New Technology & Services for AG | 5705
family farmers ranchers and rural communities online at montanafarmersunion.com montana ag live is made possible by the montana department of agriculture [Music] the msu extension service the msu ag experiment stations of the college of agriculture the montana wheaton barley committee cashman nursery and landscaping the northern pulse growers association and the gallatin gardeners club [Music] good evening welcome to montana ag live originating tonight from the studios of kusm on the very dynamic campus of montana state university i'm jack riesemann professor of plant pathology retired for many years i'm happy to be your host this evening in keeping up with the spring theme that we introduced several weeks ago we're featuring women who have had major impact in agriculture here in the state in many different aspects and we have a special guest this evening i'll introduce in a moment that i've known for probably 30 plus years i hate to admit that but it's been quite some time before we get to that though let me introduce the rest of the panel on my far left and she was an innovator in this state in many respects her background was a crop consultant for many years when i knew her and worked with her extensively back in 98 though she started a company in precision ag and it's taken off and you know that was visual because way back in 98 there were not a lot of people involved with precision again we'll get back to the emma and she can tell us a little bit more about the company in a minute eric balasco eric is our one of our ag economists here at montana state university very very knowledgeable in everything you want to know about economics so if you got tough questions tonight we like to stump economists so call them in and we'll get to them and of course abby syed abby is a horticulturalist if you have any questions concerning plants horticultural plants this evening why something's growing why it's not growing why it blooms why it does not bloom here's a good chance to ask those questions and answering the phone tonight is jennifer weiss jennifer she'll take all your questions and we also have somebody remote who will also take your questions so call those questions in the numbers on the screen and deama thank you for coming down from fort benton we appreciate it tell us a little bit about what you do as president of triangle ag services so triangle ag services is a small company family owned um we just hired a new person that's not family yet um but as as he works there longer i'm sure he's going to be adopted and we specialize in precision agriculture so we don't sell big chunks of iron all we sell is the technology to improve farmers bottom line and their quality of life so when you started i believe was 1998 89 89 okay i thought precision ag started in 98 right so the company started in 89 but i did crop consulting for like 10 or 12 years before we switched over to precision ag equipment and services but it's the same company was there much precision ag back in 98 2000 2005 in that area as they've grown pretty rapidly um i think 2000 or 2001 was the very first autopilot that we put in the state of montana and the state of idaho down in potato country so that was that was a number of years ago and i started doing precision ag in the mid 90s okay i want to show how stupid i am what is autopilot and how does it relate to agriculture so autopilot is actually a brand name but it's the ability of the computer to completely drive the tractor at least down the rows for the farmer so he presses a button it's plumbed into the hydraulics of the tractor and it steers the tractor down the rows and makes those beautiful straight rows i could never do that when i was on the farm i guarantee you that let's switch over to abby quickly here this person from bozeman and we have plenty of dandelions in bozeman they're curious are dandelions in my lawns good for bees yeah so that's a good question and i love it when people ask me this but dandelions and other flowering lawn weeds in your lawns can be really good for bees and other pollinators because a lot of the times when they're blooming or where they're blooming there isn't very much else in terms of food for pollinators so it ends up being a really nice resource for bees especially early in the season when there's very little out there but those bees still need to eat so if you want bees around you don't want to be using 2 4 d on your dentist no no and and one of the reasons why a lot of these lawn weeds stick around is is there might be something going on your turf isn't um able to out compete the weeds so then we can you know if you have questions about that we can address some of your turf issues and see how we can make it healthier okay thank you mary a quick one here this came in last week this person wants to know where they can send unknown insect samples for identification so i would suggest starting at our website diagnostics.montana.edu and downloading a form and we have a forum for insects and then sending as much information as you can and the address is 119 plant bioscience building bozeman 59717 got it i think everybody knows how to remember that one this is interesting question and again this came in a couple weeks ago we did not get to it when our dean was on this person would like to know and both eric and emma can answer this how big an economic benefit to producers are some of the precision ag concepts that we're currently using in agriculture so eric diamond who wants to go first yeah well maybe i'll set the stage and i'll be curious to hear more about precision ag solutions but you know in general i think agriculture has always been very competitive and farmers look for ways to try to stay on top of their costs keep their costs low keep their revenues high so with with additional data availability and our wonderful students who are