Category: Plant Pathology

Join Emily as she talks to Jeff, Nevin, and Bob about how IPM influences their disciplines of study.

This transcript has been edited for clarity. 

Join Emily as she talks to Jeff, Nevin, and Bob about their research project updates.

Transcript has been edited slightly for clarity.

0:19 Emily: Hi everyone, and welcome to Farm Sci-Ed, the show where we go into the science and education behind farming. I’m Emily Stine and today we’ll be talking to Jeff, Nevin, and Bob about what’s been going on in their fields over the course of the last month of August. So sit back, relax, and let’s go find out what they’ve been up to.

0:36 So Jeff how has your research been going?

Jeff: Well, in August in our relay study, we’ve continued to sample all the plots with the exception of the wheat only plot, as the wheat’s gone. So our continuing sampling has been primarily in the bean only and a relay treatments.

And so with that, as I mentioned previously, we’ve had some some challenges with the study that are related to these being research plots and the challenges of shared equipment related to that and timing of everything. So timing in this relay system, particularly for herbicides is important. And that post post-harvest operation of the wheat in the relay system, it’s pretty critical to get that post herbicide application on, but we have to wait for the wheat to be harvested before we can get that application out there.

So that relates to our time in August because we can see in some of those relay plots, the the weed – the weed escapes as a result of us not being as timely as we would like to in these research plots anyway to get herbicides on. So other approaches we could have taken with the research was if we would have had smaller plots we could have used a sickle bar to cut the wheat and then maybe hand harvested the wheat but our plots are quite large – 40 by 40 feet – so that wasn’t really viable option for us um and we don’t have a 40-foot sickle bar so totally out of the question but because we were using a combine, trying to simulate that at least on a small scale. We were waiting for the equipment to become available, so we weren’t able to be as timely as we would like.

But we are continuing the sample as I mentioned earlier for for insects. We had one more sampling time of of different sample types and we talked about that before; sticky cards, vacuum samples, pitfall samples, we give those another opportunity for catch in August. And now we’re basically watching the beans turn yellow, so senescence – maturity of the beans seems to be a little earlier this year, and we can see that also in commercial fields in the area. Some of the beans that got in a little earlier, particularly around the hay springs area in Nebraska are already cutting and so our research plots are following suit. They’re turning yellow and it seems like the dry beans that are in the relay treatments – uh i think we observed this last year as well – are a little bit later in the maturity timing relative to the bean only.

So if you’re out looking at our plots, you’d see the bean only plots would be pretty yellow and the pods are starting to dry down, in our relay study you might even still find some flowers out there. So quite a bit of delay in the timing, and that’s related to shade and some other factors that will be one of the many things that we’ll have to tease out and work around because delayed maturity in beans is not a desirable trait to have in a cropping system, particularly for dry beans. You ideally want to get them harvested as early as you can, but just part of the research and why we’re looking at those things.

3:54 E: And Nevin, how about yours?

Nevin: Well, August is kind of – at least for dry edible bean research and weed science – August is probably our slow month. Which is, which is nice because it’s going to get real busy real quick.

um So all of our treatments have been put out now, we’re kind of slowing down on our assessments as well. And so we’re just really maintaining plots right now and just sort of making observations. So a couple things that are happening: the dried beans are starting to turn, so uh this time of year as we get close to harvest, they start to get yellow and it’s it’s actually pretty interesting. If you’ve got a field where you’re not having any sort of pest pressure or irregular watering or anything like that or everything’s uh pretty uniform as far as your inputs go, you can you can start to pick out differences in um soil uh texture because you’re gonna see certain parts of the field which maybe have a different uh coarser texture, more sandy, not as much water holding capacity, potentially those are gonna start turning yellow a little bit quicker and so we’re starting to see that. We’re starting to see these patterns in the field where some parts of the field are turning yellow, some parts aren’t but those do actually occasionally line up with with weed control treatments as well.

So we had a couple, we had one experiment this year where we were applying a bunch of different soybean herbicides that are not labeled in dry edible bean, but we’re trying to see if there’s potential to expand a soybean label and a soybean herbicide into dry edible beans. And we’re seeing some delayed maturity from some of those treatments now that delayed maturity likely is not going to result in the yield impact but we’re going to find out but some of the plots that are now quite yellow, right next to it, they’re they’re still in the midst of flowering. And so there’s, there’s pretty noticeable differences between some treatments and so that’s sort of, just what we’re seeing now, um we’re making notes of that,. But that’s going to get teased out when we go for for yield so we’ll know what the moisture content is of those beans and that’s going to give us a comparison of of what the maturity is at that time of the year.

