Our first speaker this morning will be Dr. Ashok Chanda from the University of Minnesota and he will as usual be discussing solborn diseases. Alright, good morning everyone. Again, thank you for showing up this morning. Although you didn't need to drive but we missed this personal interaction and I hope to see everybody in person next year. I think it's finally we're getting really bored of this Zoom interactions here. Today, you know, primarily I'm going to focus on rhizachtonia management in sugar beet, you know, but there are a few things that I could touch upon if you know if needed at the end. Again, I'm the extension sugar beet pathologist with the University of Minnesota. I'm located at the Northwest Research and Outreach Center in Crookston. Here's my contact information and if you have any questions, you know, later after this talk or any time. So first thing I always wanted to show you some data is like the number of samples that we receive in Crookston for disease diagnosis, right? So number one thing, we just need to know what's happening to the beets in our fields, right? So we can't just assume we just need to verify, we need to pull a sample and diagnose in the lab. And again in 2020, we got about 89 samples and rhizachtonia was kind of the major one we saw. This is the same trend since 2014. So the highest number of samples are always rhizachtonia and we did see some ephanomyces. Again, it's not uncommon to see ephanomyces in some fields, especially, you know, if you have some moisture issues or a little bit later planting or it's a weak variety. And then there are at least a few fields that had both rhizachtonia and ephanomyces. And then the number of samples for fissuring was a little bit down in 2020. That's really good news because, you know, we saw a spike in 2019. That was a little bit worrisome. But right now, the only thing that we can do for fissuring is actually planting a tolerant variety. So that's very good. And we do see some pithium in very few fields. Again, if there is some water logging or food drainage issues, you know, pithium could be a good pattern in those fields. And there are some we don't recover any pathogens. And mostly it's because of some herbicide injury or some other, you know, biotic stress or abiotic stress in that case, like a wind injury and other causes there. Again, in 2021, we will have the diagnosis set up for the growers. So if you have any issues in the field, please send them to our lab. The only difference is probably maybe early summer, if people are not allowed into the building, we'll have a drop box just outside the lab just like last year. So you could drop in the samples and text me. So we'll get to them right away. Again, to emphasize this, you know, why we need this accurate diagnosis, right? For a perfect example, you know, I field south of Crookston a few years ago, the grower thought that he was dealing with rhizectonia. So next time around, he planted beets, but he wanted to try two different varieties here, you know, for his own curiosity. So it ended up to be fissurium, not really rhizectonia, right? So now we see which one I did it better compared to the other one. So this one did extremely well compared to the susceptible variety. Again, that's why, you know, it's very essential to know what's killing beets in our fields. And as we saw earlier, sometimes it's just one, but sometimes it's a mix, but that's a real problem. You know, rhizectonia, it's getting to be very common in most of the fields, but from time to time, it gets complicated with the presence of phantom ICs or fissurium. You know, this particular field was in Mindak growers area, and then it had both rhizoc and a phantom ICs. And look at the date here, right? July 21st and 2015. So, you know, most of the beets are gone like in a couple of weeks after I took this picture. Again, when you're dealing with more than one, probably have to focus with what's your biggest problem, but then you need to add different layers, how you're going to manage the other problems on top of that. When we think about rhizectonia, you know, it's a full season pathogen.   But once, you know, typically we see this necrosis at the soil line and pretty soon we lose the seedlings. But anything that delays emergence, like, you know, sometimes we don't have enough moisture, right? When we plant, you know, then it leads to later emergence. Some of these young plants are more susceptible compared to the older plants early on. But as we go later into the season, you know, it's very tricky, right? Everything is underground. So how do we know that we have rhizoconia there or some of the root rot going on? So you just need to pick up a, you know, nice warm afternoon and then probably the first thing to look up for this, the wilting, right? And some plants look healthy, but right next to is, actually you're seeing this wilting, but you're not seeing any chlorosis. So it just tells you that probably the root rot is just getting started. But oftentimes there are a couple of dead plants and especially in the case of rhizectonia, because these got infected early on and then, you lost those and you're seeing some active rot on these particular plants. But once the infection gets really heavy, you know, what you do is you get this chlorotic crowns, they collapse, they just fall close to the ground, but these are from my inoculated plants. So I don't want to see any of your fields looking like this for rhizectonia, then that's really terrible to do that. But by the end of the season, again, you lose these plants, they just kind of look like spiders, right?  So that's again, classic symptom for rhizectonia. When you see this, typically, you see, you know, four to five plants within a row. It's not just one or two isolated cases, you know, that's the way rhizectonia moves. Initially, it starts developing as the soil gets warm. But I think there is a critical match for it.  That's when we see the beets dying up and down the row here. And if you look at the roots, the classic for rhizectonia, again, you see this very dark black necrotic lesions on the roots. Sometimes you can think they're like a ladder because you see one here, one here, they go up and down the roots. But there are some theories, right? Okay, some people see maybe only at the top, some at the bottom, some in the middle. But, you know, we saw all of those situations here. In this particular case, you know, it's really clean at the crown and also it's clean towards the very bottom. And then you see significant rotting here. In another situation, again, there is good rotting just down below, but the crowns look more clean. But this is the case with this roundup ready beets, because now we're doing less and less cultivation. All the looking at the survey earlier, I think more of you are doing at least one or two passes for a take caring of the weeds. But when you do that, the soil will get into the crowns and probably know that's very good for increasing the risk for rhizectonia. But the other point here is, depending on your cultivation and tillage practices, you know, the depth of rhizectonia in Aklum could vary from field to field. Let's say if it's present in all the just below four inches, then you may see that this is developing very severely at this point, but eventually it could move up or down from the location there. But once these beets die, typically what they form with these dormant structures, we call this as exterosia, it just looks like a soil, and it can survive in soil for two to three years. So that way, you know, at least the three year rotation is very good for sugar beets from beads to beads. And for some of the data that I am going to show in my talk, so basically the root rock, we used to use zero to seven scale until last year. But in September 2020, we changed to zero to 10. Because this is nice, you know, each point is like a 10% increase in the root rock severity. So one, when you hit 10, it's almost 90 to 100. It's a completely dead plant. Right. The challenge with rhizectonia is two. Number one, if we have severe disease, we're going to lose stands, we get a lot of root rot. Number two, if you put any beets beyond five, it's going to cause significant problems during storage. So you're going to lose more money in your second or third payment, you know, as you get towards the end. So some key points, right? Now, rhizectonia, when we think about rhizectonia, it has several different groups. But primarily, we are only concerned with ag2-2. There are two subgroups in 2-2. Those are 3b and 4, but really doesn't matter in our growing area. Both are equal to be capable of killing beets. And ag4 used to be very common for causing seedling damping off. But I would say predominantly we are dealing with ag2-2 in our growing area here. And when it comes to this host strain, it's very wide for rhizectonia. The sugar beet is a pretty good host. And soybeans and edible beans. I think from the survey, I see soybean was problematic before sugar beets for rhizectonia. And even some of the weeds are common in soybean, sugar beet, and corn, you know, everything in the rotation. These are good hosts for rhizectonia. Like I said, it can survive in the soil for two to three years. The main difference between rhizectonia and ephanomyces is when you have a field with ephanomyces, it's more or less uniform. You have extensive patches, because it makes these swimming spores that could actually spread within a field. Whereas rhizectonia, it's stationary.  So it's very patchy if you have like a very severe infection and then completely clean patch right next to it. And we talked about the inoculum depth, depending on your tellage or cultivation practices, it can determine how deep you have the rhizectonia and where the disease shows up. And really, anything that you take care to reduce the buildup of the inoculum, it's really good.  And you probably need to do very minimal management for rhizectonia. So when we talk about rhizectonia management, there are several different tactics that we always talk about. But we're just going to look at this one by one, you know, early planting, it's really up to the mother nature. You know, if you could go in early and plant, that's really good for the beets because then the soil is cooler, and the beets are off to a good start. When it comes to crop rotation, we see soybeans and dry beans are probably more problematic compared to corn. So here, exactly just like sugar beads, it starts the time you put the seed in the ground with soybeans, it can cause pre-emergence damping off. Or once you know, the seedlings emerge, you can see significant root rot towards the bottom, you know, on the roots, it's just like the root rot. And this is the inoculated trial that's done in 2018. So this actually had soybeans and rhizectonia inoculum was put in the furrow, we lost about 90 to 95% of the stands because you know, we also got one inch rain right after planting. So that's like a perfect storm. Whereas these rows are non-inoculated with rhizoc, we see good emergence. And for 2019, again, we repeated the same study. But here, we lost about probably, you know, 40 to 50% of the stands. And then again, these two are inoculated, like I said, if the weather conditions are really favorable, it can take a big toll on seedling emergence. And navy beans. Looking at the navy beans, here, we actually broadcast the inoculum when we planted this, the same AG group that we use for sugar beads. Again, you see a row of plants dying here. Again, probably some were delayed for emergence here compared to the strong plant here. But you have you're seeing two more dead plants right next to it. Again, the same pattern. Some of the later emerge seedlings are more susceptible when it comes to navy beans. Again, these two are, you know, some of the early emerge ones very strong. And you see this chlorosis, and then you're going to lose this seedling. So whether it's the soybeans or dry beans, the other thing to consider is anything that you can do to manage rhizectonia, whether it's a specialty variety, or doing some fungicide application or the seed treatment, that's going to be good for sugar beads, because when you go to the beets in two to three years, it's free of inoculum there. And I want to switch gears and talk about atlantic fungicides. And number one is the seed treatment, right? So since 2014, we got several seed treatments are labeled for managing rhizectonia. But most of those belong to one class of fungicide, it called SDHI, succinate dehydrogenase inhibitor. So what they do is they inhibit a single enzyme that's involved in respiration, it's almost like choking that fungus, right? But the good news, most of them look very good. So again, I listed some of the treatments here. The main ones I say are cabina, or vibrance or cystiva, some of the labeled rates. And metloxate also comes in a different combination, whether it's cabina or vibrance. Again, metloxate is not an SDHI, it's a combination of a triazole and rhizalax here. So I'm just going to show some data for the seed treatments from 2020 in Crookstone location. So I did not separate these, but now you're seeing everything as a group, the number of plants 400 foot of row on the y-axis and the days of pre-planting on the x-axis here, and my untreated. So there was nothing on the seed. And this trial was inoculated with rhizectonia at the time of planting. So early on, surprisingly, normally, I don't see this pattern. But there was some reduced emergence with the seed treatments, two weeks and three weeks, but not really much different compared to the untreated control. But once we hit about 10 weeks, then you could see the little bit steeper, we're losing more and more plants towards the end of the season. So this is in terms of the stand counts. Moving on to the infarophonicides. I see probably at least a couple of growers are doing some infarophonicides. But again, my message for applying infarophonicides is if you have a really severe field for rhizectonia, do it otherwise, you know, you're probably not going to get much benefit out of the infarophonicides. And two things I want to emphasize. Number one, it's actually done down a drip tube in the furrow. And number two, the way we do is we mix fungicide in three gallons of water and mix with three gallons of 1034 O and then it goes well, drip tube, right? That's the way it's basically six gallons per acre. That's the rate. And number two, there are several different options for infarophonicides. But the main thing is some mix very well, some they don't mix very well. But the key is you need to have a constant agitation in the tank. You know, that's the key, we can let that sit in the tank overnight and then go in the next morning and do it. It's just going to have some big headaches when you do that. Again, 1034 O by itself and several different options that I have. So this presentation is being recorded and also I'll make these slides available so you could go back and see later if you need to get back. And some of the data that I will show primarily in our quadrace is the number one choice mostly for managing rhizectonia. That's a nine and a half Louis Downs asteroid formulation at 5.7. This is equivalent to nine and a half. He laid a 7.1. It's very similar to the quadrace component is similar to that and it has SDHI. And xanthine is a combination of headline and the biological here. You got preaxter, proline and propols. Propols is a combination of both iconozole and flowpyram. And also, you know, several growers were asking how about we reduce rate of quadrace on top of the cabina 14 grams. So I included this treatment not to encourage you to do it because, you