MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

I got a really nice presentation coming up with Jenna Falor and Monica Jean, my colleagues on the Field Crops Team here at Michigan State Extension. As Madelyn introduced us. My name is Jenna, and my name is Monica Jean. I am a field crops educator and I'm based in the Saginaw Bay region, so my main office is in the Alma, Pleasant Area. The focus of this one is going to be on IPM tools for field crops management. Just different things that are in your IPM toolbox. Some of them you may already be very familiar with, some of them you may be less familiar with. And I think that's going to vary from person to person. First up, we're going to talk about insects. Yeah, this is my eighth year. I think I'm coming into my ninth year of doing this. And I've had a little bit of time to try out some different versions of trapping. And what you see here, that first one is a spornadoechnically, it's not for insects, although it is a trap. I wanted to put it here, but I could talk about a little bit more later. That is going to I'm guessing they can't see my pointer because you're staring. That orange part there that's going to funnel in. There's a little fan located inside that. Yep, that's going to funnel things in. There's a cartridge in there where the spores for tar spot are going to hit that cartridge and stick. Then that cartridge goes back to Marty Childers lab where he analyzes it to see what's there, how much is there? That's the spornado, you can see on the top. It does have solar to keep the fan running. To help create that funnel, we typically put that it's right on the outside of the field. Actually, all of the trap shown are like located right on the outside of the field. I'm going to grab a sticky trap to show you one that goes on the inside of the field. But yes, So that's what that one does. It's for tar spot and that's one of the newer ones, right? Monica Marty is trialing it for sensitivity and to see how well it is doing and to calibrate they are brand new Sportados, not the only company making them. And we're trying a couple different models in Marty's lab and I just get to be one of the guinea pigs that gets to have it out in our fields in my area. I do try to target fields that are irritated higher pressure, right? Because really trying to understand that tar spots in our area before you're seeing symptoms out in your field. The next one is called a trap. It's really similar to the green bucket except itself counts. It does have a sensor. I think it's fair to say it's like AI, right? As a bug comes into that, a moth, it's supposed to count each one. We trial those for a couple different seasons to see if they were accurate and they were pretty accurate. I was pretty impressed. I would have to confirm and handcount the amount that it claimed. And then I also had a second trap a couple miles away just to see how it was functioning and it did quite well. That is a Z trap. Again, trap is like a brand like Spornado. I'm sure that there are other brands out there a person could look into, but this is just what we have trialed out to see if it's efficacy. And then that third picture is your tried and true green bucket trap because there's nothing wrong with it, right? I mean, you do have to go count it. It doesn't maybe look as cool as the giant Z trap and it doesn't do what the spornado does, right? But this in the Z trap is pretty much the same thing. This is just the manual version? Yeah, right there. Green bucket trap, She's calling them green, you could have them in different colors. I have clear bucket traps. Green bucket traps. That's a fair. That's fair. And those are very similar to the Z trap, I believe. As in the fact, I know that the bucket traps are that we have the lures inside of a lure bucket that are changed out on a regular basis. It goes right in the top. It attracts them to come in here because this scent is a lure, right? It's luring them in. What you're seeing in that green picture is what it looks like. The moths are, in theory, supposed to be dead because we put a kill strip in the bottom. Yeah, you still have to know whether you got the z trap or that trap. You have to know what you're looking at because you don't want to count a bunch of weird things that aren't actually the pests that you're trapping for, because there are some things that just happened to get in there. I've had a mouse before, I just thought it'd be a P to hang out. But yeah, there also are other moths that look similar. You do need to know Christophanso puts out some really great fact sheets, their coloration and patterns. Do you have anything to add? Gena, I'm going to grab a sticky trap. I will say that, Right, right. So it's a pheromone lure. So think about, you know, pheromones in a club at night. The girls going to attract the boys with the pheromones. Same exact concepts going on here with the buckets. While you do get those random things in there and you need to know what you're looking for is a pretty specific pheromone that the bulk of what's in that panel is going to typically be what you are trying to trap for. Right? Monica? Yeah. Then another one. You guys see this, okay? I realize the yellow is a little reflective, is a sticky trap. It's literally what you think like, it's extremely sticky. The insect that comes in on this is actually, it's attracted to this color. There's also little tabs. It goes around the corn. I try to place it depending on what I'm looking for, either above or below that corn cob. And then there's the little tabs that you just make it join