graduating who can take that data and make management decisions it's always this kind of fight to continue to you know pass that farm on to the next generation so finding ways to you know get every dollar out of each acre is i think what companies like dms are are so good at doing so um yeah we've had this in agriculture for a long time and and now with a lot of the technology is exciting to hear about what people can do with that data yeah i think we have a lot more adoption of steering technologies rather than database technologies data is can be harder to make profitable steering is pretty much green light is good red light is bad and it reduces overlaps um reduces skips really improves the quality of life for the farmer because he's not always trying to drive straight and he's not twisting back he's paying attention to the other things that are going on in the cab i think the thing that pays back the quickest i know it pays back the quickest is suction control on sprayers it knows where you've already sprayed so it turns off individual sections when you go into areas that you have sprayed before and it remembers to turn them back on when you go out of those areas to the unsprayed areas so he's the farmer is saving money and you're reducing environmental impact because you're not putting down those chemicals where they don't need to be how about fertilizer is the same hold true for fertilizer absolutely so i've heard the concept that a machine a fertilizer spread or whatever you want to call them can go through a field and based on soil type it will apply 20 units of nitrogen or 80 units how does the machine recognize that generally you write a prescription ahead of time so there's a lot of ground work that has to be done ahead of time you have to go out and you have to somehow define those zones and then you go out and geo-reference all the soil samples to make sure what you need to put down on those zones then you create a prescription map you send the map to the spreader and then the magic happens but there's a lot of groundwork that has to be done ahead of time once again it's a data based technology and so it's it's tougher but there are paybacks that technology just fascinates me compared to when you just used to put the lever down and drive as fast as you wanted and put 60 units over the whole field and not worry about it uh i can see where that saves produces a lot of money right now and on that note we had a question last week why are fertilizer costs so high eric you want to jump on that well so fertilizer prices have been going up for a while um the ukraine conflict really didn't help with a lot of the fertilizer prices but whenever you have you know we teach in our econ 101 limited supplies and and demand with prices kind of where they are farmers you know demand more fertilizer and so both of those things have been lifting fertilizer prices up to prices we've really never seen before yeah i'm shocked when i bought a bag of lawn fertilizer the other day which reminds me when should i fertilize the lawns yeah that's a good question um so i there's usually i i recommend doing three applications a year one pound of nitrogen per thousand square feet per application and you want to start around memorial day and then don't fertilize in the summer months but then fertilize again in labor day and then again in october okay you know eric back to i'm going back in some of my previous memories didn't we buy a lot of fertilizer from russia for a long time do we also get some from ukraine or has it just been primarily russia i believe it's primarily russia okay um i don't think we get much from ukraine but i mean a lot of those disruptions were starting before we had the conflict there and so um yeah we just had less supply coming in and i mean you've probably heard people too just it's hard to find fertilizer makes precision ag even more important correct it's always important good answer all right um abby uh we just passed easter from missoula this person wants to keep their easter lily and they would like to know how to make it re-bloom yeah you can do this two ways one way is you can put it into the ground um in in a couple of weeks and it should re-bloom usually at the end of the summer around august it'll re-bloom or you can let it go dormant in in the pot and then take it out store it over winter and then set it out again the next year how do you make it go dormant just no water yeah you don't water it and then you can set it in a cool dry place i usually put it in my basement okay over to mary facebook question from bozeman we always have a lot of facebook questions on raspberries they say their raspberry canes have died for the last two years will this happen again with the recent snow well i'll play off at abby a little bit but we've had late frosts the last couple years which the raspberry canes set their blooms on the cane from the previous year so if it has burst bud i think you're at higher risk is that correct from freeze damage yeah um so yeah i would say i like you were saying my raspberry plants are still dormant right now too so i'm not that concerned this year yet and i'm optimistic that i'll have a good raspberry crop i'm optimistic every year but you were pessimistic the last two years no i was optimistic my hopes were crushed well it was not very good the past two years now yeah man [Music] from great falls this person would like to know how expensive is some of this precision ag software that you're talking about software or hardware both both [Music] so the hardware and i'm talking mainly about steering systems entry level would start about six thousand um going on up to 20 000 or more depending on on what you want the features and things that you want software is a really tough one right now um there's a lot of online options cloud options john deere has options trimble has options case has options