Ag Geek Speak
GK Technology Inc Team Members, Jodi Boe and Sarah Lovas talk about precision agriculture, agriculture mapping, agronomy and drainage.
Ag Geek Speak
16. Digging Deep into Soil Science Part 2 with Professor Emeritus R. Jay Goos
Iron deficiency chlorosis (IDC) in soybeans can be a formidable challenge. What if you could manage it with precision agriculture? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Professor Emeritus Dr. R. Jay Goos, a leading authority in the topic, as we discuss how farmers can pinpoint and treat IDC in their fields. Dr. Goos delves into the intricate world of breeding IDC-resistant soybean varieties and discusses the vital role of resources like NDSU's IDC variety trials (https://vt.ag.ndsu.edu/view/6750).
What are some ways that IDC can be managed with precision agriculture methods? Dr. Goos, Sarah, and Jodi discuss. Knowing previous crop history and collecting satellite imagery from soybean years can be put together to create "IDC" management zones that can be targeted for management. These IDC maps can help direct the use of iron EDDHA fertilizers, variable seeding rates, and variable fertilizer rates to manage soybean IDC.
Ever wonder why old herbicides are making a comeback? Dr. Goose draws fascinating parallels between agricultural trends and fashion cycles, emphasizing the importance of increasing soybean density to combat IDC. From soil testing techniques to the potential of precision agriculture, we cover it all. Finally, we'll take a closer look at advancements in North Dakota agriculture, from managing salt-affected soils to the pivotal role of research extension centers and the North Dakota State Board of Agriculture Research and Education in driving agricultural innovation.
Tune in for these insights and more!
And now it's time for a Geek Speak with GK Technology, Sarah and Jodi In the fields again.
Jodi:I just can't wait to get in the fields again.
Dr. Jay Goos:The life I love is spreading potash for my friends and I can't wait to get in the fields again.
Jodi:No, I can't wait to get in the fields again.
Sarah:No, I can't wait to get in the fields again. Welcome back to Ag Geek Speak and with us we are going to continue our conversation with Professor Emeritus Dr R. Jay Goos. He retired from NDSU a couple years ago.
Sarah:And we had such a really great conversation in the last episode. If you missed it, I highly encourage you to go back and and check it out. Lots of fun totally geeking out about a lot of stuff in that one. On this episode we we had finished up previously starting to talk about iron deficiency, chlorosis and certainly, Dr. Goos, you have spent a lot of your career working on iron chlorosis. It would be remiss of us not to spend a little bit more time talking about that. Iron chlorosis is one of those nutrient deficiencies that gets managed by precision agriculture very well because it changes over the landscape so much, and so let's just start there. What's your overall general idea of how you see precision agriculture management with iron chlorosis?
Dr. Jay Goos:Well, IDC, it's different now than it was. It's different and it's not different than it was 20-some years ago. 20 years ago soybeans were new in this part of the country. Farmers were just learning where the chlorotic areas are, and I think soybeans have been grown in rotations enough where farmers pretty much know in general where the chlorotic areas are. It's always funny. Whenever I would approach a farmer to say, can I have an IDC experiment on this particular piece of land, maybe on this part of a quarter section, the farmer would always say the following Well, if you think that area is bad. So the farmers know where the bad areas are now and they know in general where the bad areas are Now. Sometimes that information gets lost when the land changes hands or a new renter comes in. I've seen fields that were abandoned from growing soybeans because the IDC was so bad. A new renter comes in, what's the first thing they plant? Soybeans.
Sarah:Soybeans, yeah, so but anyway.
Dr. Jay Goos:But for the most part farmers know in general where it is. The size of an area can be different from year to year as well. And I'm always asked about this time of year is it going to be a good or a bad chlorosis year? And right now it's wet, and wet conditions favor chlorosis. But you know, if you have a really dry spring and those salts have been moving up and those salts have been moving, that could be a bad chlorosis year too. So I don't know whether it's going to be a bad chlorosis year. The one thing I do know is that 25 years hence the problem's as bad as it ever was. I always say chlorosis is as bad as it ever was because the varieties are as bad as they ever were. And hey, we can cast some shade on the seed companies. But then again it's not an easy thing to breed for. We did those DNA studies 15 years ago and we found at least seven associations Not me, I just provided the seed and the ground truth Don't even ask me to spell DNA.