5:54 E: And Bob, how about you?

Bob: Well, there hasn’t been a lot of disease from any anywhere in our in our plots. We did find a few lesions um periodically, but not enough to to uh need a application of the fungicides for for a grower.

But because of the studies that we are doing, we’re trying, we will go ahead and spray; either if it’s not this afternoon, then we’re going to spray tomorrow just to test the treatments that we said we were going to use. And then um just see what happens, even though the disease has not been um has been formed in our plots very readily. And but and I still don’t understand why, but it has not done that. But it is it – but it is present, I guess. and the spore catcher thing that we were trying to use – the spornado – has never told us that has – never detected any spores. So that would be with the disease triangle, that would be one of those uh points that were taken off. Which is then what we want to do to, to to manage that and they have not been conducive for the the disease to occur to a great extent. Although we have found a few here and there.

7:04 E: Well folks, there you have it. Today we talked to Jeff, Nevin, and Bob about where their research projects are at and what’s been going on in their fields over the month of August.

Stay tuned as we continue to delve into the science and education behind farming in plant pathology, entomology, and weed science. Follow us on Twitter @TheFarmSciEd and visit our website at farmsci-ed.com for transcripts and more updates. Have a good one!

Join Emily as she checks in with Jeff, Nevin and Bob on what’s happened with their projects over the course of July.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

00:21 Emily: Hi everyone, and welcome to Farm Sci-Ed, the show where we go into the science and education behind farming. I’m Emily Stine and today we’ll be talking to Jeff, Nevin and Bob to find out what’s been going on over the month of July. So sit back, relax, and let’s go see what they’ve been up to.

0:41 So Jeff, how has your relay study been going?

Jeff: A couple big things going on in July in the relay study. One is we harvested the wheat. And so we brought a plot combine in, and the other big item is that western bean cutworms are flying and so those numbers are ramping up now. We’re still right around 25% emergence based on our predictive model and uh presently we’re catching hundreds every night. So we’ve got quite a collection – a couple thousand – more than a couple thousand western bean cutworms in a cage, laying eggs that we’ll use for various things within the relay study.

E: Have you run into any specific complications this month?

J: So the wheat harvesting relay this year is a bit challenging. Partly because in our research program, we share a lot of equipment, particularly expensive equipment like plot combines. And so you kind of get the equipment when you get it and this year we got the equipment a little later than we would have liked to, which meant that the dry beans were a little further along in maturity than they would normally be. What that means, is the the plants were bushier, a little bit bigger and they were starting to bud, so the flowers were just starting to form.

And so normally, last year, for example, we were able to get the combine a little bit earlier prior to – prior to budding and before the beans really had a chance to um to bush out that much. So what that meant was a couple challenges. One major challenge was because of the uh increased kind of growth, morphology, structure of the dry bean plants, they were more prone to getting run over by the combine. They get caught by the wheel and and you can knock a row down here or there. Fortunately we have really large plots, um but one thing we did do, um not only because of that sort of – what you could call “combine blight,” uh but also because they – as I mentioned – were starting to bud, some of them may have been starting to flower. That’s a fairly sensitive time for a dry bean plant. It’s more susceptible to injury at that time, mainly because those flowers can drop off. If you lose a flower, then obviously you lose a pod. You lose pods, you lose str – lose beans and so you lose yield.

So what we what we decided to do is we ran the plot combine through all the plots, regardless of whether or not the plot had wheat in it or not, just to make sure that all the treatments were treated the same – had the same potential for combine blight, if you will. So that was one challenge. We were successful in harvesting wheat off the top of the beans, the bean canopy was starting to get kind of close to the top of the wheat and there were a couple plants here and there that we clipped, and in fact there were quite a few growers and agriculturalists on Twitter that were pretty interested in us evaluating the clipped rows from the unclipped rows; partly because there’s some interest in the dry bean community and other growers, other crops as well that have similar growth habits, to try to understand what that clipping does to yield. There’s a bit of a debate on whether or not if you clip a dry bean at a certain time of the year if that promotes more branching, which promotes more flowering, so on and so forth, so we’ll probably take a few additional notes to try to account for some of that.