know, ideally, I want you to use nine and a half Louis Downs, but I'm just going to show some data, you know, how it looks. Because, you know, we have some rhizectonia isolates with reduced sensitivity to azoxystrobene, at least in the lab. But they they're still efficacious under field conditions. But it's not ideal to use a lower rate. So looking at the data for the info treatments, again, I overlaid my info treatments, the blackboard with the dots on top of the previous data that I showed. In 2020, normally, I see a little bit of standard action with info funny sites compared to the seed treatments, but but the pattern is different in 2020. So the stands looked good, and a little bit higher from all the way from three weeks to nine weeks. And then we saw some drop in the stands from about nine to 10 weeks. But when compared to the seed treatment, see how steeper it is, you know, we lost some but probably about 10 beats for 100 foot of row for inforose. So once you get these beats off to a good start, the inforose actually offer better protection all towards the mid part of the season. Again, you can look at these numbers if you read later. And for some of the same treatments, this is my recoverable sucrose per acre, right? So basically, this is in pounds per acre here, untreated control, towards the lower end, and all my seed treatments are towards the lower end here, right? So the stand shall better early part of the season. But by the time we went to the harvest, we saw more root rot in the seed treatment only. And then some of the best treatments are on the top here, right? So quadruses, this is, you know, always to talk about nine and a half fluid ounce, or xanthine, or asteroid, the latest. And this is the quadruses six fluid ounce and cabina, right? It looks very similar. So all these bars share the same letter A. So in terms of statistics, there is no significant difference. So you can say everything performed well, and similar, you know, that's weak. But as you add more letters A, B, A, B, C, so that just shows that, you know, it's just going down in terms of the ranking, you know, the way you say it. So ideally, you know, any one of these options will be very good if you want to do an infrared application. But again, you see the risk if you just rely on the seed treatments, if you have enough disease pressure, you're going to lose some of the recoverable sucrose here. So let's look at some post emergence fungicides. Again, right, the cost really depends on where you're buying these fungicides. So that's why I'm not going to say exactly it will cost you this much, right? Because some of you have only 200 acres, some of you have 500 acres. So you do the math. But this is some of the data from 2020. So I'll also show you the previous data so you can compare. But one thing I want to point out in 2020. So when we talk about post fungicides, I'm always talking about applying these as a seven inch band, you know, none of these are done as a broadcast. But there is only one broadcast. This is again, for a comparison purpose, because ideally, I want you to do a broadcast, sorry, band application. So my untreated control here, this is the zero to 10 rating. So we got about four at the time we harvested this. And this is the number of roots that had some disease, right? It could be one or 10. So there are 94% of the beads that we harvested have some rhizoctonia on them. The other things to point out. So quadrice, you know, we've been using for a long time, but the latest is I think going forward, that's worth the recommendation from Singenta, because it's a combination of quadrice and an SDHI, the same SDHI that we know it's not available for other fungicides for sugar bit. It's very unique. And then asteroid is 9.2. This is the equivalent rate for this. And quadrice at 10 fluid ounce rate, a little bit lower, 14.5 is the recommended one. Excalia, it is a new SDHI fungicide that's available from valent. It's just got a label in 2020. And then 0.64 fluid ounce. This is a seven inch band rate. If you're going to do a broadcast, you need to do three times of this because this is for 22 inch rows. So you need to use two fluid ounce for Excalia and top guard EQ. It's a combination of flutrient for all and as oxystrobene. And then you can see the quadrice broadcast. So it's really high disease. And then most of these treatments in blue in a statistically, these are very similar. You know, they have very little to some disease. And then some of the treatments towards the bottom of the list are propyls, proline and preax, right? You got about 40 to 50 or 79% of the beats here, right? So the more root rot rating, the more loss you have. But really, these are the numbers here for my yield. Same treatments here. And then they go to sucrose per acre 2020, the growing season was really good. You know, we got these rain events from, you know, July and August constant rain. We saw some of the worst rachospora, I think in the last six years in this growing area. But again, the conditions are also good for sugar beet growth. Again, these treatments, everything in blue did very well, you know, asteroid or top guard and Excalia all the way up to, you know, quadrace broadcast. But one thing to notice, right? So I got this quadrace band versus broadcast just a little bit lower here, again, preax and propyls, they do work. But you know, statistically, they're a little bit lower compared to the treatments I got here, right? There's a very good response from the post fund sites in 2020. So some of the treatments are common in 2017 compared to 2020. Again, my untreated control, again, at 23 tons per acre, the recoverable sucrose is about 7300 asteroid and a quadrace. Again, all of these are applied as a band top coder proline and quadrace broadcast, right? See, this is the difference I talked about the numerically. Statistically, it's very similar, but you could see about 600 pounds band versus broadcast. You know, that's the difference. So I keep getting this while can I do broadcast? Yes, you can do the broadcast, but don't expect to have the maximum benefit when you do a broadcast application with quadrace. But somehow in 2017, the 10 ounce rate was not as great compared to the 14, you know, it's even lower compared to the broadcast here. So the band for 10 fluid ounce. So that's why if you have a severe feel for rise actonia, I would still recommend going with the 14 fluid ounce or 14 and a half as a band application. Again, some of the treatments from 2019. Excellent disease pressure for rise actonia untreated about 12 tons. But you know, we all know that 2019 fall, right? We can never forget. We got so much rain. We couldn't even harvest for more than like two months. So again, quadrace was one of the top treatments latest did very good. Again, all this in the blue font for statistically very similar. Again, if you see the trend, you know, quadrace broadcast is towards the bottom here. Again, pro line and propels quadrace at lower rate and I looked a little bit better in 2019. So number one, do a band application if you want to do post. And then in the coming slides, we'll look at some of the timings for this post application. We have another trial that's been done in Crookston, Vapiton, and then Renville. So we looked at two different varieties. One is 3.7. So I consider this as a specialty variety for rise act. And the 4.4 is a susceptible variety around I know some of the ratings differ between the co-ops, but please compare you know how it relates to the varieties from Mindac here, right? So we got three treatments at the time of planting. Nothing on the seed or no in for a fungicide. Only Sisteva on the seed or quadrace in furrow on Sisteva. That's nine and a half, right? That's a recommended way to do it. This particular trial was planned on May 7. You know, it's very similar to when the growers would plant. And there are two different times for post-embrace application, four leaf and eight leaf. So treatments had either four or eight, but not both here. June 9, June 22nd, it was harvested on September 16. So looking at some of the stands, number of plants on the Y axis and then days after planting, the 3.7 did a little bit better numerically compared to the susceptible one. But we know that real resistance for rise actonia is not going to be effective until the weeds reach six to eight leaf. But the statistical differences are not there between these two varieties. So it doesn't really matter, right? So even the numerically, it's higher. And when we looked at the ad planting treatments, here is my untreated, nothing on the seed or in furrow, basically lower number of plants from three to seven weeks after planting. But Sisteva or Sisteva and quadrace in furrow now, both of them did very well. But from here to here, you could see that you know, the in furrow, I think some of the benefits you're seeing, compared to Sisteva only because you're going to lose more more plants if you just rely on the seed treatments there. And looking at the overall difference between 3.7 and 4.4, basically we had more disease in the susceptible one by the end of the season. And less sucrose percentage and the recalbule sucrose per ton is actually lower for the susceptible one and higher for the resistance just because we had a higher disease about 26 percent of the roots in the resistant one compared to 41 percent in the susceptible one, right? This is just the variety comparison. But I showed you the stands a little bit higher for Sisteva and Sisteva and quadrace compared to untreated, but in terms of the final yield, there was no difference among these treatments. So none of these are statistically different. The biggest difference we saw at this site was actually for post emergence applications. So prior to the seed treatments, we tried to time our post applications when the soil temperature at the four inch reached 65, right? But these were the two application times for 2020 four leaf on June nine and the eight leaf application on June 22nd, right? So we are well above this threshold line when we applied this, right? This is where probably by June first itself across the threshold at Renville. So looking at some of the data here, so no post application versus four or eight leaf application. We had actually lower road track with the post application eight looked better compared to four leaf stage, right? So again, we had the conditions favorable throughout the season. So I think that's why the application looked better because I protected for three to four weeks more compared to the four leaf application in terms of going to the harvest. 60% of the routes had disease with no post compared to 25 or 15. The biggest difference you can see in yield about seven tons with the post application. This is across both varieties and about 2300 pounds across both varieties in terms of recoverable sucrose. But there was an interaction at this side between variety and then post. So what it tells you is the varieties respond differently depending on the post application here, right? This is my 3.7 variety with the four leaf and eight leaf application for the post. So they bought five tons per acre bump with the post application. Looking at the 4.4 variety, we got about 10 ton response at this side for this, right? That's pretty tremendous for me. Looking at some of the recoverable sucrose per acre numbers, again, for the resistant variety, no post four leaf or eight leaf post, I see about 1600 to 1700 pounds recovery at this side, where the susceptible variety about 2400 pounds or to 28. So about 6000 pounds, no post, four and eight. So getting back to, so don't worry about soil temperatures. I think ideally, you know, you time your post application between four and eight, I would say any time between first week of June to third week. But the key is to get this post applications done. And number two, keep getting this question, do I need to wait for rain to time the post application? So my recommendation is go ahead and do your post application. If you get rain, that's great. But don't wait for rain to do your post application, then you're going to miss on entirely doing on that. So take home message for 2021. The varieties, I think we made a tremendous progress in terms of building a higher yield and resistance for rhizectonia. But sometimes you may not see the response unless you have moderate to high disease pressure in the fields. So just pay attention to those fields. If you have really severe fields, the resistant variety will pay off. And seed treatments, excellent seed treatments since 2014. Again, the best protection you will get from them is about four to five weeks after planting. So but don't rely on them completely until the end of the season. Inferofundicides, like I said, you know, they offer protection from early to mid season, but they come with the risk, especially if you have light soils or if the conditions are dry and then cooler during emergence. But if you have a severe field for rhizectonia, the benefits are better than the risk for info applications. And other key thing, especially if you're using a startup fertilizer, look for the compatibility and have a good agitation, I think you'll be better off. It comes to post emergence application, no 48 leaf. Since you have the seed treatments offering protection, you don't need to worry about exact timing. So just go ahead and do between these. But there are certain years. Since 2014, I would say two to three out of six, we did not see any response from the post funds that application, just because the conditions are dry in August, and then sometime in late July. So we didn't have enough disease pressure, then we didn't see response. But it doesn't mean that we had disease, but then there was no response from those funds applications. So again, in certain situations, the resistant variety can also respond just like we saw in 2020. So going forward, the best management practice for rhizoc, seed treatment and a post, I would say this is for the moderate pressure. And if you have a severe field, and you have lots of like soybeans and dry beans in the rotation, in a higher risk field, probably it's not a bad idea to do a seed treatment, info and a post application, I think, you know, everything that you can do. But the good news when we do this, like I showed earlier, we have several different options for info and post. If you don't want to rely on quadrice for both, you know, you could go with the headline info or Xanthian and then go back with the quadrice post application, or go with quadrice info or XKLA post application, right? So several different options. So it's better to rotate these fungicides, you know, to minimize the risk for building fungicide resistance. Although rhizoctonia, it has one life cycle, you know, it just infects the roots at the end of the season, it becomes darman sclerotia. But you know, over a long time, we don't know how quickly the fungicide resistance will evolve for rhizoctonia. So rotating this is a key too. With that, I would like to acknowledge the R&D board for funding this work and several cooperators and the industry allies for supplying all the chemicals and seed. And beyond everything, I think 2020, we know how tough it has been to get anything done. So I would like to thank my team for getting everything done. I couldn't be thankful enough. And I'll be happy to take any questions. Now. And here is a QR code, please go ahead and scan in a while we do the questions. Ashok, is there a rhizoc score where it doesn't pay to do a post application or info anymore? Like a like a numerical number 3.7 3.6? That's a good question, Cody. But you know, 3.7 I consider the specialty variety, right? You