together and they sit there. And then once a week, you got to come back out through the really tall corn and count to see what your populations are. Again, a lot of different bugs can walk across this, not even be like attracted to it per se. You got to know what you're looking for. Christophanzogain has some really great publications. So does Iowa state the coloration and the different type of patterns that your insight should have, so that you're counting the right ones. I will say one of the traps, if you've been at this game for a little while, right when I first started scouting when I was in college. These bucket traps are right the way upgraded version of having a cut milk jug on a post with Anna Freeze in the bottom where you were luring them in and they were dropping into that. And you were scooping them out of there, counting them even though they're discolored, trying to make sure you're counting the right insects. Not saying that that method still is not viable, but I am going to say I've used both in the bucket trap so much nicer. Yeah, also we didn't include in here. Did you have something else on the buckets, Monica? Okay, go ahead. We didn't include in here, I don't want to say old, but the big conical structures for trapping some different insects, I have some out that we use to on some organic fields for trying to trap corn bore. I will say I've gotten very low results from those. I will say I've talked to Kristofonso and asked her if I was doing something wrong. And she said she always has a hard time trapping and actually catching those as well. So we're also always learning. So if you have a really tried and true method for catching corn bore and whatnot, please let us know. We would love to know what IPM tools you're using. I had similar results and that thing is stink and frustrating to get set up and it's just transport. It's my least favorite so much so that I forgot to put a picture on here and I don't have my office. It's in our storage across the way. So you're not seeing it today? Tell you what, Monica, if you talk, I'll I'll run to my office storage area. Okay. Yeah. We can go onto the maritime website. All right. Oh, wait. She can't enhance Um, hmm. Name Madeline. Can you can you boot her off and allow me to share her? I can do that. I think she forgot that I can talk for a long time, but not on a slide that I thoroughly already covered. Do you have prices for these? Oh well, Thepornado is still in its infant. It is actually really expensive. Those cartridges are like 15 bucks a pop. That right now is not something I would recommend a farmer or Oh, oh, Jenni, showing it off there I am. I don't have the cool old metal ones, so this is one of the cool metal ones. This is one of the cloth or the more net material ones they have. If you wanted to trap, you would tie this off into a metal Te post. Then you have this for securing it out. And then you'd hang your lure down off from this. It lures them up in here. They fly around, they keep going up, they get stuck in this top cone part, which then you can take off and flip her inside out to dump her out negative to behind. This one is I haven't figured out a good way to put a kill strip or anything in there to kill anything that gets in there. So you have to watch for flying bugs at your face? Yeah, I have put it together and taken it back and froze them if there's like a lot. And I feel like I'm not going to do a good job, but that's the only thing I've. Been able to do. The metal ones are even harder because you can't bend them back. It's just a giant hardtack. There's no bending. She asked about price. You're good. Spornadoes, really expensive. Wouldn't recommend anyone do that. The reason we're doing it is to see it's proof of concept, right? And then hopefully scalability that then someone could afford to get those the raps pretty expensive too. Although I will say that research trial was four years ago, five years ago, and at that point I think they were like 100 and something dollars. Although the nice thing, again, is convenience. A farmer could put that around and they count things and you wouldn't have to go out and check them all the time. Boy, I enjoyed that. And then the bucket traps there. Oh, they have them in a six pack. I think they're like $20 $30 I did go ahead and paste in the link to the Great Lakes IPM store where we buy a lot of our pheromones and the bucket traps and kill strips and a lot of the equipment that we use on a very regular basis. It's right in Vesta Burg Michigan. You are supporting like a local business? I think it's the only one we got. At least I thought it was. I mean, you can order some, I believe online, but we've been really happy working with them and the fact that they're local and we can go pick up stuff and order it in bulk if we need to, has been fantastic. There is a question that came in Japanese beetles. So, yeah, talking about Japanese beetles trapping, but how do you avoid, how do you avoid those traps being attraction for critters? It's just how, what's best practice for like how often you should be checking traps. What do you guys do once a week is typically check, Mm hm. If this is like your main trap and it's not far and you can do more than that, I think that's okay. But a lot of the thresholds on populations to go out and spray are going to be like either cumulative count or a weekly boost in account. So if you go too much or you go out like every day or so, just to make sure you're adding up those numbers correctly so you understand when you do need to take action out. And I will say on Japanese