and there's still egg leader sms so they're all going to do different things at different price points um john deere's is free so i guess you start at zero but that's pretty much if you have john deere equipment too i believe is going to be your best use of that platform okay so say i have a 1998 john deere 40 20 or whatever the numbers were back then can you put that steering device on an older tractor like that to make it work i'm being tough on you tonight but you are always tough on me i'm really glad you asked that i happen to have a video if they wouldn't mind playing the video right now it's of a 1981 john deere 8640 and not only does it have steering going down the rows but it has automatic turnaround at the end of the rose so this is about a big sandy this is not a new tractor no but it is a farmer who also works in town and so he is really pressed to do as much work as he can in long hours long days and so having the automatic turnaround and just having it all work is wonderful yeah that is impressive now my next question is can you take a nap while you're driving these things it's not recommended well i i have a theory is that a lot of these were installed after the good crop years in like 2010 2011 because guys started texting me constantly [Laughter] yes when they would first get it and they would pick up the phone and they'd be like this is wonderful i'm so bored would you talk to me and i think a lot of us are listening to podcasts yeah yeah um but having more connectivity with their phones and having the equipment do more of the work really opened up a lot of possibilities i think for a lot of growers you know i saw that tractor and that that amazes me because that's technology that i never saw when i was actually on the farm or even in my previous position here at the university what about yield monitors on old combines can you do that too depending on the age of the combine yes for the most part we can retrofit on most combines but not all okay what is the um first of all i didn't explain what a yield monitor is why don't you do that and then what is the benefit of having a yield monitor on a combine so yield monitor is a device that goes in the combine most of them are a pressure plate so at the top of the elevator the grain is is going up on paddles on this chain up through the clean grain elevator when it gets to the top the grain hits that pressure plate and the pressure plate then converts that into a yield basically so you know what parts of the field yield more or yield less so that you can make fertility variety whatever kinds of decisions you need to make from that information does that go into at all mapping the fertilizer use that you might use in future years to spot treat 4 or 20 pounds versus 80 pounds it's definitely part of that equation it's also also part of measuring results so when you're doing variable rate it's always good to leave a check strip of maybe that 60 pound flat rate and what's the difference in a flat rate versus a very variable rate over a whole strip of the field okay interesting let's move over to abby this is a facebook question and actually we had another question earlier a couple weeks ago we did not answer number one this person wants to know how long does grass seed stay viable i'm thinking years probably and then earlier we had a similar question about vegetable seeds that they have stored inside have at it yeah so it depends on the seed it depends on the storage conditions it's hard to say definitively how long seeds will be viable but one of the things that i recommend people to do is a germination test so you put some of the seeds in a wet paper towel and then you see how many will sprout in a week or two and you can use that to kind of decide what your seeding rate's going to be so if you only have 2 or 3 out of 10 seeds you might want to get new seed at that point okay but you got to keep that towel wet yes you do have to keep that wet don't let it dry out yeah okay mary from dylan this person has heard that china has restricted some spring wheat from the pacific area pacific northwest area due to ergot which is a disease that you have a sample of here um i don't think we have much irrigate here in montana how about other areas around us we do get it occasionally um in the northeast corner especially i've heard some reports up you know glasgow area and then out down in dillon it would be in the hay crops and especially those ditches so i'll show some ergot here you can maybe see they're black bodies and these replace the grain essentially so these are probably rye ergot um rye ergots tend to be much much larger wheats or about the size of a wheat seed and inside that ergot body is just a mass of mycelia and so it'll infect the plant and flowering little little cup fungi come out and then the spores release and they infect that flowering there's no fungicides or anything um just keeping the ditches clean and not irrigating around flowering that kind of thing is about all you can do and wheat and barley aren't nearly as susceptible as some of these grasses you know it looks like mouse turds yeah great here's what it looks like but you know we have and we've had this question earlier but we do get a fair amount of ergot here in the state and some of our grass seed reduction or in our pastures is that an issue with it's a poison if you get too much is that an issue with livestock it can be from time to time we get grain samples in and and they ask if you know how much organ we weigh out the urgent bodies versus the regular grain and it causes ergotism which is like a vascular um tightness so the the the infections in the hooves and stuff like that it's the irkatine has been used to treat heart diseases years and years ago there's a grower up in the northeast who wanted to sell his ergot and so pharmaceutical companies will actually buy ergot to make pharmaceuticals