know, that's the lowest score I could get from crystal here. But if you look at the response from that in the southern main, and I was really surprised. Normally, you know, I would have expected maybe 500 to 1000 pounds, but the 1600 pounds was pretty significant. But this is where I think the risk for the field, you know, with your cropping history and the rotation, I think that that's a key factor for you to decide if you want to do a post or not. Because you might be thinking, I have a C treatment and once the beats are 68 lead stage, you know, you get this natural resistance. But if the overwhelming disease pressure, you know, that may not be true in those cases. Thank you for being here again. And a very cool morning. It's minus 26 outside. It's usually good to be face to face. But when it's this cool here, it's also good to be in the comfort of your office or your home. So today, I will discuss more or less some of the strategies to manage our cost per least spot. And I'll spend a few minutes to talk about white mold, which has come suddenly, and at very high incidence in some areas. So least spot, as you saw in the evaluations, the polls, we will share that at the end of today as well, continues to be our major problem in most production areas, especially in the north, the southern end of the valley. At Mindak, based on your evaluation, about 56% of you have indicated that this is your biggest problem. And these are some pictures. The one on the left is from southern Minnesota, the one on the right from your area where you've had fungicide. And one of the big problem is fungicide resistance in that the fungus has been able to develop resistance to a number of the fungicides we use. And because of that, when you apply the fungicides in ideal conditions, the fungicides do not work as well as they were previous to the population becoming resistant. Another problem is the issue of rainfall. I will touch a little bit more on this as we go along. But please note in a wet year, especially in 2020, we had a very wet year in Mindak, where about based on my calculation from Peter, about 25 of the 70 days that we used to spray had rain. So a lot of times the fungicides will be washed off. So least spot is still our biggest problem. So what can we do to manage this disease? Most of you have been doing, I believe all of you as growers have been using our recommendations. What are some of our recommendations to use crop mutations? I don't think anybody plans beats back to back. All of us or most of us use some other crop before wheat is usually the crop of choice, if you can, if not corn. And if it's possible, try not to plant beats on soybean ground. And I'll come back to this a little bit more later. So crop rotation, most of you are doing this already. Our other recommendation, all of you do some form of tillage. It doesn't have to be deep low. Anything that you can do to incorporate infected leaves into the soil, it's about two inches, that will be good enough. You do not want the leaves on the top of the soil surface. If you can avoid that, then that's the quickest way to reduce our inoculum load. Our inoculum load since 2016 has been very, very high. So in all of our production areas, the disease can be very severe very quickly because of the high inoculum load. What else can you do? This is a picture of the MINDAC coded variety trial that is headed by Dr. Metzger and his team, Phenomenal Resort Site. You can see here, this is more or less in September, some green. And the green that you can see, the distinct green, these are varieties without any funding sites that are still very green. I'll show you some close up at the end of this growing season. The seed companies have done a phenomenal job of providing varieties, breeding for varieties that are very resistant to our cost-per-lease spot. And for the MINDAC area, especially, you will have, I think, over 50% of your acres will be planted to these new varieties. And what do I mean that they're looking good? These are some close up of some varieties. Some of them are approved. I think there is a beta variety there. I think there is one from Crystal. Those are approved. There is one from CIS that has not been approved, but it's still looking good. There is also another one from Maribu that looks pretty good. So you can see in the trial, it was the disease were very, very severe, but these varieties without any funding sites were able to withstand the disease and still produce good yields. So we'll talk a little bit more about this here. How do we manage these very resistant varieties with funding sites? So resistant varieties when you can get them and the other things that we're doing, everybody who use, who plant sugar beet use funding sites. Our recommendation, use funding site mixtures. Nearly 90% of you, nearly 90% of you have indicated that you have used mixtures. Some of you did not use mixtures and we can understand why. MINDAC, based on some of the survey I've had back, some of you have had six, some of you have had seven funding site applications with mixtures and some people called towards the end of the growing season in September and asked, can I just put on a shot of something else to prevent my field from getting even more brown? And I said, yes, if you want to go ahead and do that, go ahead and do that there. So use funding site mixtures and we're slowly getting better and better varieties. So you'll have to use less in another year or two. Dr. Metzger say water is cheap, it's free. So use at least 15 to 20 gallons of water and apply a 10 to 14 day intervals, especially for the more susceptible variety. Reduce your interval timing, especially when it's wet. As I said in 2020, 25 of the 70 days that we apply funding sites, we had rainfall. So I'll show you what happens when you have that amount of rainfall in a year. So what I'll do, I'll show you some of the work we have done and I'll show you what happens in the year when we have high disease pressure, but we have enough dry days so you can spray, get the funding sites to work and in those situations the funding sites will provide very effective control and I will also show you what happens in some years when you have so much rainfall that it doesn't matter if you put five, six or seven funding site application, if you have a susceptible variety you will have problems. So this is a picture of the non-treated check at August 29th on the left-hand side, two weeks later even the brown leaves are gone, you're having green leaves and you have regrowth which will lead to high amino N and low sugar concentration. We have seen that the fungus has developed resistance to the QoIs, the Pryaxor, the Gem, the Pyrak and what that means is that when you apply the funding sites initially it appears as if you're having a little bit of control, but later in the season the leaves will die, your yield will probably be a slightly better than your non-treated check and please note in these most of the information I'll give you here with individual funding sites or funding site mixtures is what we do as researchers to find out how effective these funding sites are by themselves. There are no rotations, this is the same funding site applied three or four times back to back. So you can see here this is early in the season, this is later in the season, so your leaves are dying, you will have low tonnage and very low sugar concentration. It doesn't matter which one of the QoIs or strobilurins you're using. For many years the triazoles are also very very effective. Tetrakanazole or eminent was the funding site that saved our industry, then we had Inspire which was working very well. 2016 is the first year when we had full-scale resistance building to the QoIs and we had gradual reduction in efficacy of the triazole. You can see the Minerva was working a little bit better than Inspire. The flu triathlon was not working well at all in 2016. If you look at the leaf spot rating you can see the triazole was not very much different from the check but as I indicated it does give you some control early and then everything goes brown. The triazoles which were just as effective as the triazole or headline in the good old days prior to 2016, eminent, Minerva, Inspire and Proline, when it's wet, when you have a high population or a resistant sarcosperal they don't do well either. You have a highly spot rating and the recoverable sucrose although higher than the check are not as good as you will like for the potential of the particle of variety. I show you a picture here of 2017 and then I'll show you a picture of 2019. In 2017 you can see here eminent four times on the left. This is Inspire four times on the right is Proline. What we have seen over the years is that this particle of fungicide Proline appears to be the best in terms of leaf spot control of all the triazoles that we have. This is 2017. It was wet. 2019 was not as wet. We had higher yields overall but the only problem we couldn't harvest in some areas. So you can see Minerva, Inspire, Proline and Minerva do they all perform fairly well because the population was lower and it was not as wet. When we look at the yield you can see that the one in the brung is the dry ear. In the wet it's the in the blue it's the wet ear. You can see the non-treated check was very close to 10 in both instances but Proline in dry conditions Inspire and Minerva their leaf spot rating were below six and usually once it's below six for us it's usually not very economically damaging. In the wet year 2017 the disease ratings were higher and recoverable sucrose you can't really see it on my screen here was also lower. What has been saving us is the old fungicide tin it affects the respiration ATP and although it affects that we still consider it more or less as a multi-site it affects more than one site rather than the site specific triazole and stroberun. So tin is one of our best fungicides and I will stress this more and more in our applications and our recommendations we are always stressing always have a tin and always have a triazole always have a tin always have a triazole consider those as your base then always add something to your tin and something else to your triazole and other mode of action and if you use that in a rotation program for the most part you will have good control if the conditions are favorable. I will come to the to the mixture mixing partners shortly. So tin over the years has been pretty good by itself but we don't recommend using it by itself. Proline to the left you can see looks pretty good all in the season but later in the season it starts to get brown if you mix it with tin it looks better later in the season. This looks pretty good but when we do this especially if you're in Mendoc or even in southern Minnesota you're using your two best fungicides. If you're only using one application this will be ideal this will be great you'll have excellent control but you are using four five six and seven applications and we cannot use out all of our aces. We have to split this up so we'll see how to to split the triazoles up and the tin up as well. You can see here again it's not only Proline but Inspire and Tin looks better than Inspire alone and that's the full rate. Minerva by itself not so good. Minerva and tin much much better and one can always argue that tin by itself is very good. Yes so here again we are showing that if you use a DMI and use tin with it and this would be more or less ideal for people in the northern areas. Let's say you are in the Grafton and the Grand Forks area. The use Proline is good but we always recommend something else so you add tin to it. It looks very good but as I said those are our aces. What else can we use? We have the multisites, the otters. They are not so good by themselves like the Mancoset, the EBDZ, either in the form of Manzit or Dytane. You have the coppers. I just use badge. We have used otter trials where we've used about 10 or 11 different copper products and for the most part for the most part all of the copper products are working fairly well. So here again leaf spot rating below six and a high recovered sucrose per acre. The EBDCs by themselves, copper by itself or if you use a copper and an EBDC you're also having good leaf spot control and acceptable recovered sucrose per acre. So this is what I'm kind of talking about when I'm saying let's use otter modes of action to improve the efficacy of our aces. Our aces are tin and the triazoles. You can see if you use, this is Manzit and Inspire. It looks very well. Badge and Inspire also look very well. Now these, the badge and the Inspire, they're not only a multisite and a site specific but what else is happening here? This was a year when you did not have too much rainfall. So the fund decide is getting an opportunity to perform, to provide effective control. What happens if you have a rainfall? The badge is more or less a protectant. Inspire is also considered as a protectant but it is systemic. The triazoles and tops in they are systemic. So it's always good wherever possible to have a systemic triazole in so that if you get a rainfall and it washes off your badge or your EBDC you will still get some control from your systemic fund decides. Here I'm showing you two multisites, a copper and an EBDC. You also have another protectant in the form of tin and tops in. Tops in by itself is not very good but we have seen over the years it's cheap. It is systemic so if you put it with tin and you don't have too much of a rainfall you will get your band for your buck in having better disease control. The triazoles you can use it with either copper or an EBDC. Copper or EBDC. Some places prefer to use the EBDCs more. I have seen both of them work very well. Some years might have this past year I think the EBDCs worked a little bit better than the copper. The copper probably washed off a little bit more but it was not very easy to differentiate between the copper and the manzate. Was it effective to use mixtures in 2019? Here again you have an untreated check. You have the amount of returns you will get. You can see that once you use mixtures and I put different colors to show different modes of action. A triazole which is systemic plus an EBDC a protectant. A super tin which is a multi-site with a site specific. A site specific with another EBDC followed by tin and an EBDC. If you do these mixtures here you have excellent disease control and high recoverable sucrose per acre. In 2019 I said it was not very wet. So if I started this application here at roclosure at roclosure which is a little bit earlier than at what I call disease onset which is about maybe two weeks later you had a little bit less recoverable sucrose per acre. It was not statistical but there was a trend for the earlier application to do better than the later application. If it's a dry year as 2019 was relative to 2020 you don't see much difference in disease control and recoverable sucrose but if it's in a wet year that earlier application is very very critical especially if you have a susceptible variety. So you can use especially in the main that area this is what I will recommend different modes of action towards the end of the growing season you can also use if you wish some tin and either a copper or a tin and ebdc. So it was effective to use fungicide mixtures in a rotation and you can see different years I give you different pictures here this one here looks pretty good you can play around with different combinations you have effective control these are the years when you don't have too much rainfall what do I mean by that you have enough rainfall to make a good crop to get high tonnage but it's not happening soon after your fungicide application