Dr. Jay Goos:But, anyway, the genomics people said well, you know, there are seven genes or associations. They each give a little bit. So it's not like there's a cyst gene or it's not like there's a phytophthora gene. There are maybe at least seven genes that give a little bit. And stacking all those up isn't easy. But still, you know when the seed companies are trying to balance all of their trait packages, all of their disease packages, and you know if they're trying to get six of those seven associations, that's a hard, that's a very, almost impossible breeding challenge. So yeah, I cast shade on the seed companies, but it's not easy either.
Sarah:If I could, I do want to highlight that back years ago you had started the Yellow Soybeans website and you had done a ton of variety trials back then. And you know, at the time I was working in egg retail and so I was selling seed. I always had the results of those trials, not only for the year that I was selling seed in but for the years prior, because, as we alluded to earlier in the conversation, you can have a bad iron chlorosis year one year or it can be. It can be modified year in and year out depending upon the weather conditions and just what's going on. If somebody was coming in, we'd have the yield results sitting there so we could take a look at yield, but then we'd have the Dr. Goos's iron chlorosis scores so we could make good decisions for those situations where we needed them. And I think that revolutionized really how we thought about seed, at least in this area from an iron chlorosis standpoint, I still own the domain name yellowsoybeans. com and so I don't know.
Dr. Jay Goos:I didn't have much competition for it at the time either.
Dr. Jay Goos:But Carrie Miranda continues that work at NDSU. I'm involved with that, helping her find sites and you know she's trying to increase the number of sites. You know a problem is of course, that not every company participates and I did a bad thing once. I took the lowest ranking varieties on NDSU's trials that were bad across multiple years and sites, and then I went to the website to see what the companies would say about those varieties. And you know, in Lake Wobegon, minnesota, all of the children are above average right and those of you not from the area wouldn't get that joke.
Dr. Jay Goos:But anyway but these varieties, that were terrible. They were all above average on the rating scales of the companies. In fact, some of these companies, if they have a one to nine scale, say all of their varieties are between eight and nine. Well, no, some of them were probably threes, you know. So marketing gets in the way of agronomy.
Sarah:To that point and from somebody who has sold seed. Certainly there are places out there where we have to position seed properly for dealing with areas of very severe iron chlorosis, and in those places we really need to know what those honest ratings are. But what I always found out when I was selling seed is that every variety has its strengths and every variety has its weaknesses, and there are places around this area where iron chlorosis is not an issue. Yes, certainly our parent material is very rich in calcium carbonate, and so it is something that we always have to monitor. But just because a seed variety didn't necessarily have its strength in iron chlorosis doesn't necessarily mean it's a completely bad variety for everywhere. It might have a place someplace else. So I guess if there's any seed companies out there listening, I would certainly hope that just be honest with your rankings and help us understand maybe a better place for that to be, and let's keep it out of the iron chlorosis areas.
Dr. Jay Goos:And then one time I took eight varieties that were bad. I went to see what the seed company said about it and one company said well, actually two companies got it right. Two different companies said avoid on your chlorotic land. And four companies rated it just as average, without anything. And two companies said good against IDC. You know so and I don't know what the issues are.
Dr. Jay Goos:The other here's another problem. You know I had a support group in Colfax. Other problem you know I had a support group in Colfax, the Colfax Clorosis Club, me and the local agronomist and the local county agent. We had a support group and we would meet twice a year. We would have a winter meeting and then a summer field tour and let the farmers try everything you know cover crops, fertilizer, whatever. And one problem that the local agronomists have the agronomist at the time she had identified the go-to variety for the hot land and if there was hot land, that was the variety she recommended. But then the seed companies quit selling it. That's another part that I would say to the seed companies if you got something that really works on IDC, don't be so fast to phase it out. All of your expenses are sunk. It's all profit You're helping out. Maybe it's a minor thing for the seed company, but it really does help the farmers.