Beetle, I've never trapped for it. Typically what we're doing in our fields for Japanese Beetle, if we're seeing them there, is we're starting to watch for defoliation and monitoring severity of it that way unless Monica has a different way she handles I was just looking. No, that's exactly what I do and I happen to have the the book I was seeing if they had any recommendations quick. I have an office of IPM maybe. I don't know. I don't see where they recommend anything else. Okay. All right. It's a fun slide of show and tell It was now, this one ties in with the previous one. If you are very experienced in this already and you know it or even if you're not, there is actually a monitoring network that many of the MSU extension educators are a part of. Some local Ag businesses are a part of. Local farmers are a part of it's called the Great Lakes and Maritimes Past Monitoring Network for 2023. Last year there were a total of 65 traps across the state of Michigan that we're reporting in. 16 of them were black cutworm, 13 of them were true armyworm, 35 of them were western be an cutworm and one of them was a European corn board. That would have been me. And it was very not successful. That being said, this is a screenshot of the map. If you go in, it's going to be big scale out to like include most of the US and Canada. Or at least part of the US, Canada because actually this is run out of Ontario is who manages this. Each color dot here is a representation of a trap and each insect is a different color one. Those red dots are the western bean cutworm ones. That green one would be the European corn board. But you can see that there's a lot going on there. We just wanted to show you the traps are out there. This website is accessible for anybody to go on and view what counts are going on. Also, I believe if you have a trap, you're able to add your trap to this if you wanted to be a part of it or if you just wanted to use it for information of what's coming. Because right, most of these, if not all of them that are recorded are migratory pests that are coming in from the south. Maybe it's good to see what's coming up and what's going on a down in the St. Joe area and have an idea what might be coming our way if you're further north. But keep in mind jet streams do vary. And black cutworm. I do believe I was catching higher numbers up in the thumb either last year or the year before. Before they were down on campus. I talked to Christophanzo and she said it's just a matter of the pattern of the jet streams coming from the south. That was the big map in here, you can see this is the dashboard you can come in and monitor. Bring it down to what pests you want to see, specific crops you want to see, because in there they mark what fields these traps are in. If you want to look at a specific date range instead of the whole cumulative, then if you want to narrow it down to, say, just Michigan, it's not popping up all the other traps or you can tailor however you want. It took me I was reporting into this for two years before I figured out that this dashboard was there and made things way simpler. Yeah, it's nice. You can also look at a specific pest and it will model like if you go years back, it will show you how the flight pattern comes in and the density of it by the circumference, how big a circle is. It's cool. Usually drive being meeting. I like to show that so they have an idea of what kind of population we had and when it flew in. Because who's really watching those? Western being cuts our driving growers. Yeah, I did paste in a couple of links. While you were going to? Yeah. I just want to point out to everyone that the first link I put in there was to this trapping network. If you think it's cool, you want to even watch the numbers, maybe not put it in. I went ahead and start it. It's easy to find on my computer. Just a suggestion. The second one I put in was Kristofonssect extension page, where it has a lot of those ID life cycle handouts. Very nice if you're having issues with not remembering what pest thresholds and stuff like that are. Or you want another just cool reference if you're a nerd into entomology like some of us are. Christophanzo, along with a colleague down at OSU, put out an insect guide that is available for free online for you to access. And you can print it off for yourself if you want to, etcetera. If you work closely with an extension local person, some of us may have one or two copies still available printed that we may be able to help you with. But those copies were getting pretty limited. They went pretty fast As always, The MSU Diagnostics Lab plant and Pest ID lab down on campus is a great resource if you're seeing insect damage or whatnot and you have find an insect, I should say, and you're not sure what it is and you can't ID it, you can always use pictures and send them either. Well, Chris takes a lot of them if they're out in your field, but you can also send them to our plant and pest diagnostics lab for that. Of course, your local extension person we like to inert out. We like to go visit fields and not sit in our offices. Never. I never want to be in an office I had put to check if your commodity group will pay. For example, wheat has a pretty good free diagnostic sheet. Just make sure when you submit those samples, you print off the wheat diagnostic sheet to go with it so they know to not charge. Right. And soybean has 12. Right? And those are specifically Right. Wheat specifically for issues you're seeking in your wheat crop. Soybean. I know they have the cinema to program. I don't know if they have another program that, if they pay for any other program. I think Blueberry may have a similar situation, just before you pay check into it. We are a little bit of an issue. Jenna, I guess when I pasted in, it's not going to everyone, those links. Is there a way that Madeline or you may have more rights than me, so we can make sure to get I'm sure there is, yeah. Well, I can just copy paste one that you're sending. Mm hmm. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't realize that. It's okay. Thank you, Clay for letting us know those weren't working. Monica, I'm making you co host in the future. You should go through to everybody. Oh, there. I have the power now. So there should have been three links total. Madeline. Thank you. Yeah, I got him. Thanks, bye. Okay. Diseases act. Does anyone know what's on that? Do you know what's on that? Gentle? It's probably just fast, right? It's a bunch of That's just a little joke about tar spot, right? Because we want to make sure, we make sure that's not a bunch of insect poop. We want to ask the next one. Speaking of tar spot, I think it's one of our more, it's a newer to us kind disease, right? Managing it, understanding on an annual basis what we will be doing in season to either identify and then properly treat because it can be. I want to say scary, but it's an adjustment, right, to a new thing coming in. And we may not be sure what we should do, what's the right way to go about it. I feel like Marty does a really good job if you're not on Twitter. It does go back to his MSU page that feed as well. You can also get on that Corn Pm Pipe.org website to view this stuff, but does a pretty good job right on Twitter of as a season, every week posting showing where they're at. Also showing the tarp, those traps where they're at and seeing how those are working. That's a really good place to keep up on the tar spot. She also has a new published timeline to help you decide like if I see it at this point should I spray or not. If I see it at this point, should I spray or not as the foreign plant goes on. The thing about this map that is this one is end of season total accumulative da, over the years. But right, it's a Southern disease that started in the South. It started in the tropics. They have a lot more varieties that have resistance that they've read into. They're slowly trying to get that way, I think, for the lesser relative maturity ranges. But this map is, of course you can see, it's across the whole US. When they turn colors, the map is white and then throughout the season they turn colors. Those are they'll tell you if it's suspected case of tar spot or if it's a confirmed. The ones who are adding to this, Marty says they do not go on here until he has confirmed to them. If your neighbor says they have tar spot and they're not appearing on the map and they think it should be on the map, make sure you're reaching out to Marty, especially like anybody who is a crop advisor. And if you think something should be on here to make people aware that it's coming that way, make sure you're communicating with Marty. Getting pictures sent over to him. And he'll tell you if he agrees, if he thinks there should be a sample sent, that kind of thing, down to his lab, that kind of thing. But yes, he also takes screenshots of this and puts it up on Twitter for you guys. Yeah, so if you're looking for the most up to date on monitoring of car spot, that's probably where you're going to find it. Then of course, in the winter, Marty does a pretty good job at getting around and sharing how they're adjusting, like varietal preferences that they're seeing, types of products to use, rates, application time. And so just a very large wealth of knowledge with Marty on the management. Another couple apps that you can use were also included with Marty, particularly with Tar spot. For the first one, that's why I flipped so quickly. Monica on you is the Tar Spotter app, if you're not familiar with it. It is available for both Androids and iphones. They're still working on some of the sensitivities of it, right? Because they can tell you what the weather is saying. I know there were some questions on it last year that were addressed because it was saying high risk. And people are saying, well, I'm not seeing anything. They don't know if the spores are right nearby or not. There's always going to be some levels of variability with this, especially if the weather people aren't getting it right on rain versus no rain. It can also screw with this, but it's a really nice app you can go in, you can map your field exactly where it's at. And it will tell you at that field what the likelihood of pressure is versus your field that is, say, 10 miles away. If you want to be strategic and stack things, I love to put a trap there. Add that field in a boundary because you're going to need to scout if your numbers are getting high in your trap. Right. And then you're scouting for multiple things. There's just really efficient way of moving through an area and not we all have limited time. Farmers are really busy, right? It's a great way of stacking things to have a good IPM program. The other one there, that white mold one, works fairly similarly. Very similar scientists created both of them. I wouldn't say they're pretty, they're very functional. They're very functional. And there that we use it and prove it out actually the better that it works. It's like a logarithm model based system. The more that it's around, the more that we use it, the better the tool will be for us, some other resources that exist. Marty