and he had i think two semi loads full of it so that was a bad year okay thank you this caller actually left an email and it says a guest a couple weeks ago noted that the guest cassie martin actually said that 80 percent of montana's grain is exported this person would like to know what the process is of exporting grant and that's kind of a good question because you hear we send it overseas how does that work gary yeah well you hear a lot that her ag markets in montana are global and for the wheat market that's certainly the case a lot of the market starts at the elevators in montana and then starts heading west out to the port of portland and um actually mentioned cassidy martin there she's helped we're doing a trip this year with some msu ag business students called follow the grains we're following the grain out to the port of portland where a lot of the montana grain ends up before it's shipped to the asia pacific region japan and places like that and so you know these eight ag business students and i we're gonna drive and uh you know see the the trains that uh take the grain out to the port as well as some of the the inland barging system which if you're growing grain in eastern washington you're using the barges to go out there and so you know it hits that port and then gets loaded onto ships and and heads out to all countries in asia pacific that's interesting i think montana does truck some grain to lewiston idaho that goes out of lewiston down to portland is by barge is that still uh it could i mean the barge you know once you get it on a barge the cost goes down significantly of transporting it um my guess yes you'd have to be pretty close to that barge system to get it there to make it pencil out but most of it in montana is you know we've had more of those large shuttle loader facilities you know in the last 10 years yeah taking uh you know higher volumes out to the coast is there a unit train facility in the fort benton area yes i think there's two between fort benton and great falls okay um the carl caller from geraldine uh says it's nice to see diem on on the program and the second part of the question is ask jack if he had a good time at fort beck last night i can't hide any place yeah i was at a conservation event in fort benton last night had a great time and i'll put a plug in for fort benton for a lot of people in montana they may not know where fort benton is may not have ever been there but if you want a nice weekend trip or even one night steak fort benton has excellent food excellent drink good accommodations and a ton of history um it's the area that was settled through the steamboat era and boy the history is just great there and the people are wonderful so no the fort benton chamber of commerce has not paid me to say that but it is a great little town so if you want a vacation check in there and yes i did have a good time there last night um abby we want to know and this is from prey why they're facia is not blooming yeah so like mary and i were talking about um in the past couple of years we've had those those you know late season hard frost in the springtime so winter injury can be a reason that your forsythia might not bloom because the blooms are on one-year-old wood and so if those if those buds have been damaged it might not bloom or improper pruning so if you've pruned them too late and you've pruned out some of the buds that could be why sometimes if you have too much nitrogen that's going to encourage the green leafy growth and not really encourage those buds and blooms so it could be a combination of things going on okay thank you deanna excellent question here what's involved in converting a 20-year-old tractor to autodrive it depends on which auto steer system they want we have everything from a friction steering which is bolting a motor onto the steering column it's got a little foam wheel like is on remote cars it rubs against the steering wheel and steers it it sounds like a joke but it works and we have there's thousands of them out there that is the entry-level system and then that the next step up would be to take that motor turn the motor into a donut motor pull your steering wheel off there's a hub adapter the motor will go on and then a string will go on the top of that and that is is more responsive better performance and then your your more advanced ones are hydraulic so a 20 year old tractor you probably won't do hydraulic but the system that we looked at on the video where it was steering those nice straight rows and turning around on the end that was the donut motor you know i'm fascinated by all this this technology my question is what percentage of the growers say in the triangle which is shelby to great falls up to haver what percentage of the growers should you estimate are using precision ag technology right now once again to focus on the steering and um mainly on the steering solutions i would say about 80 85 percent but what surprises me is every year we get people who are buying their very first system and just when i think everybody has one nope there's still people out there that that are still waiting and and uh still entering that market that would be kind of like me i'm not going to throw stones all right mary from glenda this person says in between snowstorms and that is right now the snow capital of the state of montana they've had just a ton of moisture out there which is good they want to know if their late planted winter weed did not emerge will it still emerge this spring and will have vernalized it should have if it imbibed some water especially next last fall a lot of times you you'll see them germinate a little bit and they'll vernalize i know our winter wheat breeding programs planted pretty late some years and they still get a winter wheat crop so what do you think gamma yeah yeah it'll vernalize very easily i noticed some of the winter wheat in the