Jodi:And I mean it's interesting thinking about IDC specifically as a challenge that we face here. And one of the newer challenges we face now too is dealing with SCN. And even it has been in North Dakota since 2001,. So very early 2000s. But looking at Peking source of resistance versus the PI-88788, and then not only knowing how many, how strong that source is against SCN, then also thinking about how strong is it against IDC. It's not even considering herbicide traits and everything else that goes into soybean varieties. It's hard.
Dr. Jay Goos:You know, at least we could ask the seed companies not to produce varieties that are awful. Yeah, we did those studies back around 2009. We had three varieties one, the strongest commercial variety we could find, the weakest commercial variety we could find, and one in the middle and with three pounds of soy green, yeah, we greened up the weakest variety but the yield was. We couldn't correct it. But the middle variety with the soy green, it was fine and actually we still got a yield response with the good variety too, if the variety is at least in the middle. But then you have the extra expense of the iron chelate and I shouldn't just say soy green. There are two or three compounds that are effective, not just the one that's in the soy green.
Jodi:And I think this is a really important point that you're bringing up too, because I think about when I've watched you give presentations about iron deficiency chlorosis. One thing that you talk about on the management side is like what are the steps that we should be thinking about, what are the priorities that we should be thinking about? And I think you repeat variety, variety and variety. And then we start to talk about things like Soy green. You've done the research that shows where we can save yield by applying an iron chelate and where we just can't get up to where the genetics would bring us for being tolerant to IDC. Can you talk a little bit more about some of that data or what might be helpful to think about?
Dr. Jay Goos:You know we have to admit that there's going to be some fields, probably because of salinity, that are never going to be appropriate for soybeans. Any variety will turn yellow if conditions are bad enough and in fact wheat will turn yellow. There is IDC in wheat that it's not as common and it's more easily corrected. But I would encourage farmers as things are maybe a couple weeks from now, when it dries out a little bit, there can be IDC in wheat as well, but it's more of a salinity-driven aspect. But again, the farmers have 20 years of experience of growing soybeans now in this part of the world and so I think they know where they can get away with it and where they can't.
Dr. Jay Goos:In fact, to help Dr Miranda out, last fall I drove to all of my old chlorosis sites, going back 20 years, to try and find her some new sites. And actually some of those sites aren't farmed anymore. They're in some sort of conservation reserve or pasture or they've given up, you know. So not every field can be made appropriate for soybeans. I think we have to admit that.
Sarah:And that certainly there's a role for precision agriculture in that as well. You know, and we've had conversations about, when we zone out a field and we identify those zones where perhaps maybe iron chlorosis is going to be an issue in soybeans If it gets severe enough, or if you've got even just a severe enough place for salts. If soybeans aren't going to work, maybe that's a place where you want to plant barley or something else.
Dr. Jay Goos:Well, I should ask you a question, Sarah. In round numbers in the Red River Valley, what percentage of your work has to do with IDC? It must be a significant part of your work.
Sarah:I get asked questions all the time about how to manage soybeans from an iron chlorosis standpoint. Percentage-wise I'm not sure, because one of the questions that farmers first have is how do we identify zones for iron chlorosis? And I'd be curious to know what you think about this, because I think it is different than making zones, for example, as compared to making zones for nitrogen management in corn. There's different reasons why those soybeans turn yellow in different places, and so one of the things we've been doing here at GK Technology is actually using satellite imagery. I ask growers for their crop rotation history so I can pick out just the years of soybeans, and I will look at just those years of imagery and try to identify maybe two or three images in the season. That will really help me understand where the iron chlorosis occurred in the field, and I'll average them together and then, if I can find a couple of years where it's happened and then make zones from that. Hopefully we're getting a fairly predictive model for consistent variability of iron chlorosis.
Dr. Jay Goos:The standard rate of iron EDDHA, I should probably use the generic compound, or soy green or whatever is about three pounds. So do you go with a heavier rate? On those areas it's a more severe.