The other challenge was because the beans were already flower flowering, and we had to wait for the wheat to be harvested out of the relay plot. Before we could spray our first post – our post herbicide application, we were not able to apply uh herbicide in the relay plots, because the dry beans had begun to flower by the time we got the wheat removed from those plots. So so those plots will be uh not be receiving a post herbicide application. Benefit is, um in in treatments or in plots that are the relay plots where they have this cereal in it – like I, I think mentioned before – is there’s pretty good weed suppression in those plots as opposed to the conventional beans which had no residue at all – had a lot more potential for for weed development. So so we think that’ll that’ll work out okay, um but might require a little bit of hand pulling here and there.

E: Gotcha, well I hope you get some good data out of it anyway.

5:37 And Nevin, what about you? What’s been going on for you in the month of July?

Nevin: Well, July has has sort of been a continuation of June. June got very hot very early. I wouldn’t say extraordinarily hot, but it usually doesn’t get as hot as it does that early. So we were hitting triple digit temperatures uh earlier than we usually do, and July has sort of been a big continuation of that. So it’s been a very hot year and in June uh when we were planting our dry edible beans, we had a number of herbicide failures. Mostly we first noticed with our pre-plant burn downs.

So we have a few trials that are going into a cover crop or no-till and the products we use to kill that cover crop or the weeds that are present in those no-till studies, they just weren’t working. And um that’s a common experience among a lot of the people in the area. I’ve got some – I’ve been talking to my stakeholders that work at different uh agricultural service companies, different co-ops, and they’ve been having a lot of reports of herbicide failures. So that happened in June, but what we’re seeing though, is that that those failures this year um has has extended into our our soil applied herbicides, which are really critical for dry edible bean control and um we just have not been getting very good control.

And that’s, that’s a good thing actually for research. It’s not a good thing for farmers but uh we’ve got a few studies where we’re comparing uh group 15 herbicides so we’ve got Outlook, Dual, um Warrant, some of those products are labeled and dried, some aren’t. So we’re trying to see if there might be some possibility to expand the options available in dry edible beans. And we’re starting to see some separation, those products now in a normal year we wouldn’t see that separation. Everything would work pretty well but I think this year with just that – the higher temperatures um and also the increased irrigation that we need to put on to keep up with those higher temperatures, we’re starting to see faster degradation of the soil applied herbicides and we’re getting a little bit more separation in our weed control results between treatments and that’s good. You want these years, so that in normal year maybe there wouldn’t be a big difference but these extraordinary years or sometimes when you learn something.

E: Now if I’m correct, July is the month you do most of your data collection, right?

N: Data collection is pretty much what we’re doing in July. At this point, especially right now, it’s a bit later in July. We we have in the first couple weeks of July, we have sometimes – some later post-emergent herbicide applications in dry edible bean, but then we’re basically done with imposing treatments for the year. So what we’re doing now is maintaining plots by scouting for diseases and insects, sort of those lesser pests and try and keep up with the irrigation. That’s basically what July is.

But on top of that, we have data collection and right now what we’re doing is: depending on the trial we’re going out every week, every two weeks and we’re taking assessments. So visual assessments, we’re looking at the plots and just kind of making a note saying this this controlled um let’s say 70 percent of the weeds compared to the non-treated check where we didn’t do anything while this other treatment uh we’re looking at 80% control. And to kind of bolster those those ratings which are done visually, we’re also going in and taking some physical data uh and that’s mostly right now in the form of weed counts. We’ll do some more other stuff later on.

So we’re putting out specific quadrats – there’s, there’s my here’s my quadrat right there – and uh those are are laid out in the field and more or less a random method within each plot so that we’re not biased by where we’re putting it in in the plot. And then what we do is we we just count every couple weeks how many weeds are in that plot. And that gives us an idea of if there’s a difference in species response to certain herbicide treatments or if we’re seeing different types of herbicides come up at different times of year. so we can kind of track emergence throughout the year and uh we’ll be doing more measurements later on as we get closer. But that that’s been mostly what we’ve been doing.

We also have to in in certain studies we have a – what we call a hand weeded check, so in order to assure that we have a plot that has zero weeds in it. And we need the zero weeds so we know what the yield potential is of the dry edible bean crop and or other crops in absence of weed competition. We have to maintain those plots weed free and sometimes the best way of doing that is just going out there with a hoe and so we spend a lot of time this time of year going out, usually in the morning before it gets too hot, and we’re with a hoe and bent over just pulling weeds. And that’s a lot of what weed science is.

E: Hope all that went smoothly for you.

10:34 And Bob, how’s your cercospora and sugar beet study going?