is part of the Crop Protection Network, as are a lot of people and researchers within MSU and across other land grant universities. They work to put out different publications and tools. They have an image catalogue of different diseases and damages that you can see on their website in case you're questioning what you're seeing out in the field. A big one I get a lot of calls on here is the fund which fungicides are going to be most. Useful against different things in which modes of actions. They have a fungicide efficacy chart that they put out every year to tell you how things are performing then I haven't used it, but I don't know. Monica has found the yield loss calculator and then the severity estimation tool for defoliation and whatnot. I just found them as I was making this presentation and I thought they were pretty darn cool. Yeah, that we There's a lot it's a really great website. I don't think we have used it either, actually. So good. Fine. Jenna, Other than that, we had that here. If you are really into diseases and whatnot and doing your own scouting, there are corn, soybean, and wheat diseases for farmer books that are very useful. There's lots of pretty pictures, pocket guides, easy to carry to. Then again, we have the diagnostics lab, seeing diseases or other damage. Again, you can work with the diagnostics lab on thing or your local person. I will tell you if you send a physical sample into the diagnostics lab, because you need to physically send it, they like a picture with it. Diagnostician sample. They want a Aaron Hill specifically told me that. She said you like the book. If you give a mouse a cookie. She goes, if you give diagnostician a sample, we want a Yeah. I downloading and looking at their paperwork, they give some pretty good suggestions on how to preserve it, how to send it in, where to take those pictures, and also, if that sounds overwhelming, please reach out to your local extension educator. We'd be happy to help you with that. Yep. Alright we we're either doing really good or we're really boring Monica. Alright, We love question. We only made like 15 or 20 slides for the whole hour, so we do. All right. So we speaking of Aaron Hill every year, she she really does is she uses her students to go ahead and evaluate a bunch of different weed ID apps. A lot of them are free or have a free version. Some of them you can download and start to use. And if you want to access more storage or more advanced this or that, then you have a paid version. What they do is they go ahead and she's got a lot of samples because she's one of our, oh, I don't know if I can say that word, diagnostician. Thank you. You kill this, see one of those. And she'll grow at a bunch of weeds and they'll go around evaluating each one of these. So they're taking pictures of things that they already know for sure exactly what it is and seeing if it got there right. Because if you ever get to use one of these, you know, you can take multiple pictures, try to help it out a little. So did it get to the final answer? How hard was it to get to that final answer? And I would say, judge how accurate it was, how accurate it is. So there's precision and accuracy, right? So they're assessing for both of those and then whether it's free or not, ease of use, stuff like that. Based on her recommendations. The one that I've downloaded is the Seek naturalist one. That's the one I use every year. I am laughing that that's the one that you're using Monica, because when I pulled this list, this was the most recent publication of them I had from her in the order that she found the most accurate. I got that one from her table from a couple of years back and I like it, so I've kept it. I personally used the picture. This one that just goes to show you both of us have an idea of already what we're looking for. Right? I use it sometimes on weeds that I know just to verify that I think that the app is still running pretty accurate. Then I'll also use it if there's something I'm not 100% certain on what I do when I don't take it as gospel. I take its suggestion at what it thinks it is and then I do some extra searching just to verify that its characteristics, et cetera, just to make sure that I agree with it as well. And if I don't agree with it, I'm then e mailing Aaron Hill down at the plant diagnostics lab saying, here's a picture of it, here's what this app is saying it is, here's what I'm thinking it is. What are you thinking? Just for verification, we do use them. They are useful, but they are not 100% accurate and don't take them at Gospel Word. Yeah. They're a lot like the apps we just covered with disease as they use them. And that logarithm gets better and stronger and you know, like they function better. So this list does change over time because of how that company does change and improve on the app. So like she mentioned, it's good to check back. Although I guess if you're getting used to things like me, you just don't change. You kind of stick to what that works for you, and that's okay too. Yep. And David, I'd see your comment. Madeline Silvoski, who is on this call, is actually your closest field crops extension educator down there. Madeline, you may want to David Jackson, I'm happy to come to Livingston, or you can just text me some pictures of some weird weeds, and I'm happy to look at them. All right. Sorry I interrupted the phone a little bit, but I would make that connection. Since she happened beyond, I don't think we have any more comments. But again, I know some of you on here are probably well versed some of this. So if you have