Sarah:Yes, so on a whole, a fertilizer like iron EDDHA and there are differences in quality of different iron EDDHA products. So it does somewhat depend on the quality of where I'm actually going to be recommending that rate. But let's just pull soy green out and say three pounds. I will try to have a goal in the back of my mind that we always attempt to try to get close to a three pound average rate over the whole field for cost reasons, because it's an expensive compound. But in the areas where we've got more severe chlorosis I will attempt to apply more.
Sarah:I've applied up to about six pounds of soy green in those really hot areas and it seems like it has actually helped out quite a bit. Now there are some things that we need to keep in mind when we're operating controllers that with this in mind, you know if we're going back and using the old powder, you know the standard three pound rate that you're diluting and you think about one pound going into two gallons of water. You know you'd be thinking about six gallons per acre for that three-pound rate or 12 gallons per acre with the six-pound rate. So you have to think about how your controller is also managing that in the field and some controllers can handle zero rates and some controllers can't.
Dr. Jay Goos:It's interesting that the very first publication about IDC in Minnesota that I remember was by Giles Randall in Wadena, and back then they were growing soybeans in 30-inch rows. Then they used cultivation and so what he would do was they would plant the beans in 30-inch rows and they just had just a drop right on top of the row and whenever they would drive into an area where the beans looked yellow they would turn on the switch and when they would drive out of it they would turn off the switch and they put on about two and a half three pounds of iron EDDHA.
Sarah:And so it's interesting that the very first publication about IDC basically was a precision agriculture situation and that absolutely is a precision agriculture application and there's lots of guys that are honestly still doing that, where they're just turning on and off the switch. You're not going to be able to do a true variable rate with that. I think there's some better ways to manage the rates, but to that point at least, your variable rating. It doesn't make any sense to apply these expensive iron fertilizers in places where there's no iron chlorosis.
Dr. Jay Goos:You know, I talked to a farmer once near Pezak, north Dakota. His land was such that you would drive down into a chlorotic area. I mean, he knew from landscape where the chlorosis was and I don't remember the conversation exactly. But he had the ability to switch from 15 to 30-inch rows on the fly, and so when he drove down into the chlorosis area he would switch from 15 to 30-inch rows, which would double the seeding rate in the row. And when you double the effective seeding rate on a micro scale it does reduce the chlorosis.
Sarah:And that is interesting because we have a couple of customers that not only are we variable rating the iron EDDHA or the iron fertilizers but we are also variable rating the seed. For that very purpose we are increasing that seed rate in the areas that are hot with iron chlorosis.
Jodi:Can we talk about why that is right? Seed rate in the areas that are hot with iron chlorosis? Can we talk about why that is right? Because it sounds counterintuitive to increase the rate of how much soybean we seed we're placing in an area that we know is high in IDC. Right, it's like well, why do you want to add more beans and more money to where you've got more problems? But what is the science behind that? Why can we help reduce IDC in those areas by increasing plant population?
Dr. Jay Goos:You know I studied that in the waning days before Roundup Ready soybeans okay.
Jodi:So we're going to go back some years.
Dr. Jay Goos:Yeah, we're going to go back some years, back to the late 90s, when seed was cheap.
Jodi:Those were the days. Those were the days.
Dr. Jay Goos:We studied seeding rates and we studied them. You know, in 30-inch rows you'll have beans this tall with 100 pounds of seed and you'll have beans this tall with 100 pounds of seed and you'll have beans this tall with 25 pounds of seed. I call it the Johnson effect because my technician, brian Johnson. He forgot to trip the seeding device and he had no seed. And when he came back he had a double rate of seed and we couldn't believe how much at 100 pounds of seed, how much better the beans were. And here's what's—there are several things that could be happening.
Dr. Jay Goos:Clorosis is water driven. A lot of water gives you bicarbonate and bicarbonate intensifies the chlorosis. And so when, if you got seeds I mean you know like an inch apart in the row they're drying it out, the nitrate that intensifies the chlorosis is being taken up by more plants. So there's less nitrate to intensify the chlorosis. And my personal favorite that nobody else believes but me is the far-red reflectance from one plant to another. Plants know when they're being crowded. And what's the term? I'm going to say it wrong Atoliation.