Bob: Well, they’re doing fine. From a standpoint of a pathologist, it’s kind of disappointing. There’s not a lot of disease out there. We did inoculate a couple weeks ago, and the Spore-nado thing that we’ve been using, which which measures active movement of spores if they’re present, has not – uh has been zero. We’ve done this now for the three weeks, and uh there’s been no um cercospora found on the on the little discs that we see. It’s been – it’s certainly been hot and it might have been a little bit too hot, but it’s been high moisture in terms of the humidity – it’s been brutal. And it’s certainly been hot enough for that, but it’s not there. There’s apparently not any spores flying around. So we went out, and looked at that again – I mean I looked at it every week.

If we go back to the disease triangle, what we’re doing with the spore-nado is that we’re measuring to see if the pathogen is present and with the alert system we were seeing if the environment was conducive, and it’s just been off the charts from from the different sites that we have. But the fact that we’re not identifying any spores takes away that leg of the – uh of the triangle. So that the pathogen is not present so we’re just not getting any disease currently, even though we’ve tried to do everything: create a more humid microclimate, and sprinkler – overhead irrigation, it’s just not there.

And I don’t – I can’t understand why, but for some reason, they – we haven’t had a lot of evidence that the inoculation did anything. I’ve seen weekly reports of of the different sites, and they’ve really been high, which would suggest that the conditions were conducive for for disease to occur. But I have not heard of any severe outbreaks, so I – I don’t know if if that’s the case or not. But it’s that’s – that’s what we have.

E: Fingers crossed you get the results you need.

12:39 Well, folks there you have it. We talked to Jeff, Nevin, and Bob, and checked in on all of their projects and what’s been happening over the month of July. Unfortunately they’ve all run into a couple of hiccups, but for the most part things seem to be doing okay. Join us next time as we continue going deeper in their projects to find out more specifics about how and why they do the research they do. Until next time, don’t forget to like this video, leave a comment below, and subscribe to our channel for more updates. Visit our website at farmsci-ed.com for transcripts of all the episodes. Follow us on twitter @TheFarmSciEd for more updates and reminders about what we have going on. See you next time!

Rather than talking to a specific researcher this episode, we thought it would be neat to see what parts of their research happens in the spring through June. Come join Emily as she talks to Jeff, Nevin and Bob about what’s been happening in their plots already.

This transcript has been minorly edited for clarity.

00:18 Hi everyone, welcome back to Farm Sci-Ed, the show where we go into the science and education behind farming. I’m Emily Stine and today we’ll be taking a little different approach, talking to Jeff, Nevin, and Bob about their current research projects and where they’re at in the month of June.

00:34 So Jeff, how has the relay study progressed over the course of June?

Jeff: Well, the month of June has been unusually hot and dry. So, we were able to get some timely applications in the study done, so we were able to in early June – well actually early May I should say – we got the herbicide banding done for the relay plots. So our strategy this year was to use an herbicide banding technique to spray out the wheat in the relay to create small beds for the for the dry beans that we’d plant in the relay treatments. Basically, in 30 inch centers we have basically a five inch band of wheat – three to five inch band of wheat – that’s dead that creates a – basically after the wheat dies in a month’s time, when it’s it’s very dead, there’s just a band left behind of, of no wheat, nothing growing. So then that creates a seed bed for our beans.

1:28 So we planted the beans then on June 1st, so about a month later. We used a GPS tractor for both of those so they could be locked in exactly where we wanted to plant the beans, which was not outside the banded seed bed but actually into the seed bed. So it was a little bit of trickiness with the equipment to get that lined up just right, but using the same planter and having some high precision equipment helped out that process greatly. So we got the dry beans planted on June 1st and again, it’s been pretty hot, so those beans came up really quickly. So we had emergence on June 8th; so about a week later they started popping up through the ground and we began our sampling process around then. I should mention we also fertilized the beans right after planting. So, in any plot that had dry beans planted in it, we applied a fertilizer to help the beans out. So right at that time, we – we sampled.