triangle looks pretty good right now they need moisture there but out east they've really had some significant moisture i don't i'm not saying it has broken the drought which they've had a superior severe drought but things are looking a little better right now so and eric there's a question that came in last two weeks ago we weren't on last week we didn't have an economist on i brought it back up from great falls they want to know your vision of wheat prices six and eight months down the road oh nice yeah get a pin that's a little paper ready right your investment advice here is coming um the markets have been really tough to to figure out um you know we talked earlier about you know supply and demand lifting those prices up but my price wheat prices are really high right now um and there's a lot of factors i mean they were going up even before you know you know right after covid we saw them going up we saw drought hit montana they went up right now there's drought in kansas you know you know oklahoma and texas and they're going up further russia and ukraine export a lot of you know wheat into the global market and with those reduced supplies and russia supplies were dropping even before this conflict was happening and so there's been a lot of upward pressure on wheat mostly from the supply side and demand hasn't really relented so demand is still there um you know six months out i don't know i mean next december next december you know the futures market says you know over 11 bushel and that's kind of what's in the market now we'll see what happens kind of between now and then there's obviously a lot of production that needs to happen before that but i mean given that uh you know a lot of the us has already seen some pretty dry conditions for wheat production i wouldn't be surprised if those prices remain high you know mentioning that and just looking at the news my old home state of nebraska which you don't anticipate as being extremely dry because we're in a 20 25 inch or 30 inch rainfall they've had several significant fires similar to what we hadn't did this past year so yes it's dry throughout the midwest and that does not bode well right now for the crops now that can change there's no doubt about that um interesting question here color has a very old birch tree abby it hasn't been pruned recently and maybe mary too there's a water-like fluid dripping out of the outer branches what is it and what should they do about it so um i would say i would like to take a look at it um so if if they could send a picture to my email or if you wanted to send in a sample the diagnostics.monte it could be a pathogen that's causing that um so uh it'd be good to take a look at it yeah but you realize that you'd be probably pruning it out while it's dormant yeah yeah but getting it diagnosed would be good yeah okay deanna we're supposed to ask you about triangle ag services website and your ability to answer questions about precision ag are you willing to do that well we have a ask us questions link on our website so it's triangleag.com
and we do get questions from people generally on equipment will this work on this equipment you know what are my options for this equipment those those are ongoing questions and they can definitely put it on our website okay thank you um question for me do i remember john mackey and the dylan area yes i do john was a county agent down there for a long time and i do remember him uh damn it back to you am i in trouble with that dylan too you know it's tough traveling around this state with a bad reputation okay dammit a question that came in via facebook are cereal crops as beneficial to precision egg technique or concepts as higher value crops like corn and soybeans absolutely okay absolutely um once again our growers are covering a lot of acres a lot of hours spent in those tractor cabs and the more efficient you can make the driver the better the other thing the technology does for the farmer is that he can put in new drivers it doesn't have to be a trained driver well they have to know how to run the tractor but they don't have to know how to drive a straight line by siding on the horizon they're going to be able to go press the button and drive just as straight a line as grandpa did okay thank you facebook from laurel this person has several varieties of wheat grass in their pasture and many times a black mold will appear where the leaf meets the stem mary have any idea what that might be it could be one of the smuts yeah that's not it's not toxic to livestock at all but we do see it occasionally i did bring some smut on barley which affects the the seed head um and that's kind of a loose smut so the black stuff you see in here is actually the center of the head that's kind of left it's covered in black spores and if you just break it open it it puts black all over your finger and pretty easy to diagnose that way so it's not hard like the ergot so the er gets super hard the smuts tend to just break apart real easy and become dust okay perfect thank you uh abby darlene from chester has two 1 000 gallon stock tracks they're pretty big that leak so they're probably pretty old they have holes in them can she use them as raised beds so that um i've had questions like that before one thing that i'd be concerned about because if if they're old and they're deteriorating leaching could be an issue so leaching zinc and other metals is possibility they can be used as raised beds but i would recommend lining them first before using them as raised beds especially if they're older it'd take a lot of soil to fill it would yeah but they they it's become pretty trendy to use stock tanks as raised beds people like doing it a lot so do you like put some holes in the bottom and put some rocks yeah that's what yeah i'd do that and then first line it put some holes in the bottom so it can drain they can get pretty hot though so