Jodi:Oh, etiolation yeah.
Dr. Jay Goos:Yeah, and that is a vertical response to being crowded as far-red reflectance. It's an auxin effect and auxins are iron chelators inside the plant. In fact I wanted to test that. You know, at the greenhouses at NDSU there's all the shade cloth, the 50% shade cloth. Well, we had some that we were going to throw away because it was getting pretty tattered. We went out in some fields and we drove in fence posts and we made pup tents of shade cloth in a field and so we had 50% shade cloth and we had open conditions and where we had the 50% shade cloth, the beans were taller because of the. How do you pronounce it?
Jodi:I think it's etiolation.
Dr. Jay Goos:Etiolation and we had less chlorosis and at one site we also had every soybean aphid in the quarter section. And so I also think that if you start to get chlorosis because of soil wetness and then it turns clear and the sunlight is intense, the beans can really fry from the chlorosis. That was another thing we were testing. You see, idc is not like any other nutrient deficiency. I mean, if you've got yellow corn because of nitrogen deficiency or sulfur deficiency, you put on some nitrogen or some sulfur and it rains, it greens up. Beans are really hard to snap out of IDC. You can spray the heck out of them and not much happens. It's because it's more than just a nutrient deficiency symptoms. There's actually things that accumulate in the plant you can call them toxins if you wish that accumulate in the plant because of the IDC. For example, the metabolism of a plant or almost any living organism creates hydrogen peroxide, photosynthesis. There's peroxide and superoxide produced. There are enzymes that detoxify that. Catalase is one of the most universal of enzymes in metabolism and that's a heme or an iron enzyme. So it's more than just being a lack of iron. It's all of the downstream things that are effective.
Dr. Jay Goos:My current theory is okay. I'll make a bad analogy. If you have a fever because of a bacterial infection and you go to the doctor, the doctor is going to give you two medicines. He's going to address the fundamental problem, which is the infection. Right, you're going to get an antibiotic, but you'll probably also get something for the downstream effects, the inflammation, the fever.
Dr. Jay Goos:Now it might just be Tylenol, but you have to treat the cause and the downstream effects. And so this is why, if you've got IDC at the first or second trifoliate stage, it's really going to be hard to snap that out of it. But you know, there are cases when a farmer will use three pounds of soy green and the plants get about this tall and it starts to wear off. You know, maybe there's chances for a rescue treatment there because you got leaf area to treat, the beans aren't so sick, the growing point isn't injured, and maybe we need to do more than just apply iron. What can we do to help the plants process the superoxide and the IDC? To me, those are some of the future of iron chlorosis work. That's out there.
Sarah:When we were talking about concentrating those plants in a row and talking about growing them tall, and you were talking about the shade cloth and how you can really fry those beans under intense sunlight, because immediately when you started thinking about that, I was thinking about radical oxygen species in the plant as well.
Dr. Jay Goos:Exactly right, exactly right.
Sarah:When we've got those iron chlorotic situations and then under intense sunlight, is that radical oxygen generation enhanced.
Dr. Jay Goos:I don't know if anyone's ever done it with soybeans, but people just have clipped off plants with IDC and just extracted the plants with water and they show that there's an accumulation of hydrogen peroxide and superoxide. Do you connect?
Jodi:I think it's very similar to like the mode of action for PPOs. Applying a PPO or beside, like fomescifin over a soybean field or Flexstar you kind of get if the plant isn't metabolizing it very well or you're using a PPO inhibitor that isn't labeled for soybeans, I feel like you kind of see that same symptomology on the plant right. You get cell disruption, you get like a yellowing of the leaves because there's that buildup of reactive oxygen species and like bad radicals. And like with, just like with PPOs, if you've got higher sunlight you've got more of that activity and more of that damage.
Sarah:Didn't Zollinger and you or was it Franzen? Do a paper on that?
Dr. Jay Goos:Franzen and Zollinger did a paper again at the tail end of the conventional soybean era. All of these over-the-top herbicides and yeah, I mean if the beans are already suffering from IDC some of these herbicides are rough enough on the beans. It's like kicking someone when they're down.