2:38 So our sampling plan continues on a number of different techniques. So we took wheat head sample – or we took wheat heads, collected them in the vials and shook them in alcohol and we’ll use the alcohol extract to look for thrips, both good thrips and bad thrips, to see what – what’s – what’s going on in the wheat heads since they can be a source, particularly for thrips. And as we’ve talked about before, since thrips can both be a pest for dry beans or beneficial, it’s important to account for those. We also, in all of the plots in each treatment, we set up pitfalls – pitfall traps. So basically holes with a cylinder in the ground and a cup that we use to collect ground roaming, ground beetles, or rove beetles, or other beneficial insects that are commonly found at the soil level that are collected in pitfall samples. And then we also took vacuum samples; so if you can imagine a leaf blower on reverse, that’s basically how we took the – we take vacuum samples. So we basically put a nylon stocking on the end of a leaf blower and uh – put it on the suck end of the uh – the sucky end (very technical term there) of a leaf blower, the intake of a leaf blower and then use that for a controlled period of time to take a standard sample. And we pulled those vacuum samples out of bean rows and the wheat rows – obviously if it was wheat only, there were no beans to sample, if it was beans only, there was no wheat to sample. But even in the relay plots where we obviously have both beans growing now and wheat, we made a concerted effort to just try to sample just the bean rows and just the wheat in those, to see if there might happen to be a difference between what we are vacuum sampling within the bean rows themselves and the wheat even within that in that relay treatment overall. And then of course, we’ll compare those samples across the different treatments to see what we’ve got. Other sampling techniques that are going on right now are sticky card sampling – so we have little three by five yellow sticky cards that have a tangle trap on both sides that we suspend in the canopy, which is pretty low to the ground right now, so we keep little – kind of wide – mesh cages around the sticky cards to keep debris from blowing into the sticky cards, leaves and residue that might be on the ground since the canopy’s so low, particularly right now. That’s our approach to keeping large debris out. But then those yellow sticky cards, the yellow color is really attractive to aphids and thrips, as well as some beneficial insects like minute pirate bugs and such. So we use those yellow  cards as again yet another sampling technique. Many times when we’re sampling, we’re capturing the same insect with different techniques, but sometimes there are insects that are very specific to certain types of sampling techniques that you may or may not be aware of. So it’s good to use different tools – different sampling tools and strategies to just see if one of them works better than another to try to capture as much of the community as you can.

6:02 So basically right now, the past week, we’ve had um more than a couple days that have been in the high 90s to over 100 degrees with – um except for last night we had some cool weather and some rain that came through and that was that was pretty pleasant. But over the past week, we had some pretty high temperatures, very unusually high temperatures for June which isn’t unlike what a lot of the Midwest has experienced over this past month really is unusually high temperatures. So as a result, the wheat is finishing very aggressively, maturing along, and the beans are growing pretty aggressively as well. And also over the past month, we established soil sample soil sensors to establish soil moisture levels so we can try to keep on top of irrigation scheduling and so far that seems to be working, even though we don’t have really highly accurate soil sensors. They work well enough to just keep us out of the red. Last year we had some challenges, particularly in the relay plots not keeping up on enough soil moisture and so the beans would occasionally wilt. And you don’t want to get a crop to the point of wilting because that – sometimes you can wilt a little too much, and you actually lose plants as a result. So pleasantly, this June we’ve not seen any competition uh visually between the beans and the wheat. The wheat haven’t – the bean plants haven’t wilted due to the wheat competition.

7:42 E: Thanks so much for that update, it sounds like things are going really well out there. And Nevin, how has the first part of dry edible bean growing season gone?

Nevin: Well, dry beans are a pretty late planted crop in um well, everywhere, but the panhandle included. And the dry beans were planted last week in May, which is pretty typical. They’re usually planted towards the end of May, first part of – part of June and we we got all those in the ground by the – I think before June this year, which is pretty good for us. And there’s not actually too much going on at the moment as far as evaluating weed control. We have our pre-emergent herbicides we put on at the time of planting, or slightly before planting, or slightly after planting, and those usually give us between four to six weeks weeks of control and they’re still providing control now. Then, the date that we’re recording this is June 25th, so we’re still looking pretty good as far as weed control goes. So we haven’t done a whole lot as far as assessment and we’re not really seeing a lot of weed problems yet because those pre-emergent herbicides are still holding on.

8:52 E: Are there any specific tasks that you’ve been doing?

N: With the palmer density study, we have the palmer amaranth up and uh what we do is we went in  – when I say “we”, it’s the royal “we”. It’s actually my graduate student Joshua Miranda. But he went into the study and what we have is we have six different levels of palmer density and we just kind of wait for that palmer amaranth to naturally come up and they came up right after dry bean planting this year. There’s no herbicides applied in that trial, and then we took different colored zip ties for each different population level – so we’d have yellow for a certain population, level in red, or you know so forth – and put zip ties around all these little tiny palmer amaranth plants and they’re going to stay there all year and then Joshua goes in two to three times a week and hoes out every single other plant that emerges. So it’s a pretty time intensive trial and we have to wait until those, those palmer plants emerge before we can do anything. But luckily, they came up early so we already have the populations established in the palmer interference study. We’re just going to keep hand weeding it all summer long and that’s really all we have left to do with that one until harvest time.