these rainfalls are not happening soon after your rainfall application after your fungicide application if that happens then you have poor fungicide efficacy poor disease control this is 2018 and 2019 the previous ones were more or less mixtures of different modes of action here I use different multi sites tin and an ebdc tin and copper or just a copper and an ebdc once you do mixtures again and you apply it in a timely manner you don't get too much rainfall you can control the disease using those fungicide mixtures as well. In 2020 based on our reports of rainfall at Campbell, Wapiton, Breckenridge and our own sites, starting from around July, August and the 15th of September we had 25 days when we had rainfall 25 of those 75 days when you had rainfall so one in every three days so the site here at Foxtome looks very good but every time after we finish applying the fungicide we had to go in with a tillage equipment a cultivator to tidy up the site or else you will not be able to put on your next application so very early in the season you didn't have too much disease in July there was very little disease but in in August the disease became very severe and just early in September you can see picture on the left you can see a few more plots here with green this is Menda coated variety trial here again you come back about two weeks later on you you're only seeing a few of these varieties now are green most of them are brown these are the resistant one and likewise at our resort site only a few of the areas are green and those are more or less resistant varieties not so much the fungicide effect I will discuss this picture here a little bit more at the back here we have your ITs that are supposed to be much more resistant to sarcasm per least spot what do you call the generation to a sarcasm per least spot resistant varieties most of the seed companies were trying to ramp up their seed production so that you can get commercial seeds so as such we're willing to get one variety and you can see here this little trial that we did right here you had between zero and five fungicide application and it only this only goes from here to the green I could not see any difference between zero application and five or six fungicide applications visually if you did not put some fungicides you could see they looked a little bit more yellow a little bit not so healthy but where you put the fungicides they weren't really that critical they performed everything performed well here the variety right next to it i'll show you some close-up you can see a lot of brown and some greens and the greens again here are varieties with more tolerance to the disease if you come to this particular site here most of these here are looking brown and some of these here had five or six fungicide applications it did not matter how many applications you put this variety here and a lot of the other areas i'll show you later the least spot rating of this variety was five and anything five or above because of the amount of rainfall we had no matter how many fungicide applications we put on you are not able to control the disease after let's say september the second okay i want you to just memorize your answer here for me so we have variety a variety b variety c and variety d just look at the four middle rows one two three four the other rows on the left and the right are guest rows so keep your answer in which one do you think looks the best variety a variety b variety c or variety d the answer is variety d i hope you agree with me now my next question to you is which one of these do you think had the most fungicide application out of variety a b c and d which one had the most fungicide application and this is a quick question look at the title effect of host resistance on sarcasm release spot if you said d you are not correct all four of these varieties had the same number of fungicide application four or five fungicide applications in mixtures the reason why d looks better than the others or d looks better than a b looks better than a c as well is because of the ability of the variety to tolerate the fungus so you can see right in this picture here that different varieties based on the inheritance of the genes for resistance and it's usually four or five genes that come to work together you apply the same fungicide but this variety d had the lowest cls rating and had the best response in terms of the least severity we'll talk a little bit more about that the picture on your left hand side range one two three and four this was September 2nd in the trial that we had sequence you can still see some green a few weeks later on these same varieties all the leaves were gone and they were brown it didn't matter which treatment you were using because the disease severity was so high and the amount of rainfall you had were washing off all the fungicide as i said none of you will use this kind of rating here of five but it just shows you that if you have a very high leaf spot rating and you have lots of rainfall it becomes more or less impossible for you to control the disease so some of you may be asking am i doing something wrong in my field no most of you are doing the right thing you are using the varieties that were available to you you are using fungicide in mixture most of you are using high water volume but if there's too much of rain it washes off the fungicide and there is where we will need better varieties i'll show you a few slides here where we had the foxum trial in 2020 it was very wet as i said 25 of the 70 days we had to apply fungicide we had rainfall the leaf spot rating of the check was 10 the sugar concentration was 12.8 and the highest tonnage of any of these treatments was 17 tons you can see the best treatment where we started at rural closure i think we had about six fungicide application in mixture the leaf spot rating and this was early in september by the end of the season it went down we took this rating when the check was 10 the sugar was very good 17.8 but you only had just over 4 000 pounds of recovered sugar 5 000 pounds the other next treatment was tin and manzate followed by inspire and manzate tin and badge proline and manzate super tin and manzate so you can have fairly good control early in the season but everything goes down later in the season another treatment you have other fungicides that you can use in mixtures the problem is the leaf spot rating this is early in the season when this one was already 10 but by the end of the season everything was close to nine or 10 the average tons for the or the highest tons for any of the treatment was 17 tons per acre now the one picture i showed you earlier was where we had one variety and we had a check or we had treatment some of these here had i think it was one two three four five five six applications this one here had five applications another one had two applications another one three applications another one two applications look at the CLS rating it didn't matter if you had no application or six applications the ratings vary from one to one point five because of the inherent ability of the fungus to withstand of the of the variety to withstand the fungus look at your yields now let me say that foxtome in 2020 was not very ideal for sugar beet production or any other crop there was too much rainfall too much standing water however these varieties were able to get anywhere between 26 and 28 tons which was more or less a reflection of what happened at Mindak last year the average was about 24 tons this particular area along highway 19 was very very wet so 24 tons was the average with 16.8 percent sugar for the most part this variety was over 17 percent sugar with or without fundicide so we're still learning how to use these new varieties we're hoping that in 2021 we'll get more improved variety so we can do more testing to determine when will be the best time to apply fundicides we will discuss this a little bit more later this picture here shows us just look at the force range what I was trying to do was to use these two varieties here this is a commercial variety one two three four five six treatments five of these the first five have fundicides about five to six application the one with the x is the untreated check the least part rating for there is about 4.8 this other variety was about 4.4 five different fundicide applications and a check another more tolerant variety around four or less five treatments with fundicides and a check and the one to the extreme right five treatments and a check and you can see over time that the two commercial varieties these here although we are putting on five and six and seven fundicide applications by the time you are ready to harvest all of these here became wrong the more tolerant and this was an experimental variety that kind of they stayed green and their yields were high I'll just give you some figures these are four varieties unfortunately here I can't see the fourth one D I don't know if you can see it on your screen but what's happening the two commercial varieties because of the fact that their least part rating was 4.8 or 4.3 even with fundicides the fundicides were not really getting to control the disease because of too much rainfall variety C and variety D let me go back to this one here they were performing much better not so much because of the fundicide because the fundicides were being washed off of everything but just because of the ability of the variety to withstand the fungus if you I don't know if you can see variety D here but most of the yield here are about 9 000 ponds including the non-treated check so my take home message for release spot is use a holistic system you are all doing the right thing you're doing crop rotation you're incorporating you're infected debris we know that the QOIs are not working as well as they used to so try to avoid them we are possible there will come a time when we're hoping that they will be useful again and that will kind of segue into my next topic tin and triazoles are your aces those are your best fundicides you protect them how do you do that by mixing either with an EBDC or a copper or a top sin Dr. Metzger says water is free water is cheap use 15 to 20 gallons of water per acre right now the recommendation is about 80 psi but we have seen some instances where 60 to 70 psi works well once you use the water volume you should be in good stead if you have varieties that are more than 4.0 in CLS rating you must start your application at about road closure to get your best disease control we don't know what the season is going to bring what we know is if it rains it will be difficult to control the disease what we know is we have lots of sarcospera in our in our fields so we need to make sure that we control it in dry conditions about 14 days interval will work when it's wet you'll probably have to go to 10 days and if you have a rainfall if you have a heavy rainfall within 48 hours of applying your fundicides you may you may have to go back and make another application again if you have more resistant varieties according to Dr. Metzger you're having some this year some of them are very resistant 1.8 to 1.2 you will probably need need less fundicides but here again you will probably need to maybe put one early in the season one mid season and one probably late in the season we'll have to do much more work before we give you a form recommendation we've put in for some money hopefully we'll get some some funding and I'm hoping to get more varieties from more companies that are resistant so we can kind of compare them all at the same time so that's for a least spot if we didn't have this one particular problem you will say okay we can probably relax a little bit but what we have seen for us in 2019 in the Mindak area but at very very low incidence was white mold yes white mold which is common in edible beans and canola and sunflower we found it forced in Fairmont but we thought it was just a one-time deal but in 2020 we saw it in Manoman area we saw it in Eda at our resort site in Prosper at Fokso we saw it and Dr Southern Minnesota Mr. Blumquist called and said we have some issues here this is what it looks like early in the season the lowest leaves closest to the ground they are the ones to start getting the disease they will start becoming yellow brown and then they die some varieties are green it doesn't matter they may look a little bit greener from far but when you go and you look at the low most leaves they are on the ground they're dying if you have a more yellow variety it's a little bit more distinct the leaves are dying they fall to the ground and they die this is what it looks like late in September and October one thing that appears to be a little distinguishing when you go and you look at some of the leaves and these pitchers here some of these pitchers were taking views that had about five fundusite application for leaf spots so you may see some leaf spots but most of these here the fungus is dead the sarcospora is dead you may see a distinguishing blackening along the mid-rib and the petio that leads them towards the root so we check the roots but the roots didn't have any discoloration within and the outside looked very healthy the outside looked very healthy so we didn't see any disrupting to the roots we took infected leaves grew them on a medium and then infect the sugar beet leaves and of course this is what we kind of found it was very damaging the fungus will move all along the mid-rib dung to the crong and kill the plants and the fungus doesn't only affect sugar beet it affects sunflower it affects soy bean it affects pinto beans so all of these crops here if you grow them in rotation one of the best thing we can do short on is not to plant a soy bean before sugar beet or do not plant a sugar beet if you can on a soy bean field or a pinto bean field especially after a year like 2020 and 2019 when it was very wet 2018 was also very wet now we've asked for some funding to do some resource but in the meanwhile we went to the lab and tried some funding sites to see which can help us to control the disease an initial resource shows that Pryaxor which is an SDHI looks very very good potentially proline looks good vorticine we use it as a C treatment propuls also look relatively good compared to the control my one disappointment I was hoping that topsin will work but this topsin is not very much different from my control so Pryaxor looks pretty good this is labeled Endura is another product from BASF but it's not labeled that's Boscolid what else looks good most of the triazoles be it eminent proline inspire they all look good compared to the control and what we saw was that diphenconazole which is present in Inspire XT looks good by itself and if you put two of these funding sites together they look even better this is proline and inspire this is inspire and eminent so I'm hoping that the funding sites that we apply for a least spot control will help to control white mole the only problem is I believe the white mole may start earlier in the season when it's cooler so we still have to figure that out when will be the best time to control it if this becomes a problem one question I had I couldn't answer because what happened this disease when it comes into your field it's not like rhizoptonia where it's patchy it infects 100% of the plant here we have four different varieties variety A variety B variety C and variety D I was asked a question and I said I will defer to you because you have been growing beets much longer than I have been around and you know what a fee looks like when you're losing yield based on these pictures here this disease it starts around what I've seen the past couple of years around