one that you're seeing that you think is highly accurate, let us know. Monica and I like to try new things and see if we think that what we're doing is actually better or not. I do know some people just take pictures and put them into Google to just do a search. I personally feel like the apps may be a little bit better than that, but no shame, you know, that's okay too. More resources. Have a weed question. Yes. What do I do if I think I have a herbicide resistant weed? You take a sample. What do I do with that? Yeah. Do you want to talk about this and I can find the submission stuff. Yeah, so Monica will go. I don't know if it was coming up but it was not. We are wrapping up our weed section but it's kind of covered here. Right. Msu Diagnosticians, what you would do is you were going to go ahead and collect a sample of it over the winter, a lot of weeds are grown from weed seeds down on campus specifically to test and screen them for herbicide resistance. They like to know what we have going on for herbicide resistance across the state where we're seeing those resistant weeds. We can update our charts that we have showing where it is so people can make the best management and IPM practices. Are you ready yet, Monica? No, I did. I pasted it in. Oh, all right. So Monica pasted in the submission form and it's going to go ahead and tell you exactly what you need to do, it's going to give you tips for how to collect it when you should be doing it. How long the process is going to be taking Michigan soybean there? It looks like they have soybean growers qualify for free testing on specific weeds for herbicide resistance. The Michigan Vegetable Council also has a program going on and then if you want to have any of them screened that are not a part of these, there is a fee that can be considered. But e mail Aaron Hill. Dr. Aaron Hill, if you want to or contact your local person and sometimes things can be worked out particularly, go ahead. I did send you the link quick. I don't know if you want to pop up the map, but we do have a lot of resistant weeds and we're starting to get some that are have multiple resistance. So it is important to know kind of what's in your area and the type and how many kinds of resistance you have. We're kind of planning out a lot of our herbicide stuff for the year, right? So these are great things to be aware of. I'm trying. It's okay. All right. It's up. There we go. So they create this map. And like I said, if I don't want to say exclusively, but if you think you really do have a different type of resistance than we've seen before and the cost of running a test if it's not covered is prohibitive, please reach out to your local extension person, reach out to Aaron. Sometimes things can be worked out to make it so those samples can be submitted if cost would be the factor and it's something new and whatnot that we think may be coming down the pipeline, funding can be found in a different places. So for instance, number seven, there's Grass County. That's currently where I'm sitting actually Grass County. We are dark, meaning we have a lot of different species. If you are on this map, you can click on it and we'll actually bring up the list. We have horse weed that has LS, glyphosate, trizene, some with even multiple resistance. That's just an example of how you can use this tool. Thank you. That's very helpful. What a good question. What a good question I think you knew the answer to really. Again, we have the weed guide. So if you're looking to figure out which herbicides may be best for different weeds that you're seeing for your predominant weeds, et cetera. Every year, Christie Sprague and Aaron Burns put out their weed control guide. You can either purchase a physical copy of it if you want it, or you can also come online to their website and you can get to it and use it online for free. I believe you're able to print from there too. If you just want to print specific slides, then I don't know what the cover crop determination comment was, Monica. Yeah, that was me. I can put it in. They also update annually the herbicide recommendations on terminating cover crops. It's a short bulletin. There's cover crop recommendations inside the weed control guide, but it's not the actual bulletin. That is also an annual update that gets put out. All right, and I'm going to grab those links quick. So she'll grab the links and throw them in the next thing that's not truly IPM, but it's a cool tool that Monica has had the fortune of trying of looking into at least one of the manufacturers of them. We know there's, you know, probably multiples of them, but we're only going to speak from our experience of what we're seeing on currently. And there are always models and updates coming out. We've been informed that there's been some updates to it for the ones that are even getting placed out for this coming growing season versus the ones that Monica tiled. Yeah, like she said, there are other tools. Right? There's handheld tools that you can use throughout the season to look at your chlorophyll measurements. There's tools like presydrate nitrate tests that people can pull. We just wanted to highlight a newer one because I think we're getting more and more questions. Are these worth purchasing? My current red, we have the terolytic soil probes. When you look at the market, there's probably six or so different versions out there. Ben Phillips is actually, he's a vegetable educator in southwest Michigan and he's trial quite a bit of them. The difference between paralytic and some of the other ones is the amount of nutrient