Jodi:I mean it's. It's so interesting because I think that's part of the reason that Agvise started doing calcium carbonate equivalency testing was for that exact purpose of like Zollinger, I think, noticed a response of these higher carbonate containing fields would react more negatively to herbicides that weren't metabolizing over time, and so they were trying to figure out what is that relationship between higher carbonates and this higher crop response.
Sarah:And it's a really important conversation for now because we've got resistant weed issues. So guess what's back in style again All of those herbicides that was probably in that paper.
Dr. Jay Goos:I had coffee with your friend Marsha and you know they never got out of those old herbicides and what's old is new again. I guess they never got out of that business and they're doing fine as far as their business goes.
Sarah:Just like bell-bottom jeans, it's back in style Well.
Dr. Jay Goos:I told my wife, if I live long enough-bottom jeans, it's back in style. Well, I told my wife, if I live long enough, my hairstyle and my clothes will come back in style.
Jodi:Okay, kind of wrapping this whole concept together of like planting soybeans in like a row, it sounds like if we're increasing the amount of soybean plants that we've got planted in an area, there's a lot of things that are helping to reduce that risk of IDC growing. Not only is it that you're lowering the water table and reducing the amount of bicarbonates that are in the soil solution, you're also helping to protect some of the downstream effects of IDC. Because you don't have enough iron in the plant, the plant isn't able to build up those enzymes that can help them to break down some of the metabolic processes, and so if there's more soybeans, there's more shade. They aren't as affected by some of the negative things that they can't break down because they don't have iron in the plant itself.
Dr. Jay Goos:Yeah, people younger and smarter than me are going to have to work on some of these things because, like I say, we still need a rescue treatment. Every agronomist out there does everything they can to prevent IDC, but yet it still hits us. Like I say, if the plants get so sick, so small, it's going to be pretty hard. But if they get six, eight, 10 inches tall, maybe there's been a lot of rain and maybe they did things right, but now it's going back into IDC. There still needs to be work on rescue treatments.
Sarah:Something that I get asked quite frequently by farmers and agronomists is what should we actually be soil sampling? What should a soil test include for trying to identify where iron chlorosis might be occurring and to what severity?
Dr. Jay Goos:You know, the big picture is of course your DTPA test, the calcium carbonate and the salinity. You know, those are the three. I have a tiny quibble with agvise in the sense that you can have an electrical conductivity of 0.5 or 0.6 just because of the clay and the exchangeable cations, you know, but if it gets much beyond that it's because of elevated salinity. Those are the main factors. There are modifying factors by year. The wetness is a factor, the nitrates are a factor, the environment, like I say, these chlorosis areas are bigger or smaller. There's good chlorosis years, there's bad chlorosis years, and that part of it is hard to predict.
Jodi:When you say DTPA, do you mean like the DTPA iron test hard to predict. When you say DTPA, do you mean like the?
Dr. Jay Goos:DTPA iron test. Yeah, the DTPA iron test. Yeah, I don't know what else I would be testing for apart from those three things.
Sarah:Certainly there's confounding things that inhibit iron uptake, but it always seems to me like the number one indicator where you should start on a soil test is the calcium carbonate equivalency and then take a look at the salts next. Is that out of order in your opinion?
Dr. Jay Goos:Well, you can have terrible IDC without elevated salts, but if you got the salt it's going to be worse. You know, I have seen recently salinized soils that didn't have much lime in the top soil. You know, maybe there was a change in a drainage ditch or something and something has become salinized recently. But those cases are pretty rare. Normally if there's salinity because of soil formation, you got the lime in the topsoil as well.
Sarah:And especially in this neck of the woods where the calcium carbonate is in the parent material. But if we do run into those places where you don't necessarily have the elevated calcium carbonates but salinity is there, then you're probably dealing more with a salt issue than an iron chlorosis issue.
Dr. Jay Goos:Yes, and obviously, if the salts are high enough, you're not going to grow beans anyway, right Right, you're going to have to grow something else.