that's that's another thing to consider and dry out pretty quickly um so we have to keep up with the irrigation pretty well but um yeah you can do that yeah you can do that yeah okay thank you uh eric a facebook question not only are grain prices up but food prices have skyrocketed do you see any chance that these may bottom out or become less prevalent yeah well i feel like for the last year i've been saying you know a couple months from now they'll come back and i keep pushing that forecast out but um no i mean like i said earlier there are so many things that are sort of lifting up wheat prices and a lot of the other commodities have experienced similar things where you have you know adverse weather and demand is is strong for a lot of products and so prices are going up and especially at the retail side a lot of the additional costs that are seen like when we go buy food at the store a lot of those costs go up because you know the labor costs we've all seen those going up and there's the expense for transportation logistics and so um yeah you know we've seen a lot of high prices last year was about eight and a half percent uh of inflation on food and you know i've seen some projections that say well it should kind of calm down to about five percent by the end of the year but again i i feel like we've been saying that you know for a while really i think what needs to happen is you know this uh the supply you know chain needs to sort of uh you know get through and you know what's happening in ukraine is also you know interrupting but we have you know shutdowns in different areas so anything that's going to slow the the global flow of food even though it's not here in the u.s it's going to you know raise those food prices and so um you know that the fed is taking some actions now to try to you know keep inflation down and so um i don't know we'll kind of see where we are by next year it's hard to imagine it going much higher than where we are right now but i'll probably get criticized saying this but food prices in the us are still quite reasonable compared to much of the world yeah well yeah and i think the reason you say that is you know the the amount that u.s spends on its food is still pretty low right we we definitely complain about it um but yeah in other countries it becomes a much bigger issue certainly when those food prices and they're and they're seeing the same food price issues that we're seeing as well okay thank you a couple questions here that everybody can jump on one is from east of brady and i'll read them both before we answer this farmer wants to know if the extreme drought will affect needed leaching or fertilizer and chemicals out of the root zone regarding planting other crops they're a little bit worried about carryover herbicide carryover and whether or not there's going to be fur or nitrates in them area and the other is this person from fairfield is aware that they've had serious nitrate pollution problems underground water through the years and they would like to know whether or not precision ag techniques could reduce some of this groundwater contamination soil i'll let the emma answer that latter one first um it it's definitely possible if you're over fertilizing in areas where the crop is not utilizing that nitrogen then if we can reduce the amount of of nitrogen fertilizer we're putting down in those areas it's going to reduce the runoff but once again finding those areas is people have to work at it okay mary well i'm not a weed scientist but tim seifel is and i get a lot of herbicide injury samples into the clinic and especially in a drought you can look at the months after planting you know the months after application that you have to pay attention to and then add a lot depending on the chemistry but yeah your content back times vary so much if they're tested during wet periods of time yeah and pulses are very susceptible okay perfect thank you abby color from belgrade did not get their strawberries thin last fall and they really are overgrown now they've started to green up and they're sending out suckers can they still be thinned or do they need to be thinned i mean if if they are crowding each other it is probably a good idea to thin them a little bit and if they're looking really unruly that can they can be issues you need nice air circulation to prevent disease issues and then the physical damage from them rubbing up against each other so if they are really unruly you can thin them now um ideally you would do that when they're dormant okay yeah i agree with you entirely and this question again came in a couple weeks ago i did throw out at that time because we didn't have anybody that was really qualified to answer but tonight diema's here so she can answer [Laughter] this person wants to know why yellow pee prices are roughly a dollar fifty to two dollars a hundred weight greater than green pre prices and we talked about it ahead of time so emma has a great answer so as i remember this was um something perry miller had told me and so i i speculate that it it uh plays a role in in the price of the crop there's a rise in popularity of protein drinks that people like to drink people most people don't like to drink green liquids and yellow peas the protein molecules fractionate off easily and they're not green so you get high protein without the green that's what i kind of anticipate but i think that's absolutely right so we did get that question answered and thank you um quick one when should they plant uh rhubarb here in galton county i'm i'm pretty fast and loose with rhubarb i usually plant mine um in may usually mid to late may my only problem was i put the rhubarb in the garage and it dried out and like decomposed before i planted it so yeah yeah yeah but it's it's pretty easy to grow here all right here's a good one i like this one this person says the average montana farm is just