readings that it takes. A lot of them do more like moisture or maybe some nutrients. This is claiming a pretty, a pretty broad collection, like a lot of data points that it's taking in. You can see it has three sensors deep here. There is a technician that will come out, install it. They bore a hole. It can go in and out throughout the season to allow for like tillage and other practices. The farmers that are doing this testing for us, after the technicians do create that hole, you can pull it out and put it back in. Then that's something they get to keep after we're done. The thing that interests me the most is like they're in PK, although it only represents a portion of the field. I think it's just really cool to see what is happening to nitrogen in that area to get an idea of like should I go out and take some nitrate tests across the field that I just have a huge rain event and maybe all my nitrogen is gone and I should do something about it. I don't think this tells you what to do for your whole field in a really automated way, but kind of like a bucket trap gives you an idea of what's coming in in your area. This gives you just an idea, right? It's a good trigger for you to go out and do something, just like some of these traps are for us to go out and scout your field. And so u, I should I have one behind me, actually could have pulled one out. But like I said, we have the terolytic soil probes and it is a research project going on right now. If someone was just like itching to get one, a lot of mark our passed out. Oh, they run well, you could find it. They're about $1,000 each, roughly. So anyhow, we're doing more research is the gist of it with them currently. And they've made some updates from the first round which unfortunately had a lot of connectivity issues because they do need a power source and if you're not close to a power source, they end up having to use solar to power them. Yeah, there were a lot of issues with the connectivity. Obviously, if they're not connecting, we're not getting those readings from them. So anyhow, they're working on that, They have new updates this year. What we're excited to see, it does come in as a dashboard. And so as a farmer who purchases this, you do like you get the data back but so does that company. Very similar to like in a combine right with the smart yield parameters. We're going to stick high level on this next one. This is a primer, Eric who has just joined and Monica are going to be talking from ten until 11 on vertebrae, pest management options, but as we were talking IPM tools, we felt it was something we could not overlook. But we're going to stay pretty high level here. So leave the in depth questions if you're going to be able to attend the next hour to them. So I didn't pick the picture, I'm going to let Monica take the lead. But high level, yeah, you'll learn more about it at the next. But this is what our exclusion cages look like when we're trying to get idea of fear damage out on the field. Some of the farmers repeatedly had, I had a guy that I was working with that was trying to produce seed, right? So he needed to keep those deer out of there for multiple reasons. About quality concerns, not just deer damage. And he got very creative. Lot of different noise making visually unappealing things like Genda is listed here. There's also things that can be sprayed that don't smell good. There's like a old factory sense to it that then they don't want to come out and eat it. We do know, like in wheat, if you have deer damage problems, you can plant a bearded what variety that would help you with that? It's like understanding you've got a problem and then looking at it in a whole farm management way. Fencing is another thing would consider to do. And then the next thing at the bottom, I just recently had an update with DNR and they pretty much said at the caring capacity we're at, we have to shoot deer. We have way too many deer. And it's really back on the land owner to do that. And so permits permits. So dancing men because I couldn't I didn't know what they were called. It was the big tube thingies that dance in the wind. Our places have them. Yes. But there is a farm. I know they're more of a vegetable farm, but they have used for a deterrent and they say their big thing talking to that farm is they use a variety of visual and noise deterrents. And they have to switch it up every two weeks or so because otherwise the deer get used to it. But that being said, I'll leave everything else to Monica and Eric. Yeah. So now we're going to wrap up here with some of our whole IPM things that can help you make your best decisions. Do you have a separate slider? Is it only on the side? My I was going to leave it there. That's okay. Because I use some other stuff later. What we're showing here is Bruto Basil's lab does have a logarithm that they can use using your sensor. They can do it two different ways. They can either NDVI data taken from satellite imagery, if you don't have solid data that you've been collecting on the farm like yield monitors, Yes. Maybe you don't even have pieces of equipment to do that, not just that you've not been taking them correctly because it is trash in. Trash out. Right. But if you do have your yield monitored data, you have your applied map data and if you want to consider your nitrogen application, you'd also have to prices that you've been using. What can be done is they can put it into this program they've developed on campus. It is free. And they can give back these maps to you that are like Profit Stability Maps, Yield stability