the pathogen and really when you take those those three things into consideration you really have the perfect storm for a pathogen to develop fungicide resistance so you all know some important management measures measures for sarcasm release but you know obviously crop rotation is important we're getting some varieties with really great genetic resistance but currently we still rely on timely fungicide applications so this is just a snapshot of really of the work from the Geary Seacore lab of the last 20 years showing how this pathogen is able to develop resistance to a variety of important fungicides we have the TENS the benzamidazoles where it's a little bit more cyclical and then in C here you can see the DMI fungicides or in this case tetraconazole as you can see we had for several years very good efficacy but that resistance factor or the ability for the fungus to become resistant to the fungicide that really started to to increase in about 2011 and 12 and and this is a this is a this this particular fungicide has been the focus of our lab for the last several years the QOI fungicides you can see work for a few years but really we have lost efficacy for those most growing regions okay so just a little bit of background on the DMI so these are called sterile biosynthesis inhibitors or demethylation inhibitors that's why you'll hear several of us call them DMI's and they're in the frat group number three so what they do is they inhibit the C14 demethylation step in the production of something called ergosterol so ergosterol is this important component in the membrane of the fungus so ergosterol is not a protein ergosterol is a metabolite and it's synthesized by the reactions of 23 different enzymes so when I think of how ergosterol is made I think of a of an assembly line where you have all these enzymes that will take a simple precursor like acetyl-CoA make a small modification and hand it off to the next assembly line worker and at the end of 23 reactions we get a rather complex molecule called ergosterol okay so why am I bringing this up well here again is that ergosterol biosynthesis pathway and these enzymes erg-10 erg-13 etc these are all our assembly line workers and what the DMI fungicides do is they target this enzyme right here called CIT-51 and when when they target and inhibit CIT-51 what we do what happens is we get a toxic level of your baricol in the cell and at the same time we get a decrease in ergosterol and together that leads to fungal cell death okay so we've spent you know several years trying to understand how those resistant strains are able to become resistant now there are several strategies we've looked at but one of the ones that we think is the best way to look at this is using something called genome-wide association and this was the project of Becky Spanner who was a former PhD candidate Becky just got her PhD using with this project a few weeks ago and she's already on her first post-doctoral position in Chile okay so just a quick brief rundown of this project we collected samples in North Dakota and Minnesota we did something called clone correction where we identified unique genotypes we don't because this process relies on sequencing the genomes of strains we want to make sure we didn't sequence the genomes of of clones we didn't they have to be genetically diverse strains so we clone corrected our our samples we gave these isolates to the Gary Secor lab where they phenotype them for DMI resistance in this case tetrakanazole and at the end we received 100 sensitive isolates and 100 resistant resistant isolates and for those we sequenced their genomes so 200 genomes 200 strains in total that we sequence their genomes and then Becky took that data and ran that through her GWAS pipeline okay so believe it or not this slide right here is the culmination of several years of Becky's PhD research because it shows us that we there are five genes in fact that are highly associated with resistance to tetrakanazole so on the bottom here you can see all these these are the chromosomes of circus per particular and anything above that red line is a gene that's highly associated with with tetrakanazole resistance so you know I could spend a lot of time just talking about the details of these five genes but for the sake of this presentation we just want to focus on what that how this information will help the grower right we previously published a paper where we developed a few different out two two types of assays to identify resistant strains so one relied on this technology called lamp or loop mediated isothermal amplification and this is kind of cool because you just take the DNA sample and you drop it in this to in a tube with the with the right reagents and if circus per is present or if that mutation is present that's associated with resistance you'll see a color change in the tube okay so it's a very quick visual assay that will just tell you if uh yeah if the fungus is present and if it has certain mutations I will say it does have some limitations which is why we also focused on a probe-based qPCR assay where we take that DNA from the fungus and we put it into the real-time PCR machine and it tells us very very specifically whether or not that strain is resistant or sensitive to that particular fungicide so because of the better sensitivity you get with real-time PCR we are generally now pursuing real-time PCR as a strategy for DMI resistance for detecting DMI resistance so the current status of this project is Subi as a postdoctoral research associate in my lab she is taking the information from Becky's work all those five genes and the mutations in those those genes and she is developing a probe-based detection strategy for all for those genes okay so it's taking some time here we know what the mutations are and we and Subi is developing probes for those so we can we can develop this assay further and for proof of concept we want to test the qPCR strategy on 420 field strains against their ec50 values so these ec50 values of course were generated again by the Gary Seekor lab and when I say Gary Seekor's lab of course I mean Viviana but yes we want to show that that our probes are as robust as the ec50 values that were generated by Viviana and really ultimately we just hope that development of these probes will lay the foundation for you know timely on-farm identification of resistance strains right we want to be able to not wait at the end of the year to find out what resistance you have in your in a growing region we want to be able to tell you on this particular field you have resistance to these specific chemistries and I think we're getting we're laying the foundation for that all the time and I think we're getting closer all the time but ultimately we think that this will make farmers more informed when it comes to fungicide resistance management and ultimately disease management for Syracostra at least part and that's all I have I just want to again mention Subie and Becky for their hard work on this project and Gary Seekor and Viviana for their help along the way and of course we definitely really appreciate the funding from the Sugarbeet Research and Education Board okay I'm going to introduce the next presentation then the the the title of the presentation is characterizing Syracostra but a coa spore germination the the presenter is Vivian Rivera Vargas and Vivian works for Dr. Seekor at North Dakota State University go ahead Vivian I was saying Syracostra leaf spot is the most important leaf spot disease on sugarbeets cause important loss economic and losses and integrate management is necessary to control this disease like cultural practices resistant cultivars and timely fungicide application and of course disease forecasting fungicide application is a very important timely fungicide application also first fungicide application is the most critical and usually is based on the calendar road closure first appearance of the disease and force gas subsequent applications based on daily infection values that force gas condition favorite for disease