10:00 E: Have you had any abnormal challenges that you’ve had to deal with this last month?

N: The only challenge we’ve had, we have one study looking at different populations and row spacings of dry edible beans. So we have – it’s a very large trial; four populations dry edible beans and four populations – uh four row spacings and all those different combinations and that study was last we had planted. It was about a week later than the others and right as the beans were emerging, we got I think three – about a third of a – third of an inch – which isn’t too much, but that came down in about less than 10 minutes and so that that really washed out a lot of soil and we’re still the process of assessing the stand from that study, but it looks like certain parts of certain plots may have experienced some stand wash.

10:53 E: I know Jeff previously mentioned that he’d been facing some challenges with the heat. Have you been seeing the same problems in your crops?

N: The beans do fine with the heat. the beans are very – as long as they have enough irrigation water, they tend to do very well with warm temperatures and that actually helps speed things along for us so uh weed development crop development um how fast we sort of get through the season a lot of times depends on how warm it is and so when we have plenty of irrigation water available and this, this year, it’s been a good year for that. And we have a lot of heat units, the season just kind of comes along a lot faster so this has been a pretty fast season because we’ve had some pretty warm temperatures in early June but nothing that’s got in the way of doing research yet.

E: Well, I hope everything comes up just fine and things keep going the way they need to be going.

11:43 How about you, Bob, what’s been happening for you the first part of the season?

Bob: Okay well, the project began uh in the latter part of April, where we put down the pre-emergence herbicide and then it was planted on the third of May and then it emerged roughly two weeks after that. Then just last week, the post-emergence herbicide was then incorporated and then we’ve again continued to irrigate every week at least once a week and then put down about a half an inch each time. The next step with this is we will be inoculating the plots in about two weeks. We got this inoculum last year from infected plants just all over, dried them and then we’ll crush them up, mix them with talcum powder and then just sprinkle that onto the heads or on into the foliage of these plants. And then we will begin hopefully to use the forecasting tools that we’ve had to begin the study to begin the monitoring or accessing the information that we need for for both the presence of the pathogen and the environment, which is what we’ll be predicting.

13:00 E: Have the abnormal June temperatures been a problem for you?

B: It – well, it hasn’t really affected it to to date. I mean we were able to get up a nice stand at this point, uh because it was also the post-emergence about a week after that, it was cultivated. So that has taken away a lot of the weeds and I
imagine we’ll – we’ll have – we’ll end up putting another application of uh herbicide down sometime in August, I’m guessing. But, but the, this – the heat lately has not really affected I don’t think the the sugar beets because this is a last, uh an older, a disease that occurs at the end of the season. So we’re not really concerned about it right now.

13:42 E: Okay. What are you doing in the upcoming months?

B: Hopefully, we’re just going to inoculate and and hope that will enhance the chance for disease to occur. And then we’ll keep irrigating, keep trying to keep it wet and and see if that won’t uh establish disease a lot quicker.

E: Great! I hope that goes smoothly for you.

14:04 Thanks everyone. Today we checked in with Jeff, Nevin, and Bob to see how they were doing in their research projects. All three of them have their crops in the ground, we’re waiting for things to come up, and we’re kind of in a holding pattern. We’ve experienced an abnormally warm June and so things are happening faster than we expect them to and for us right now, that’s alright. Tune in next time to find out more specifics about the research projects. Be sure to like this video, subscribe to our channel, and leave a comment down below. Visit our website at farmsci-ed.com for transcripts and for other episodes you may have missed.

See you next time, have a good one.

Episode 0: Welcome to Farm Sci-Ed!

Transcript:

[00:19] Welcome to Farm Sci-Ed, the show where we go into the science and education behind farming. Farm Sci-Ed is a behind-the-scenes look at integrated pest management research in the western panhandle of Nebraska.

[00:29] Over the course of the season we’ll explore studies focused on some of the common agricultural pests in our region. This season we have three research projects: a wheat and dry edible bean relay study looking at conservation ecology and biological control (entomology), a series of dry edible bean and palmer amaranth studies looking at plant interference and herbicide options (weed science), and the detection and refinement of a warning system for the sugar beet pathogen Cercospora (plant pathology).

[00:59] Come join us as we explore the research Jeff, Nevin, and Bob are doing in the panhandle of Nebraska and explore the significance of their studies.

[01:01] Subscribe, follow us on social media, and visit our website at farmsci-ed.com for more science and education behind farming.