August and it gets worse and worse over time this was in October I will give you a poll a little bit later do you think based on these pictures that white mold is causing a reduction in yield and it may impact quality I saw some pictures from Dr. Metzger when he gave a presentation at USDA where he showed sarcosperally spot severe leaves reducing tonnage and reducing quality I think some of these pictures will be kind of close to it not as severe because here some of the leaves are still green and his own all the leaves were brown but remember what I've always said in the past the oldest leaves are the most productive leaves and which leaves are being killed here or lowest most leaves first my summary for white mold is that the best things you can do for prevention of this disease is to try to plant sugar beet on some other crop other than a host of white mold do not plant it on soybean or edible beans if you can plant it on wheat will be ideal or barley I know a lot of you are trying to do that if you have to plant it on corn that's another option but not the beans if it were a dry year and you didn't have much white mold then it will probably be okay but it's a risk that not worth the chance taking and the white mold can stay in the field for a long time for many years we're hoping to evaluate a number of fungicides and hopefully these will help to control the disease with that I would like to say thank you these are your CUs you can take you will need to take two pitchers this is one of them if you have your phone you can scan it we'll show it back at the end of the meeting as well as well as the next one this one here is for 0.5 CUs and then the other one will give you the remaining CUs with that I would like to acknowledge you for being here today I would like to acknowledge the growers for your funding not only for a resort but for educational program thank you thank you to all the people who have made our research possible the seed companies the chemical companies some of you have good products some of you have experimental products that you're trying to make things work better for us thank you we'll continue to try to make them work for you Luke Scansguard from KWS for taking out a lot of the pitchers Airely Bruce Sondane as well Kevin for allowing us to use his farm American Crystal Grand Forks Lab for doing a phenomenal job for all our all our trials my colleagues at NDSU they do all the hard work for harvesting and the person who makes the work looks really good is Peter his students and his group of interns my email address and my telephone numbers are present if you do see if you do see any disease that you have not seen in the past especially white mold and even if you see some alternaria which is different from Sarcospera please call your agriculturist and give me a call as well I would like to check it out and know how severe this issue is with that I will take any questions are there any questions anything in the chat box if you want you can also put stuff in the chat box that's my 40 minutes I think they are Tom I'll read the questions in the chat for you Muhammad the first question from Luke is if I use priaxer at row closure for rhizectonia will it affect resistant levels of QOIs if you use so you're using priaxer at row closure for rhizectonia we don't know for sure that's a loaded question because of the fact that the fungal pathogen that we have if you look at Dr Seacor's analysis over 90% of them are already resistant to the QOIs so I don't think it's already a bad case situation it's already not working very well for least spot control so if you want to use it for rhizocontrol I will say go ahead and use it I'll probably go a little bit earlier than row closure though because typically at row closure especially in the Mindaki area I've gone with John Doomer July just after July 4th and you already had dead or dying plants with rhizectonia so you may want to go a little bit earlier other question other comments there's another question two more questions Glenn is asking about chlorothalinol and its activity on on sacospora I'm sorry I had a picture I don't know if I still have it here I think I took it out but chlorothalinol was the only other fundicide that we saw that had effective control when used in a mixture so we we did some work several years ago and right now we have enough data it would be good to have another year or two data to show that chlorothalinol can be used in a mixture with tin or a triazole and it will probably be comparable to an EBDC or a copper maybe a little bit better but we still have to get EPE to give us clearance on that there was one more question Tom yes from Brian Brian's asking about field bordering and he wants to know about using the more resistant varieties on the borders to improve control for the whole field that might be a strategy I know at MINDAQ wanting that Dr. Metzga has recommended this kind of spring the edge of the borders of the field so you prevent the inoculum from moving in that might be a strategy we have not tried that it's kind of difficult for us to do it on our small plots but it may be a way to go which will be similar to spraying the border of your fields early to prevent the inoculum from moving in from from outside more or less a lot of you had really nice green fields in August and September I took some pictures of some fields around along Highway 210 that looks spectacular in August and early September but by the end of September and October just before harvest those fields became brown not because of anything you did you didn't do anything wrong it was just there was just too much rain that was washing off the fungicides and the level of resistance we have in those varieties is only so much that it can do to withstand that population so overall when you look at your sugar concentration which was just under 17 it was not too bad compared to how some of the field look and that was not your fault Mohammed yes sir I have one question probably it's useful for everybody here looking at these white mold fields is there anything that's common among these fields all we know was that for based on my conversation with the growers that we had especially in Ada and Prosper either a year before a lot of them were a year before they either had soy beans or edible beans at Prosper we had soy beans at Ada, Tom and Amitava were there and the grower had about three different varieties and Tom and Amitava had two different varieties they all had a disease and the grower what the grower said okay he came and visited us and he said he will make sure that he doesn't put edible beans he doesn't do much soy beans but he won't put edible beans before his sugar beet so my recommendation for the short term is at least try to avoid that bean crop before sugar beet if you can thank you I would like to visit with you I'm going to talk about weed control and sugar beet and I will tell you in advance there's going to be a very very strong water hemp overture to my presentation so I know from the survey there's other weeds we'll have to talk about those offline because today I'm going to talk almost exclusively about water hemp so I'm going to start with my recommendations and I want you to really focus on the top line so in previous years what we've talked about is tell me when you're going to plant sugar beet if you're going to plant before April 20th in some cases we didn't always use a pre-emergence in 2021 we would like for you to use a pre-emergence regardless of when you plant and I'll get into what some of the thinking is about that as we develop the presentation and then follow the program you've used in previous years go into the chloroacetamide program for labi and then we're going to talk about some ideas that we have for control of escape water hemp if there are escapes in your field so there's a couple of times during this talk where I'm going to tell you that I'm wrong and here's an example of that so in previous years previous presentations I've indicated to you that water hemp germinates and emerges after the 15th of May well look at the picture on the left this is from Greg Krause he's over in a field in the Mapleton area and Greg has water hemp those cotyledons are absolutely water hemp cotyledons and it's the 2nd of May so what's going on well I think part of the story really dates back to the previous fall I've talked before that water hemp germinates and emerges through the month of July maybe into early August well because of all the rain we had we had some late germinating water hemp in August maybe even early September 2019 and those water hemp all made seed okay they may not have made very much seed but they indeed made seed and Greg thanks for cleaning your hands before you took that picture now it wasn't just Mapleton where we saw water hemp we saw early germinating phenotypes in a lot of places and again we're attributing some of this to maybe the fall we had but the other thing that Joe Eichle pointed out to me is that seed by and large went to the soil surface and we had some pretty warm days in early April that may have triggered germination and emergence so I did an experiment along with David Metler and we looked at pre-treatments and in this particular experiment we had four treatments we had the control we had at the fumazate at four pints at the fumazate at two pints and then dual magnum at 12 ounces we didn't have the combination of ethyl and dual but I'll talk a little bit about that afterwards so what we saw first of all starting at Hickson is improved control with at the fumazate at four pints compared to ethyl at two pints or dual magnum and certainly much better control than the pre-treatment but at Lake Lillian we didn't see any differences across treatments there's no statistical differences here and interestingly even the pre looked good so when we went down and evaluated the prees we had very very little weed pressure in this particular experiment and by and large what we evaluated was ground cover what percent of the ground cover in the plot was free of water hemp and that I think attributes the high numbers now Lake Lillian was very different or Blumkess was very different from our site at Hickson it was very dry after planting or during planting and we believe that attributed to some of the results that we observed so here's a picture from the experiment this is late May and we've already got a carpet of weeds at Hickson so I would say in my experiences with water hemp it's very unusual to have this much pressure this early in the season and contrast that to the ethyl fumazate treatment on the right okay so I want to talk a little bit more about ethyl fumazate we saw more ethyl fumazate application at higher rates in 2020 than in previous years so we did this experiment both at Moorhead and Blumkess we're going to talk to this morning about the experiment at Blumkess so the different lines represent rates so we started at one and a half pints that's on the bottom the line on top in green is seven and a half pints and what the dots on the map represent control over time so there's a couple of points that I want to make here and I want to use this line at 85% it didn't matter what rate of ethyl fumazate you used we didn't stay above that line even seven and a half pints didn't give us more than 57 days of control the second thing is is these low rates one and three pints we didn't get anywhere close to 85% control with those treatments and one of the other things that I've been saying is the advantage of the low rate early on pre is to buy us some time so I'm questioning if my logic is right there are we getting full rate are we getting full control for maybe 20 or 30 days until we start the lay-by program or are we getting less than full control and I want to go back and say that we had a heck of a time of getting this product activated and we believe that probably explains some of the differences but we're going to study this in more detail in 2021 so which of the pre treatments should we use and I'm going to compare and contrast dual magnum pre using our 24C local needs label and I'm going to contrast that with that the fumazate so one thing I'm going to say about Etho is there's a lot of flexibility and price depending on where you live so please shop around because you're going to see a lot of different prices with Etho we need more rain I've been talking a little bit about that already we need three quarters of an inch to get it activated and contrast that with dual magnum dual takes a lot less rainfall to get activated we need to use the local needs label we need an indemnified label the other advantage of dual magnum is it's a little cheaper but the treatment that we really like if we had to pick one treatment the one that we like the best is the combination of dual at half a pint plus Etho at two pints I think we get the best of both worlds with that treatment the early activation from the dual but the longer length of control from Etho I want to go back to the first slide I had I mentioned that we're interested in a pretreatment regardless of when you plant and our data has supported this the green bars indicate good control this is control over 85 percent and it's not surprising to me that the biggest bars are programs that involve the pretreatment starting with preeds how about lay by so we have a lot of options here we have warrant we have dual magnum we have outlook there's some generics which products should you use and I will tell you in my work they've all looked good and really the decision is up to you what's important to you if you're concerned about replanting I would use dual because I don't think you have to wait you could replant right into dual magnum residues and be fine what about activation well the one that requires the most rain as warrant the one the least amount of rain is outlook so if getting it activated is important to you use outlook sugar beet safety I think maybe at least in some conditions dual magnum and warrant are safer than outlook length of control warrant spectrum warrant gets us some lambs quarters and then after that you decide whoever you work best in industry we've talked a lot about mixtures and sometimes especially at lay by time the chloroacetamide herbicide is going out with with with power max maybe you've put some at the fumazate in there and in other cases there's been other admixtures to the combination so we've we've seen insecticide in the mix we've seen stinger we've even seen beta mix in the in the mixture but one of the things that I observed and this was through the help of one of the agriculturalists is occasionally we see some injury in sugar beet so my team and I have spent a lot of time both in the field and in the greenhouse trying to identify and to better understand crop safety especially with these complex mixtures so this is a result of a greenhouse study and I will tell you these are very very high rates we wouldn't typically use 21 ounces of outlet also there's a six ounce rate of stinger here but what we saw is as the mixture got more complex as there were more products in the tank together we saw more sugar beet injury now one thing that's important that injury it it it becomes less over time so from 14 days from seven to 14 days you can see the change in visual injury and then when we harvested the pots we didn't see any significant differences so that phenotype we see is very early it's right after application and sugar beets have a tremendous ability to to recover from that phenotype I want to talk about the survey a little bit these are results from the meeting one year ago and it it's the question is it relates to the chlorocetamide program how effective was that program