Sarah:And that is the perfect place for precision agriculture as well. Oftentimes we're dealing with these salt-affected areas, we're dealing with modified yield goals or change the crop to something that's going to make more sense or plant something different there, because it is not worth it to put in all of those inputs into that salt affected area. Furthermore, especially if you're in prairie pothole country and you're around yeah, those potholes, if you soil, sample those areas by themselves, a lot of times you'll find elevated nutrients there, and so it doesn't make sense to add more nutrients.
Dr. Jay Goos:Yes, I mean if an area has overall poorer yield because of salinity, even in a crop that's not particularly salt sensitive, but you're fertilizing it all the same, you're going to have an accumulation of nitrates and so on.
Jodi:Yeah, we saw those quite a bit. Looking at soil test reports at AgFi. It's very, very common for some of those like red zones and fields to have 100, 200 pounds of nitrate and a lot of sulfur and even a lot of phosphorus too.
Sarah:I remember one time when we were working in the lab and I think you mentioned that iron chlorosis provides a lot of really great job security.
Dr. Jay Goos:Yes, yeah, I don't know, maybe the gene jockeys will put a root reduction gene into soybeans to make the problem. Take a gene or two from barley or something, I don't know. But it hasn't happened yet they seem to be up to their necks with herbicide resistance and some of these other things.
Dr. Jay Goos:And I should say pesticide resistance. You two are young. This is going to be a problem for the rest of your careers. You know you mentioned the two genes for cyst. Well, what's the third? You know pesticide resistance. You know every young person starting off in agriculture that's going to be a real issue.
Sarah:It's interesting because when I came into the industry and when I was first learning how to scout crops and make recommendations, the first recommendations that I were making was in purely Roundup-ready soybeans. And you know, you get your rate of Roundup out there and you put your—that was all that was going down.
Sarah:The good old days, the good old days it's just so different, and so a lot of these conventional herbicides. I've had to either learn by working with dry beans or incorporating them, as my career has gone on and we've needed to solve something new with, ironically, something old.
Dr. Jay Goos:I can tell a story about that. It was during the high holy times when Roundup was killing everything. I gave a speech on IDC for the Sinner Brothers group Food grade right and Rich Zollinger was talking about conventional weed control and I can't remember what the question was. But a farmer asked a very routine question. I have this weed and this weed and this weed in my conventional soybeans, and I'm not making this up, dr Zollinger, who is a saint as far as I'm concerned, he had to look in his own weed control guide because he hadn't dealt with that for a few years. Yeah, and that's back where we are again. What's old is new.
Jodi:Just Roundup has been such an easy button. It has been a wonderful roller coaster ride for as long as it's been effective and I mean there's still places that it will be used and be good at controlling weeds for. But we're in a different time now.
Dr. Jay Goos:But is the seed any cheaper? Oh heaven's sake.
Sarah:Oh my gosh.
Jodi:Too soon. I don't want to talk about that right now.
Dr. Jay Goos:Too soon, she just got done planting her crop.
Sarah:You know, Dr. Goos, you have seen so many things over your career and this is a two-part question. If you had anything that you could peg as your favorite thing in your soils career, what would it be? And if you have anything that you are extremely excited for for the future, what would it be? And if you have anything that you are extremely excited for for the future, what would that be? What was the first question? Again, over the course of your career, what is the thing that has excited you the most?
Dr. Jay Goos:Boy. I think one thing that's exciting for North Dakota and this is going to be a very unusual answer and maybe not one you'd get out of the main station in Fargo it has been exciting to me to see the development of our research extension centers. I don't know of any other state that has as many high-level PhDs on their experiment farms and that has been a pretty exciting development. And then the other thing is the development of our checkoff funds. You know the Soybean Council, corn people, even eventually the Wheat Commission. There was a time when our Wheat Commission one year our Wheat Commission, spent a million dollars on lawsuits against Canada and $1,500 for production research. But you know that's changed now too. I'm not casting shade on them. They did what they thought was best for the marketing of the farmers. But you know our commodity groups put good money into production research. So between the commodity groups, sbar, our experiment stations, we have a phenomenal infrastructure in North Dakota for ag research.