development is calculating using a parameter like a humidity and temperature in the field and it's based in two days of daily infection values and when these two days I have a value less than six conditions are no favor for disease for infection and when these values are higher than six the condition at the favorite for disease development and right now we have two force gas model Shane and Tang that was developed in the 80s and deep gas model developed in 2004 both of these models use weather data which is relative humidity and temperature to calculate the disease infection values both model pretty condition favorite for disease development in the field after the disease was detected the model doesn't include the condition favorite force for the termination which is important for early infections so in our lab with all the work we've been doing over the year we observe that germination of a sport growth of mycelium and a sport production can be observed and temperature of say 10 Celsius over a period of time so the objective of this study was determining the condition temperature relative humidity and time required for a circus for a particular sport germination this hasn't been previously described so for material method we shows then isolate that were tested for sport germination five of these were fully sensitive to work from the size and fight isolate resistant to all of that two wet conditions free water and a hundred percent relative humidity also we test a four different temperature 10 14 18 and 20 centigrade Celsius centigrade and time of incubation at this particular temperature 248 12 and 24 hours this study was conducted in gross chamber in this table is just to illustrate that the sensitive isolate really were really sensitive to all chemistry and the resistant were highly resistant so once we start a do a sport production or induce a correlation in the isolate the sport were collected with the steel ester water and a hundred microliters of the sport suspension was placed in a microscope slide two sets of each isolate were prepared once it was placed right away in the incubation chamber and the other set was air dry before the placement in the incubation chamber the incubation chamber was at a hundred percent relative humidity and they were placed at the desired temperature a slide were collected after the age this time and time and the sport germination was stopped by fixing the slide with lacto phenol and cotton glue sport the germination data was collected from a tree replication and a percent of germination were calculated and this used to do a statistic analysis so this is to illustrate our humidity chamber this is a big petri plate which we put in this is the suspension of a sport and this is the same suspension but previously air dry and in the left corner here is the humidity chamber closed and with parafrim to keep the high humidity inside and this is the slide that being fixed for further analysis when as a result we calculate the porcina sport germination across all treatment and we find out that the resistant isolate in general have lower germination compared to the or the group lower than the sensitive isolate in if we consider as a summary of this study we find out across all treatment humidity and time of incubation that the resistant isolate have a significant less germination than the sensitive one also very interesting that the germination in free water is really significant compared to just a high humidity so water is really important for the sport germination and of course higher the temperature higher is the sport germination and also in time it's really important the time of germination every four hours two or four hours there is a big increase in the percent of germination so this picture illustrates the germination is the same isolate incubated for two hours and I think it's also used and we can see the sport is not germinated this is just to bring the slide and this is the same sport same treatment but in free water and we can see the micelle already growing from the apical cell and also for lateral cells so for the present for this graph and the following only we use the data for the free water because the dry it really has it's really low germination and we can say it's no significant for the study so if we see the time the influence of the time in the sport germination we can see at two and four hours incubation regardless of temperature there is no significant difference in the percent of germination of the sport but when we go to eight to 24 hour sensitive isolates show higher percent of germination over time than the resistant one now if we look temperature across time in the end of the time we can see a tanked Celsius resistant isolate have significant lower germination than this sensitive isolate is a big difference which also can be seen at 14 Celsius but wait we get to temperature of 18 Celsius and above this difference is no significant anymore so here we have a germination at 10 Celsius 24 hours after a incubation in this side we have the resistant isolate we can see they are germinated from the apical and lateral cells but compared to the sensitive isolate we have we can see the high feet have been growing longer than the resistant one also another interesting observation we have when we're inducing the sport a production in the isolate we observe the resistant isolate which is in this corner the size of the slide they produce a sport faster compared to the sensitive one so and this was three days of induce of the sport production at 22 Celsius also it does seem interesting that isolate a start a can germinate after two a start in the process of germination after two hour incubation 10 Celsius and this is how they may see it may see it start to grow in from the apical cells also we find out or we observe that the resistant isolate have longer a sport than the sensitive isolate this is a extreme case but this is sensitive isolate we can see that in general short compared to the resistant isolate with 76 microns compared to the resistant isolate that is a really long cell a sport is about a 190 microns so result high sport germination occur when free water is present compared to germination and 100% relative humidity across all treatment sport from resistant isolate have lower percentage germination compared with the sensitive isolate sport from sensitive isolate have significant higher percent of germination a lower temperature 50 and 55 Fahrenheit compared with the sport with resistant isolate but at temperature above 64 Fahrenheit this this difference is no significant in the percent of germination germination of a sport from sensitive and resistant isolate begin can begin at 50 Celsius of 10 centigrade after two hours of germ of incubation mycelium growth after germination of the sport is greater from sensitive isolate compared with the growth of resistance one any germination begin for the apical sport end but after eight hours additional germination begins from all other cells so as a conclusion we can say that it's appear there is a fitness penalty for sport germination of fungicide resistant isolate a colder temperature which disappear when the temperature increases also appear there's a different there's a fitness advantage for early sport production that forward the favorite resistant isolate compared to the sensitive one also they have a larger sport and rolling more cells per sport this study might have implication for the forest cast of the disease when combined with the sport trapping and the d.i.b calculation value this imply that early fungicide application mostly target sensitive isolate and early fungicide application should reduce and better manage an early surface particular germination and infection additional work is necessary to adjust the current model to include condition favor for sport germination and timing of the first fungicide application also we need to study the impact of term intermediate temperature at what the condition in the overall germination of the sport and with this I conclude my presentation thank you