and these are responses from the Wilmer Wapiton and Fargo meeting and you can see that 80% of the time growers had good to excellent control so that's great I'm happy for those guys but what I want to do is talk about the fair and poor control and I want to present during the next 10 minutes or so some options for controlling escape waterhemp and sugar beets so the first question is how many water hemp are too many and you know some might say well you know these aren't that bad there's there's water hemp out there but I can live with that I want to present some data from two two gentlemen that I have a lot of respect for so the first is Dr. Schweitzer from USDA in Colorado and what Dr. Schweitzer said or found is even six weeds per 100 feet of row so I'm looking at the graph on the right six weeds per 100 feet of row gave a 10% yield loss 24 weeds so a weed every five feet apart four feet apart or so that was close to 30% loss in biomass and it was worse with cocia there was similarity in terms of the reduction with lambscorter and redwood pigweed but cocia was absolutely the worst Dr. Dexter did some similar work Alan along with his grad student Rick Evans and in many respects they found the same thing so at at very low densities this time weeds that are about seven feet apart they had about a 15% loss in yield redwood pigweed that was about five inches apart almost a 50% loss in yield but one piece of information from Rick's experiment that I think is really really important and it relates to when you plant and it contrasts an experiment that they did back in 1978 and it indicates the loss in yield and it's compared to when sugar beet were planted so there's about a 14-day difference here two-week difference between essentially no loss in yield and a 40 to 45% yield loss so that early season sugar beet growth and development is extremely important so I want to tell you something about water hemp water hemp is easiest to control when it's small and I don't care what program you're using and unfortunately small water hemp turn into big water hemp so I want to encourage you to get out and scout and I want you to be in the fields early and I want you to respond when water hemp is at the cotyledon stage or two-leaf stage don't wait don't wait at all so the first strategy might be to use roundup the response to water hemp from roundup is not binary we see some control especially against small water hemp with full rates now once the water hemp gets bigger we don't see such good control anymore but even with roundup even with resistance vial types at least some resistant alleles we see some control and then two three four we're going to talk about cultivation for a few minutes the weed zapper herbicides applied through the hooded sprayer and finally ultra blazer applied post-emergence and sugar beets so we've talked a lot about mixing stinger together with roundup and you've heard me say over and over that stinger controls four families of weeds but one of those families is not pigweed so one of the again an observation from an agriculturalist Peters you know it kind of looks like we're seeing some efficacy from roundup and stinger together so we tried it in the greenhouse so what these bars represent is the difference in control from stinger power max and ethyl compared to power max and ethyl by itself so what you're seeing and you can see it in the pictures as well on very very small water hemp the stinger is helping us out a little bit we're getting about a 20 maybe even a 25 bump from having stinger in the tank now when the weeds got bigger and it didn't take very long just a matter of days that that benefit was less and by the time they were two to four leaves there was no benefit at all so one strategy that you might consider is adding a little stinger into that mixture next advantage is to cultivate so I'm going to play off the comments from Dr. Chanda early on if you're going to consider using the cultivator be concerned about rhizotonia crown rot and you might want to consider using quadrists in that particular program because we have seen some evidence of rhizoc before does cultivation control escape weeds absolutely it does and we've seen anywhere from 60 to 70 to 80 control in our research what about that barrier will cultivation disrupt the barrier that we have with soil applied herbicides that's what this slide is about so it considers three locations two different timings 14 and 28 days and and we were looking at late germinating water hemp only in this experiment and what we saw and and you can see the difference in bars blue bars are with cultivation red bars are no cultivation the axis is percent water hemp control we didn't see any differences at all and at least in one field we saw an advantage to cultivating so there's no penalty for running the cultivator even if you're using the lay by program let's talk about the weed zapper for a minute so lots of experience with the lasco system from the 1980s there's a new kid on the block it's called the weed zapper and it brings three advantages compared to the old equipment so the first is the booms on the front the second there's a lot more killing power a lot more wattage with this system and then the third is the safety improvements are tremendously improved from the original system so what we see is an immediate phenotype when we run the weed zapper and field it's a wilting phenotype we see that immediately and it doesn't change at all statistically over time up to 14 days so around three days later we see necrosis and that necrosis that's in the stem and in the branch leaves of water hemp grows as we go from three to seven to 14 days so you can see a statistical improvement in necrosis at each evaluation timing and that that necrosis corresponds to overall control so against water hemp we saw pretty good control we saw 85 control using the the weed zapper but here's the thing we already saw weed interference because you can't go out with the zapper until water hemp is over the canopy so you've already taken some loss and yield before you can even use the equipment next idea is the hooded sprayer so this is an idea from cotton producers um cotton um is very um herbicide intensive um weed control intensive and they're using a hooded sprayer that's built in by wilmer fabrication and cotton production so we thought what if we did the same thing what if we use the hooded sprayer in sugar beats and we would select two herbicides liberty and grimoxone that had a lot of the regulatory work done already for sugar beads so what we did is we did two kinds of experiments so we control experiments and efficacy experiments with grimoxone we use 17 and 21 ounces and the activity was immediate this is a picture from weed control one day after treatment the picture on the right is with liberty that's about seven days after treatment and you can see where we got activity corresponds to the the width of the boom the the the hoods are about 16 inches and the hood runs right along the ground right along the soil surface and it protects the sugar beat or in this case weeds that are growing in the row with sugar beads we did another set of experiments that considered yield and we saw no difference in sugar beat yield from application of either grimoxone or liberty um application at the two to four six to eight 10 to 12 leaf stage compared to our glyphosate control and these were in weed-free conditions so this is this is a true safety experiment now we did see um we tended to see um less yield from application at the two to four leaf stage and i think part of this is from learn is about learning to use a hooded sprayer we've got to keep those hoods on the ground so what we've requested in a 24c application for both liberty and and and glyphosate or excuse me and grimoxone is an application from six leaf sugar beat through the 12 leaf sugar beat stage next idea so it's it's using acifluorophane and sugar beads so these are the results of of experiments at moorhead these are experiments that were done over two years and the first line is two roundup sprays um and you can see that we had less than 60 percent weed control in these experiments now compare that to 16 ounces of blazer in combination with power max and you can see that we were in the 80 85 to 90 percent range so we know that blazer controls pigweed okay and just a couple of pictures from the field all the dark green in the picture on the left is water hemp so you can see the advantage that we got from adding the ultra blazer to the mixture now um we don't normally harvest our weed control trials but we did elect to harvest this experiment and um what the the numbers on the bottom are are the percent change in either root yield or recoverable sucrose from adding blazer in the tank compared to the roundup alone applications so the weed control the opportunity to recover some of that yield that we would have lost with import inferior weed control was very significant in in this particular experiment we have other tolerance experiments that that uh emma burt is managing and what what the data is telling us is that once again we've got to stay away from the application at the two leaf stage um but application beyond six leaves gives us no differences in in sugar beet yield and recoverable sucrose as compared to our our roundup control so there is several different ideas we've talked about here and i want to use this slide to talk about the pros and cons of each of these so using roundup so i want you to use roundup the key here is you've got to be out there on small weeds in a row cultivation i want you to cultivate um but watch out for for rhizoctonia crown rod the hooded sprayer we need those 24 seed labels we expect to get those we don't have them yet and myself and the agriculturalists will keep you posted on that however we need specialized equipment for that particular um application the weed zapper we get good water hemp control our control isn't as good with um kosha um but as i mentioned we we have to um we see weed interference before we can use the equipment and then once again we have to purchase equipment and then with ultra blazer we're working on a section 18 label um that work is in progress we submitted the first draft to mda last week and what we're going to target is glyphosate plus ultra blazer application after the 10 leaves stage so we want to be very very careful with the last one and make sure that we learn more about sugar beet safety before we we um expand that label now i'm not going to talk about this this is an example of a slide where you need to take a picture and what it is it's weed control in the rotation it's it's weed control and soybean pre um soybean post emergence and corn so there's a lot of ideas here some of these ideas may fit in your rotation some of them may not but what these programs are are programs that get water hemp control what about what about in wheat well wheat does an excellent job of smothering out water hemp early in the season my challenge with wheat is after harvest especially for those that want to keep the residue on the surface they don't want to do any tillage um it's amazing to me how quickly the water hemp comes back into the stubble so we looked at round up we looked at combinations of round up we looked at round up to 4d we looked at round up in combination with sharpen and with ms o and then sharpen plus valor um plus power max and what we saw early on boy that round up plus sharpen program really really looked good and we saw results immediately but if you wait you know by 21 days by three weeks there was no difference between the sharpen treatment and the the 2 4d um mixture with with power max I don't personally believe you need to mix sharpen and valor together while the labels would suggest that this is an acceptable application we have some experience with valor and sometimes it carries over so I I want to be very very careful with suggesting that we use valor um on on wheat stubble especially with sugar beet in the rotation a quick update on palmar amaranth so in north dakota we we have a lot of challenges with water hemp or with palmar amaranth especially in southeast north dakota so what the green bars represent is is uh 2020 so you can see we picked up three counties in 2020 alone in addition we saw a second field in right uh richland county so this is very concerning and we're extension is is continuing to very very carefully manage and to make sure we understand the movement of palmar amaranth in minnesota the story is a little better so we had a number of counties but by and large we have we have eliminated palmar amaranth from all but three counties due to a very aggressive program by minnesota department of ag so the three counties that they're still watching are are the two counties in the southeast corner and then also lingon county um along the south dakota border very quickly we've uh made a um a change with stinger we used to talk about two ounces maybe three ounces um we'd like to increase that from from um two to three ounces the three to four ounces of stinger um in combination with glyphosate for common ragweed control so we've seen more common ragweed concerns i i've looked at more common ragweed samples during the greenhouse season than we have water help so we think we need to adjust the rates and we're going to do that um throughout the valley and then the last light i have i want to give you a very quick update on ht2 sugar beet and this is a new trait this is a biotech trait that combines glyphosate dicamba and liberty um we're going to have the opportunity in 2021 to start evaluating the weed control program so we're excited for that opportunity we'll have several years to evaluate weed control because we don't anticipate an approval until the 2026 season so kws will be uh commercializing that um technology and they'll be using the trait uh the commercial name true vera and then once they get regulatory approval they'll be licensing it to other other seed companies lots of people have contributed to our research we can't do our research without the help of of our grower cooperators the universities and the cooperatives so like my colleagues i thank you very much for your support and and my contact information hopefully everybody has this if you don't please take a picture of it and don't be shy about calling me or or following me on twitter and then finally mohammed here are the the codes so that you can click on these and and get credit for attending um this session and mohammed i lost a little time in the beginning because of uh technology but if there's a question or two i'll try to answer it in the few minutes that i have left um uh i had to step away for a sec but uh there is a question in the chat box i don't know if you saw that one but uh in case you didn't tell what rates of ethos plus metolachlor are best for pre-use yes so if if you're going to use the combination so ethol plus dual magnum the only rate that i would recommend that you use is two pints of ethol plus a half pint of dual magnum if you're going to use ethol alone i would start at the two pint rate and you can go all the way up you can do two three four pints um if you have kosher concerns in your field i would recommend six and seven pints here's a thing with ethol though you're not going to get season long water hemp control on the dual magnum side or or es metolachlor um if you have higher organic matter soils um you can go up to three quarters of a pint pre-emergence but i don't want you to go any higher than three quarters of a pint and i would prefer that the only people that use three quarters of a pint are those that have three and a half percent organic matter there's one