Jodi:I agree with that and I know Sarah can talk way more about that specific subject. But in my short career, having lived and worked in agriculture in other states again over my very short career I've only seen reductions in other states of the reduction of those field stations, reductions of the number of PhDs and researchers on those stations. It's very different here in North Dakota compared to other places. We are very, very lucky.
Dr. Jay Goos:It's not an accident, though as far as I know and, Sarah, you can tell me if I'm wrong the Dickinson Research Extension Center is a separate bill, Kind of kind of there's okay.
Sarah:So for the audience listening, this audience may or may not know this, but currently I serve as the chair of SBAR, the North Dakota State Board of Agriculture, Research and Education, and you can go find out more about that if you Google NDSU, SBARE. The way that the budget works is the College of Agriculture is separate from the Ag Experiment Station and Extension and within that the budgets are separate and there are places within that bill. It's all one bill but each extension center does have its own budget, and so that is very critically important. But to be quite honest with this conversation, it's critically important to North Dakota that we have those research extension centers supported as well as agriculture research.
Sarah:North Dakota is number one in just a plethora of different crops and that isn't by accident either.
Sarah:We wouldn't be able to have dry bean production in this state if we didn't have that specialty crop supported to the way that it is. The private companies are not going to do that. The research that supports all of our specialty crops in the state, because there's just not enough acres of them nationally to get good return on investment, and so the fact that we've got all of these researchers here in this state that work on all of these crops. That gives us the information that we need to continue to be competitive in the way that we raise these crops, and so it really is something very special that this state has. But we are just incredibly blessed. From my perspective as somebody who has spent time on SBAR, we have been incredibly blessed by the researchers who are here, the faculty and the staff that make all of this research happen. There's a lot of hard work that goes on out in those fields and we are just so incredibly blessed to have all of the researchers that do that work. I've learned so much about it through my experience on SBAR.
Dr. Jay Goos:But to get back to my point and thank you for clarifying that the experiment station is a separate bill.
Sarah:From College of Agriculture Experiment.
Dr. Jay Goos:Station is a separate bill From College of Agriculture. But you know, in some states it's all in one huge higher education budget, you know. But in North Dakota the Experiment Station has its day at the legislature and those experiment farms, they have their ducks in a row. They know what they want, they have the local support. It's all very good.
Sarah:They all have to come in front of SBAR and they have to tell us what stakeholders come in front of SBAR and tell us what they need for priorities.
Dr. Jay Goos:So it doesn't just happen.
Sarah:Thank you for your service, sarah. It's been an honor. And research that we really need. We would not have the information on iron chlorosis that we've got from Dr. Goos today if it wouldn't be for the overall egg experiment station funding and the checkoff funding, and soybean production in our calcareous soils would just look so much different, so it's pretty neat.
Jodi:Well, I think that's a really good place to probably wrap up our conversation. We've touched a lot of different corners of soil fertility and crop production here in North Dakota and it has been an absolute pleasure to have Dr. Goos's expertise and stories with us here on the podcast today.
Sarah:I think it's really important for us to say a big thank you to Dr. Goos for all of the research that he's conducted over his career in North Dakota. North Dakota agriculture and the way that we think about fertilizers and soil fertility and soil management in the state would just be completely different than where it is today if it wouldn't have been for the work that you've done in our state.
Jodi:At least on a couple nutrients today, if it wouldn't have been for the work that you've done in our state, at least on a couple nutrients, that's for sure. And we bring that up not only because this is specific to North Dakota but because it is public research. This kind of research gets disseminated out to folks in the prairie provinces in our neighbors in Montana, wyoming, south Dakota, minnesota. This research doesn't just stay here, it covers the whole region as well.
Dr. Jay Goos:And I want to come back sometime and talk about wheat. Yes, let's talk about wheat on another episode.
Jodi:We'll do that. That sounds great to me. Let me think about a wheat pun really quick, until we wheat again. Dr. Goos, thank you so much for being on our podcast today. Folks for listening. Thank you so much for being here. Just remember that with GK Technology technology, we have a map and an app for that and I can't wait to get in the fields again. No, I can't wait to get in the fields again.