over 3 000 acres i think it's a little more than that now it's been growing over the years what's your best guess how much money could be saved by adopting all of the precision ag techniques available to reduce their costs damn you got any idea how much money one could save um are you looking at a per acre or percentage or well let's just say a ballpark figure for a 3 000 acre wheat and barley farm or wheat and pulse crops um i would think 15 maybe 15 i think that's probably pretty realistic and how much reduction in environmental pollution might you have and assuming that you're considering excess herbicide environmentally not good yeah i don't know how you'd measure that other than once again the price because when you reduce how many inputs you're putting on it would be a direct correlation because as your input as the amount of money you're putting into inputs decreases that means there's that much less going in the ground so that much less going into the environment i agree but let's examine a little bit further and eric he can jump in too so let's say grain prices right now are 10 11 bucks and you reduce your fertilizer costs and your herbicide costs it would add up to a pretty significant amount of money let's say on a per acre basis anybody have a guess there i mean i'll have a guess but i would say that anytime you see you know higher prices then you're going to have more demand for those products that'll get you just you know whether it's a little bit more cost savings or a little extra yield the incentives for those so my guess would be in those times when you see good profitability in montana is probably when you see people really trying to think about how do we take those extra funds and invest them into some new technologies for those years when grain prices aren't great and the rainfall is not great yeah yeah i think we have more interest maybe in the higher end solutions and then when things aren't so good maybe they just start with the entry-level systems then or do more of a maintenance okay you know we're going to pull up a picture here in a minute or a little bit of a promotion but last two weeks ago i keep saying last week last week was easter there's a lot of interest in the precision ag boot camp that we have here being offered in june at montana state university and i think it's pretty full but i think they can still do some work with webinars and so forth so if paul could pull that up which he just did you can contact robin happel at 994 i think it's 2132 to get more information on this and if this is really popular and i i assume it will be because the demand has been great i'm sure there'll be more of them down the line right mary yep i hope so yeah i think so it's i think geared right now for um people not my age in other words younger people i think it's undergraduates undergraduates and so forth but you know as we move more and more into precision agriculture it's these type of programs and yeah you might even get involved with teaching some of these because your knowledge base is really really good i'm impressed with it uh mary from richland if we get significant moisture what is the ascochyta risk on chickpea any first of all tell them that ascochyta can be devastating on chickpea yeah ascochyta blight is can melt chickpea um literally you can go in days to you know nice green crop to not a whole lot it defoliates the crop it also can infect the pods and you can see these very characteristic target shaped spots that the lesion expands and at this stage it'll infect the seed and then the seed will contain the pathogen so that could be one way you get the disease the other way is you either had the disease the previous year in that field or your neighbor did which hasn't been a huge issue the last three years we haven't had enough moisture to facilitate ascochyto blight we recommend rotating out of chickpeas for three years just due to acetyl risk and secondarily the root rots as well that said we'd have we've had drought for three years so i i think the risk is pretty low this year but but you know check your seed make sure it's clean always use a seed treatment you know that can change so rapidly you get a wet period or some moisture moving down from canada and spore showers we've seen that before we have seen that before and they can just wreck the crop there's no doubt about that from geraldine diemma do you miss crop consulting you probably know who this came sometimes i think my favorite part of crop consulting was being out in the field maybe at um 7 a.m and so it wasn't really hot
and the ground was just warming up and you dig in that soil and it smells so good and the view is awesome because you're out in the middle of some field in the middle of the golden triangle and yeah that that's pretty nice it is pretty nice pretty nice and you probably prefer that to sitting in your office and playing with your feet okay i know that another question here [Music] this caller knows that gps is a lot of a satellite base i believe yes is there any satellites they'd like to know that are specifically dedicated for gps for agricultural purposes um to my knowledge um our our major vendor is trimble trimble navigation trimble um is technology based that's what their company is and agriculture is one of the applications they have for their technology and to my knowledge they rent space on other people's satellites for their correction i guess i'm wondering if they're talking about correction or or the gps signal gps is a brand gps is the u.s brand of satellite navigation constellations the russian one is glonass our newer equipment is using constellations from like five different countries for for their for their positioning and then we have a correction signal that makes it even more accurate so the navigation satellites are dedicated for navigation but not necessarily but not just for agriculture and the