more question for you go ahead um is section 18 blazer only for roundup have you did mixed in stinger in for agweed we're not ready for that yet so what we're gonna do what we're proposing to do is a roundup plus ultra blazer plus non-ionic surfactant mixture so 16 ounces of ultra blazer and then um non-ionic surfactant so we don't want even we don't even want an oil in that mixture and um and we want to make that application after the 10 leaf stage so we're gonna do we're gonna continue to evaluate different combinations we're just not comfortable with going any further than than that recommendation for 2021 and i want to say this we still have to get the approval so that's what we've applied for with uh with the respective states minnesota and north dakota so for everybody what tom is saying do not go start using blazer as yet do not go start using blazer until it's approved all right and since you mentioned that muhammad and that goes for the liberty and the the grimoire zone as well we still need to secure those 24c labels all right check with your agricultures before you use any of these products so thank you tom thank you as we indicated if you have any questions feel free go into the chat box put your question there and tom will get back to you during the presentation or after the final presentation so our next speaker will be dr mark bowtell and he will tell you all you need to know about control of insects in sugar beet so thanks everyone for attending i'll be covering mainly or focusing mainly on three insect groups like us bugs grasshoppers and a little bit on a sugar beet root maggot dr metzger asked me to speak on them a little bit and that's uh yeah so you've had a little bit of a root maggot activity on the northern edges of your growing area so want to make sure we uh we cover that a little bit as well the insects are kind of unique in your area because uh there aren't huge numbers of you that have lots of insect problems but lots of you have a few insect problems so that will hopefully have something interesting and helpful to everyone so i'll start off with the root maggot just to show you what we're seeing with root maggot population trends the thing to point out here as you can see on the far right for 2020 these are on a per trap basis for the entire red river valley as you can see the orange line is showing a the trend line has been up for a long time we've had some success years where we've kept them down under a hundred uh cumulative but we'd really like to have them more like around 40 or 50 so uh the average in 2020 was 194 that's the second highest in that 14 year period so uh we've got work to do on that certainly that's mainly in the uh central northern parts of the valley but i'll show you in a moment that we've got some concerns in your area as well uh this next slide is a animation slide so i'll show you what our uh risk looked like in 2017 and then i'll animate it through to 2020 what the forecast map looked like and our forecasts end up being pretty accurate actually so this reflects really what was seen in the season as well then i'll move to our actual forecast for 2021 as you can see i'll go back and forward in 2021 we're expecting as you saw the black areas didn't necessarily increase a lot they increased maybe in frequency but what did increase was the moderate risk and and the the severe risk didn't really or the high risk didn't really reduce at all so uh as you can see down here southeast of fargo the baker sabon barnsville area those are areas the northern northern area of your uh your cooperative acres uh we had a kind of a little bit of i wouldn't call it an explosion but a significant increase in activity last year so that's something to watch out for your growers in that area these blue boxes that i just popped up those typically i can squeeze in moderate and high risk but the last three years i haven't had room for all the locations that are for both high and and moderate risk so these are the high risk areas for minnesota and north dakota and this next slide shows where we're expecting moderate risk and there's your baker and sabon of focus for this location for this presentation location so something to watch out for if you've got a moderate rate of an insecticide on at planting or you've got a seed treatment on you still need to be wary and watch out i'll be sharing information through the crop and pest report we can also do text messages through your agriculturist or your ag staff if we see something going on the other thing you can do is watch for the fly counts online they're very easy to find if you search for indias you root maggot fly counts so we post them every three days throughout the root maggot activity period online so do check that out and contact me if you're having trouble finding it this next slide is not as exciting as some of those that my colleagues shared in the earlier presentations and there's a point to that if you look at that closely you probably can't see a whole lot of difference between the various treatments we have there the two far left boxes on top left counter at the moderate rate poncho beta those perform at similar levels but you really can't see much going on here and i would argue that even when you look at the untreated check there's not a whole lot of difference that's visible above ground this was a moderately infested area near Thompson where we did some trials a couple of years ago you can see it maybe a little bit of not quite as nice a canopy closure with the check but that's really about it yet but this drives the point home this is what the roots look like you look over here at the untreated check on the far right those some of those lost the tap root they're not going to produce a whole lot of tonnage or or sugar recoverable sugar and you can kind of see some subtle differences between the moderate rates of uh or moderately performing products and then adding a full rate of lores band advanced or lores band for e we get a little better looking roots but what's really telling is the yield all of those combination treatments where we had at plant protection plus a sprayable application of lores band at either one or two pints were produced very nice yields and for this slide and then any others where i have statistics showing these with these groupings letters indicating significance basically anytime two treatments share a letter they only have to have one letter in common they are not statistically different from each other so for your convenience i put the blue rectangle up there just to show you that those top four treatments are not statistically different from each other with regard to sucrose per acre or tons per acre so we got good performance out of all those and even under that moderate pressure this is actually a three-year study 2016 to 2018 but even under that moderate pressure just putting on some form of at plant protection easily paid for itself uh these uh dollar figures they look small that's just the dollars per acre gained above the untreated check uh next i'll uh cover a little bit on lagus bug management that's probably of most concern for many of you the last couple of years seen rising lagus bug infestations as well especially in neighboring fields at neighbor alfalfa production just a little bit about the biology of this past it's actually a complex of different species but we mainly have one called the tarnished plant bug um they're all in the same genus uh they over winter as adults uh and uh so the what the winter ends up being if we have a heavy snow winter that's mild uh in temperature uh we get uh good or depending on how you look at it bad you know good success on the part of the lagus bugs surviving um what happens in sugar beets is they'll move in late summer after other crops and weed species are are senescing are drying down so that's uh early to mid august maybe even early september when you see the build-ups they lay eggs in the petioles the the adults do and then those hatch into what we call nymphs and there are five instars when they're in the nymph stage and all the while they are feeding uh all uh both stages uh damaging the plant typically we have two generations per year in minnesota and north dakota but in years where we have an early mild spring where those adults become active early we sometimes get to a third generation lagus bugs are known to prefer to feed on small seeded broadleaf weeds and uh other uh plants uh and the zones that they feed on are mainly the uh the zones of high high growth uh high uh meristematic tissue development and so on sugar beets they'll feed on the on the crown area they use uh piercing and sucking mouth mouth parts to damage and feed on the plant and when they do that they actually salivate down a salivation a salivary channel in their mouth within their mouth parts and uh they inject uh this saliva which uh liquefies plant tissue and then they suck the the exudate that comes out of the wound area uh as i mentioned both stages injure the plant and symptoms can vary but most tell tail is going to be leaf curling and these bumps along the petioles as well as uh the uh midrib of the of the leaves and since they're a sap feeding type of insect uh they do reduce carbohydrates uh directly but also indirectly because the plant is going to be responding late season by putting out new growth in response to that in response to that injury just a few more pictures here of what the uh the injury symptomology can look like there's more of that uh blackening by the way this exudate that comes out of the plant uh that's not necessarily the saliva that that is a what happens is it's a oxidation process that turns that sap black on contact to to air to oxygen in severe infestations you'll also see some lift leaf tip burning but that's not always a telltale sign certainly other things can cause that so you really need to inspect closer i want to show you just a little bit of data on a trial or a an experiment that was done by one of my former master students he was looking at intercrop movement between sugar beet uh sunflower and several other crops that are grown in rotation with beets and the emphasis today i'll just show you uh because there is uh some increased alfalfa production i'll just show you what's happening but what can happen between those two systems sugar beet and alfalfa because these crops have different different canopies and especially between things like alfalfa and sunflower uh justin had to do sampling with different methodology different different methods to uh assess populations and with that he had to develop an an analysis and consultation with uh with statisticians of course but what he came up with with a was a term called z score which is basically just a departure from the seasonal average so this is a really busy chart but that's not really a big deal here uh each line indicates we just want you to look at trends by the way each line indicates a different location he had six locations in this trial this experiment over a couple of years and what he saw this is alfalfa basically the undulations in activity at all those sites had a lot to do with alfalfa cuttings so we had one in late june and then things really picked up in july another cutting after that and then uh things picked up later on later on in august and then they they dropped off considerably in some of those locations they dropped off in mid august or or so on sugars beet it somewhat corresponded with those drops late season we didn't have much activity at all because uh early season because there was uh there were weed seeds to feed on flowering heads of weeds and other crops and alfalfa as well which is constantly putting on new growth but later season they built up in sugar beet so that's when we need to watch out for ligus bugs in our crop so this kind of just makes the points that i've pretty well covered already but in alfalfa the cuttings really impact activity within the crop and later season that that um that imp sort of motivates the the or provides the stimulus for the the adults to move on into sugar beet so that's when we watch and we need to be really being careful with uh or watching carefully what's going on with ligus ligus bugs and beets i'll show you uh just a couple of data slides on ligus bug control and sugar beet this first one was quite a few years ago but it still applies to today uh we were mainly looking at osana and lorsban 4e and the main point here is that we saw that osana was not so effective at lower rates and i would say this probably applies to other pyrethroids like mustang so we don't want to cut rates on pyrethroid insecticides for ligus bug control we'd want to max that out so with osana keep that at the 9.6 maximum rate per acre and with mustang we'd keep that at four ounces with lorsban in this first study we didn't really see or in this study we didn't see a major difference between the half pint and one pint but i'll show you some more data that suggests the one pint might be more consistent so in this trial we wanted to look because growers are as you know you prefer to save a pass across the field when you can so we wanted to look at combining ligus insecticides with sarcosper management fungicides we had a fairly good infestation not a stellar one i would say but nearly two ligus bugs per plant so certainly worth doing the trial and although we didn't have every single combination you could think of it i think some important patterns showed up in this trial this first slide is the survival of ligus bugs at 11 days after spraying so it's insects per plant um on the far left we have the half pint of lorsban it's not a lot of ligus bugs surviving but it is about double what was surviving with lorsban for e when we used a one pint so um that suggests a little better control with one pint than a half um and then the colored bars by the way so on the base of each cluster of bars we have the treatment rate for the insecticide the base insecticide and then either alone in the case of the half pint or with eminent for the yellow with the yellow bar and then super tan is indicated by the red bar on the far right of each cluster uh we only actually had that with lanate so with with one pint of lorsban uh we didn't have a negative impact on control when we combined eminent with dibrome we see that we actually had slightly better control by including the eminent although that was not statistically significant and then with lanate we appear appeared to have had some kind of antagonism with both eminent and lani or sorry with eminent and super tin when we combined that either one of those with lani so that's one thing to watch out for to really avoid I would say when we took that to yield uh just comparing the half versus the one pint we the yield was statistically higher by using the full one pint you can actually go up to two pints if you want but I would say avoid using a half pint for managing ligus and sugar beet uh maybe more concerning was the negative impacts by combining fungicides with these insecticides with lorsban at one pint we had a significant loss in recoverable sucrose per acre when we added eminent to the as a tank mix we had a similar pattern with eminent and dibrome although that was not statistically different so you can see these two bars are sharing a b and then with lanate uh although it wasn't significant we had we lost over a thousand pounds of sucrose by combining super tin with lanate so eminent appears to be safer it was actually numerically slightly more uh sucrose yield there not necessary you know not declaring any difference there but suggesting that there was no negative impact by adding the eminent so that would probably be a safe