maps. And the point of is for you to see those fields and see historically where things are producing, producing at a profit and what is not The map you're looking at right here, it looks like there's 11 years of yield data for the one that's on the left. The other one looks like seven years of yield data that is on the right. This is about one year how a field does, but over time, how are my fields doing? We can sit here and talk about maybe what is causing all those red areas which are high loss over seven years for that picture to the right. Over the seven years, you're not making an income right on those red areas. We can talk about why, but the point is is that whether it's shading from trees or deer damage or insects or what name you like, so many things, right? These are just, it's not working. So what would we like to do differently in those areas? I think this is a great large scale, a IPM tool management tool that crosses over everything for you to consider looking at. Like I said, it's free. Bruno's Labs runs it, and they do a pretty good job at helping you collect your data and get everything into them as well. Yep. So like she was saying like one of the key takeways from this is right. It'll show you those areas that are unprofitable. It's not going to tell you why those areas are unprofitable. So that's one of the things where it still comes down to your feet on the ground, right? If you know it's deer damage. You have a lot of deer damage on the edges of the field. If you know that. You always have, say, a high incidence of white mold around the edge of the field. It's not going to tell you what it is, but between your knowledge and this technology, compare really nicely at helping you make those IPM decisions. Yeah, like the bucket trap, right? It triggers you to go scout another whole farm and leaning still towards technology here is the use of a drone. I think there might be we could come back to this picture. Yeah, so we've run a little case studies with Michigan Potato Funds for potato growers, trying to decide what's the best way for them to determine drown outs and some early de, and other kind of diseases, tuber diseases that you can see in that above ground biomass. And we have found a pretty strong correlation. You can see the red areas here. This field had been through a lot bar with drownouts and then subsequent disease pressure. And it did help them really understand like, where to go into scout. Why is this important? Potato quality is critical, right? So you want to understand the amount of damage you have and make sure you're still filling your contracts. If they can use a drone, fly over these fields, know where to target scouting, save some people a lot of time, right? You can do targeted scouting and you can do a pretty good estimation idea. Because this swath, let's say if you're looking at the right picture, the one that's got a whole line there where there's water and then you can see some discolored. It'd be to the right of the picture. Yeah. They probably just wouldn't even going through there and like they include that in the load. They're going to have to harvest it out eventually. You don't want to leave potatoes out in the field for disease problems, but if they're really concentrating quality and they're going to strategically harvest this, it's just a very useful tool. I think that as our drones and our imagery progress, it can be more and more useful also for corn and soybeans and all the crops we have. I was going to say, and there are some people I know who've used it for scouting, say white mold, where they fly it overhead, they're looking for symptoms, and then those are the areas they're going to walk to. Particularly when that crop right is pretty bushy and hard to walk through. It can help save you a lot of time in identifying it as long as you're running that drone correctly. It nothing against manually going down on the thing and scouting it though, especially if you maybe aren't all into the drones And they're also not cheap. He doesn't want to walk through a potato field in July, I pretty much bought the drone, so I didn't have to. That, that's why I bought a drone. It was just to help my legs. I'm going to cut you guys off a little bit just to leave some space. If there's any questions, this is our last thing. Can we just Okay. Okay. So we only have two things left to mention because two of the four have already been mentioned. There are a lot of a lot of scouting apps out there that you can use. Monica and I, neither of us have experience using any particular one. When I was an intern, I helped the company I was working for was building one. So I do have experience using one, but it's not a one that's commercially available anymore, and that was a while ago. There's a lot of apps. If you are one of the people in this room who are using one and do scout, let us know what ones you're using because we would love to know that. We'd love to maybe trial some out ourselves. Other than that, watch for your local updates from extension. A lot of us put out either newsletters, Facebook updates, that kind of thing, Just to say what we're seeing in our area, what we're catching in our traps, that kind of thing. And then we have our Wheat Watchers program, which is statewide, where we report in how that crop is progressing, what we're seeing in it, across the entire state by region. That is a go ahead. Oh, we had vi weather vier weather, check it out. Environ weather's great. I'll paste in the chat. Lot of good links. I myself just downloaded two new apps. Alright, playing with those.