corrections i don't think are either i think that's just spent rented space as far as i know yeah i learned something there i did not know that myself you know it's amazing as old as i can get what you can learn sitting here is somewhat impressive at times gallon county the color has a number of mature cottonwood trees planted to adjacent several planting beds containing exotic plants i don't know what they are is there a good solution other than continually pulling up the cottonwood suckers and the answer is there isn't unfortunately i wish there was but yeah you've got to keep pulling them up okay that's what i would expect um eric this person would like to know do you see prices also increasing for pulse crops here during this ukraine crisis and so forth oh boy um i wouldn't think as much with the pulse market just given that where export markets are um i would think they'd be somewhat insulated from it the crops that have kind of more of a global market you know like wheat if you have any sort of diversion then it's going to be experienced in the u.s even though we're not kind of directly exporting or importing from a country um so i would think that'd be less so with peas and lentils okay thank you and on that note yeah there's been a fair amount of peas lentils and not so much chickpeas but some chickpeas growing in the triangle do precision ag techniques help say applying fungicides on these crops has there been any work done in that area the work that i'm aware of for fungicide application is more on sugar beets um some crops in the midwest where they're trying to use remote sensing to find the areas that need the fungicide application and to be honest i really haven't kept up to see the efficacy of those applications all right i'm going to ask do we have another video you want to show quickly that you brought we got them all done got it got it done so from bozeman eric and this is interesting what are the pros and cons of the united states insulating russian fertilizers from economic sanctions i didn't know they were doing that yeah i didn't uh i knew with oil there was right but um yeah so there's there's sort of a trade-off economist love to use that word trade-off but it yeah if you're kind of using a uh you know a political instrument uh to limit trade you know which might be desirable or might not be then that's certainly going to drive up prices we've seen that in the oil market where you had um you know a lot of countries you know not importing oil from russia and so you saw some of that result in higher fuel prices in different countries so yeah you can definitely have that happen this question came in two weeks ago and i threw it out then and we weren't sure so i'm going to ask dana the same question this person wants to know when we expect to see autonomous tractors yes i am very excited for autonomy um once again it depends on how you define autonomy is it you know completely these tractors out there with nobody in the cab nobody in the field john deere released an autonomous tractor four-wheel drive articulated i believe for the market this year and the steps that we're taking like the video that we showed those are the steps to full autonomy and so while all the farms might not be completely autonomous i i see more and more people going down the path towards fully autonomous just like just like we are with our vehicles we have cruise control and different sensors and stuff on our vehicles now the tractors are going to go the same way we're just going to keep adding and adding and adding does that steering system reduce fuel costs is there any data on that out of curiosity i guess i'm not aware of it okay all right abby it's gardening season according to this person here in galton county they would like to know can they plant peas now and if so can you promise they won't rot in the ground um i would probably wait a couple of weeks before planting peas personally because i wouldn't want the seeds to rot i think you're probably right what about you i can't promise anything though wait until something's growing yeah yeah wait wait till yeah you know you can plant them and they'll sit there and sit there and sit there but if you plant one's a little warmer they pop right out yeah and they catch right up yeah a good friend of mine called me last week and said i want to plant my potatoes i said you know you might be a little bit early mary you've worked with potatoes and when would you put your potatoes in the ground well later than this i don't know the potato growers probably go after the wheat growers for sure so yeah they're probably around the first part of may yeah uh no earlier than last week and we've been cold this year things are just not they're behind yeah definitely folks we've come to the end of another program diama thank you very much for coming down i envy you living in fort benton it's a beautiful city i really enjoy going up there next week and by the way eric and everybody else thank you also for being here tonight next week we have kate vogel who is co-owner of north 40 ag out in ballentine and i'll tell you where valentine is next week if you don't know but it's somewhere east of here so anyway folks join us next week thanks for watching this week have a good week stay warm and good night pbs.org ag live [Music] montana ag live is made possible by the montana department of agriculture the msu extension service the msu ag experiment stations of the college of agriculture the montana wheaton barley committee cashman nursery and landscaping the northern pulse growers association and the gallatin gardeners club [Music] programming on montana pbs is made possible in part by viewers like you the friends of montana pbs thank you and by the montana nursery and landscape association a trade association of horticulture professionals who can assist with yard gardening and outdoor space
2022-04-25 18:06
