 This is the Sugar Beet Report, bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the Sugar Beet growing season. Today we're checking out the Sugar Beet crop in the southern Red River Valley. With us is Todd Jacellius, Vice President of Agriculture for the southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative. Todd, how did the season start out for producers in the southern valley? Planting at southern Minnesota started a little bit later than normal this year. Our average planting date is about May 5th. That's about 10 days later than our long-term average planting date. So a little bit late because it was kind of a wet-ish April, but once we got started planting things went pretty rapidly. We did have enough moisture to get most of the crop out of the ground nicely and those early plantings were really had a very very good stance, 200 plus. So we're very happy with that. As we moved into May it continued to get a little bit drier as those plantings came along. We got less rainfall and stands are a little bit thinner the later you got but still very acceptable. So all in all we got off to a really good start. How was the battle with weed control? Weed control started out really good. Guys who had a pre-down for the most part got a nice activating rain and pretty good on keeping the weeds at bay early on. Our problem weed here is resistant water hemp and improved to be a problem again this year. On the whole I think our growers did a really good job of controlling that particular weed, but we are starting to see some escapes now as we get later in the season. Generally speaking not bad compared to where we've been past a couple of years when it was really dry. Didn't get an activating rainfall for those prees, but still there are enough resistant water hemp in our area that it's always a concern. Did the dry conditions work for or against growers? Those dry conditions although didn't always help us with weed control did help us with diseases and we've seen very very low rhizectonia or a phantom icis in our beets this year so far and that's very helpful and really helps maximize the potential of the crop. The other thing it's helped is Cicosper has been very minimal this year. Our growers over the past few years have really done a fantastic job of keeping that disease under control because it was a very problematic disease, but right now it's actually a very good check here in the middle of August. The dry conditions have helped keep that down, but I really think our growers efforts the last couple of years have really helped keep the noculeum level down and that's resulted in very favorable control of that disease this year. The recent rains were pretty widespread, how is the rain at your end of the valley? It has been dry up until just recently, did get some rains last week which was welcome we had a nice I'll call it one to two inch rain across most of our growing area which is very welcome and that has kept our crop growing very nicely. We have had a nice crop coming based on our root samples and so we actually started our pre-pile activities on Tuesday, August 15th. We're just getting started on that. We'll have more information about how our crops doing here as we get a few days into pre-pile. Right now everything is looking very good. Thanks Todd. Our guest has been Todd Gisellius, Vice President of Agriculture for the Southern Minnesota Beech Sugar Cooperative. This has been the Sugar Beet Report bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the Sugar Beet growing season.