combination as well next we have uh I don't have data to show I mean I have data but I'm not sharing all that data today in the interest of time but uh what we've seen in other research that's not being uh not being shown is that uh we had pretty substantial yield losses uh by combining lorsban between one and two pints per acre with eminent so if you're going to combine then you probably would want to back that back down to a half pint of lorsban or choose a different combination such as lorsban 4e with headline dibrome with eminent and uh you know what uh sorry those are negative those are losses these are all what I would say are dangerous combinations lanate with super tin and then we also had one study where we're looking at combining these treatments with roundup and we we also had uh pretty significant yield losses so up to 20% with those combinations safer combinations we saw included asana with headline mustang max with quadris and lanate with eminent so if you have ligus concerns in a field uh and what you want to do is randomly sample the field you want to cover it well and what you want to do is uh randomly select that an individual plant at a time to count uh without looking at whether it's a showing symptomology or not you want to be random about that process uh and as you're approaching that plant uh you want to really approach it you know or have it picked out where when you're 10 to 15 feet out or so and then approach that plant and if you see adults leaving the plant then you want to count those and you kind of get used to what ligus bugs look like as you're in the field a little bit so that'll give you you'll have a good idea you need to positively idea as best you can though to be accurate uh you want to inspect the whole plant but really zero in on the new growth area once the adults have kind of left the plant the nymphs are mainly going to be focused on or feeding on the new growth area in near the crown then you want to tally all all the uh insects you've counted per the amount of plants and the economic threshold we have right now is that it's probably worth treating if your average exceeds not not up to one per plant but exceeds one bug per plant and uh research that we've uh done in the past uh suggests that uh insecticide applications that are made closer to harvest are probably not going to pay off you may be just as well to go ahead and and harvest that that field uh i've got a list here you'll be able to download this uh recording as well but chlorpyrifos so far we still have it registered for use in sugar beets it works well you'd probably want to stick at the one pint if you can Mustang max i would also say keep it at the high rate and then diabrome is also registered for use in sugar beet so that's that's another option as well one thing i always like to point out with Mustang is that it's got a very long pre-harvest interval so uh those late season infestations um are not going to be that Mustang is probably not going to be a good option for managing them now these are insecticides that are specifically labeled for ligus bug control in sugar beet so we have the pest and the crop combination you are also legally permitted to use other insecticides on this second list the catch is that ligus control is not promised on or guaranteed on the label so you're kind of on your own if you use one of these insecticides and you have unsatisfactory performance the manufacturer does not have to stand behind you on on that so that's that's a consideration as well but all these have reasonable uh pre-harvest intervals for ligus bug management so as far as uh what to expect for 2021 i think most of us are experiencing a somewhat dry winter thus far as far as snowfall and insulation so maybe the weather is uh is not only providing us good storage weather beet storage weather but it uh it may be depressing some of the ligus in uh survival as well but that's yet to be determined this is a fairly long stretch of below zero weather that we're experiencing so that may help us as i'd pointed out before it's usually mid to late summer but we have seen and i've talked to agriculturists in the mendak and the southern men area as well that have said they they've seen outbreaks in uh in mid june so watch out for them uh keep an eye on your fields uh earlier on in the season and as i'd pointed out before with asana don't cut the rate if you're going to use that product uh law's ban for e or advanced or generics you want to make sure the formulation is the same as the two insecticides that we've used over the years the four four pounds per gallon liquid uh but you want to keep that at at least a pint of product per acre and then with mustang max again don't cut the rate and then lanate the application rate recommended is one pint per acre uh you indicated in the survey today as well as the folks that did do the uh the earlier survey that grasshoppers were an issue i certainly got more phone calls this past year on grasshoppers than i have for a few years so i'll talk just a little just a few minutes about them uh grasshoppers tend to be pretty sporadic but uh and and with that sporadic city uh they're also the timing is somewhat in unpredictable they can impact depending on whether they're winter over or they're if they adult they over winter as adults excuse me uh they may get going earlier in the season but they continue throughout the summer so if dry conditions occur in the spring and persist through the summer we can have major grasshopper problems just a few more slides here both nymphs the imagers and the adults cause problems the catch on that is that adults are much harder to control and they're also uh more mobile so you want to try and get catch them when they're in the nymph stage early season injury and sugar beets obviously is going to be the most concern for us and the most costly to your pocket book um as far as an economic threshold there really isn't one for sugar beets so this is somewhat extrapolated that i'm going to show you from other crops of a similar value uh you'll have this uh in your uh recorded as well but basically uh you can break it's broken down by either in the field or in the field margins you can take a whole lot more in the margins uh obviously uh so we really want to focus in on what's going on in the in the field and uh one point on this is that managing grasshoppers because of their lack of mobility when they're in the nymph stage um you can actually sometimes and and the adults tend to kind of invade in sort of hop skip flights so if you catch an infestation early sometimes you can what some people refer to as ring the field to um to uh control an infestation before it gets out of hand especially if they're in the if there aren't a lot of adults and they're mainly in the nymph stage similar products are available i i've mainly focused here on this slide on what we got the insecticides we know a lot about with regard to uh grasshopper management these products all work pretty well on grasshoppers again thing if i guess another point to drive home or to repeat is Mustang will work fine you just probably want to focus on that uh more early season if you've got an outbreak and as far as the variable rates uh the smaller the grasshopper the lower rate you can probably get away with but if you've got a lot of adults and they're they're going to be mobile you want to knock them down as soon as possible you'd probably want to maximize these rates out so that ends the uh informational part of this uh i just want to wrap it up by saying that uh i want to thank the sugar rate research and education board for uh providing funding to support my program over the years i want to thank my technician jake rickus for his contributions and making sure the research goes well and i want to thank the seed and chemical industry as well for providing products and seed for us to test and use in our trials and i want to thank my colleagues at india shoe and the event minnesota for collaborating on research and for helping with harvest as well especially dr ian mccray who helped a lot with the ligus bug management trials and i will wrap it up i think we have a few minutes for questions uh there are the two qr codes for you to scan and i'll leave that up and open it up for questions is there any regulatory update mark is there anything going on with any of your products um yes uh thank you tom for that question and by the way i've kind of lost control as far as uh including my video not that you need it necessarily but uh um yes uh there is a uh comment period right now that uh people can provide in uh their input on whether they would like chlorpyrifos to maintain uh registration to be maintained so it's kind of another round of it i would say um i i guess i'm hopeful i'm kind of an eternal optimist but i'm also a realist and i i'm really concerned about whether we're going to have chlorpyrifos too much longer because with a new administration of a i guess a different color if you will i'm not playing politics or being political but it's a reality we all face that uh uh you know there may be more regulation and the environmentalist groups that want to get rid of chlorpyrifos uh are probably going to be knocking on the door of the current administration especially as soon as uh they approve a new EPA administrator that certainly that ball could get rolling again so that is a concern there was one question that came in if you compare the triazoles can you start with indicating the most efficacious versus the least efficacious as i indicated in my presentation depending on the year uh even when it's wet all of them work poorly when it's dry i will say number one is probably proline followed by inspire then maybe minerva and provisal lucento however we're not recommending that you use any one of these product alone do not use any one of these product alone mix them for the most part with an ebdc or a copper and you will have pretty good good to excellent control good to excellent control with a triazole and either a copper or an ebdc if you go to southern min website they had their presentations earlier you will see that proline was also working fairly well very well up there as well but all the cops we're all recommending you use mixtures other questions chat dr metsko any comment from from uh mendak area no we're pretty quiet down here nice and cold beats are freezing and the factory's slicing so i can't think of anything better than uh worry about today yeah other than missing your roles and it's better to kind of be from home i don't have to wake up too early to travel but i'm missing your uh debonair here and face so grow it a little bit more next time i see you yeah i have a face for radio and a voice for newspaper i'll leave it hey mark do you want to take uh scott's question about springtails in the fargo area sure yeah um you know springtails are uh difficult to uh difficult to uh predict there it's very uh sporadic also not to overuse that word but it's difficult to predict where and when they're gonna pop out but uh um they one thing i would say is uh if you're either on ground that you've had springtail problems before or if you're uh in a gonna be planting beats into an area neighboring a field that that had springtails in in the recent past you'd probably want to have some sort of uh insecticidal protection on uh one thing i could probably mention too is that uh so far in the i occasionally get a question about rumors about seed treatments not quite performing as well as uh as granular or as a counter essentially um and that's mainly out in the mondak area montana north dakota border uh that but they have a different species complex out in that area we're working on the genetics of that complex right now we're in a collaboration with USDA but they yeah they are having problems some growers would refer to it as failures of the seed treatments the neonicotinoid seed treatments to manage springtails that that area so that is a concern but as far as within the north dakota eastern north dakota and uh and minnesota um probably uh they they overwinter very well in cold winters we don't really see seem to see uh uh negative impacts from open cold winters on springtail survival they actually get active very early when soils are quite cold so um probably gonna be similar to last year just spots here and there mark bloom quiz you guys doing okay in the south processing and cold weather very grateful for cold weather down here um processing going all right uh but uh we have a quite a ways to go so the cold weather should uh help us get there i think and for all the growers at mendak if you had gone up to southern mendis past growing season we know that they usually have a lot of sarcosper probably more than anybody else but their fields were the greenest that i've seen this entire season there are a lot of brown fields in eminda in eminda and even american crystal area in the northern areas at southern mend they did a phenomenal job so hopefully your fields will look like that with funding size and with improved varieties as well your sugar went up your tonnage went up so we hope you guys use all the recommendations to have a great crop this coming season it so already february by the time you know it you'll be planting in april so best of luck to everybody anything else ashok tom yeah just a slight correction from my presentation so the latest got supplemental label actually in early 2021 so but i'm going to change that in in my slides when i share with mendak so yeah they're going to use it now so yeah enough to worry too much yep the other guys are the agriculturists any questions from the agriculturists well you're thinking i guess i have one other comment in relation to tom's question about regulatory things uh some of you probably are aware last summer was the first season that midak was registered so that's another option for at plant you know insect management and what we've seen thus far at least with regard to root maggots we really haven't been able to test it very long uh but we've got three years worth of testing on root maggots it's a labeled for soil application so at plant um but we've gotten uh performance at a level against the root maggot at least that's comparable to that moderate rate of counter not the it's probably out usually outperformed by the maximum rate of counter but it's um it's kind of a mid-range performing product i guess i would say and that company also has another insecticide that they're pursuing registration on called bifender which is a bifenthrin formulation and that's from the same company vive crop protection that um i guess they're probably they're you might say they're they're not a huge company but they're their niche probably is uh developing formulations that work well with with 10 34 oh starter fertilizer and both of those formulations are are compatible with starter while mohammed is doing that i i did notice in the survey that you completed today that uh insecticide use was up that was probably the grasshopper stuff mainly but some cutworms as well uh some were 75 percent of you that used insecticides to manage ligus said you were unsure of the performance which is reasonable but it might if you're disappointed in your performance at all uh it you meant uh 50 percent of you that used an insecticide for ligus but management um used the between six and 10 uh gallons per acre as a spray output volume and with ligus nymphs feeding down in the crown when it's a full canopy crop you may want to up that water to somewhere around 15 i actually even go 20 but i know that comes down to volume issues for hauling water and refilling and that kind of thing but i would bump it up to at least 15 gpa