(bright music) - Hello, and welcome to "Farm Connections."

I'm your host, Dan Hoffman.

On today's episode, we discuss planting climate-resilient plants and trees with Angela Gupta, of the University of Minnesota Extension in Rochester.

We talk about carbon emissions and conservation practices with Mark Gutierrez in Owatonna, and the University of Minnesota provides us another "Best Practices" segment.

All here today on "Farm Connections."

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- Welcome to "Farm Connections."

We traveled to Rochester, Minnesota to the University of Minnesota Extension Office, and with me as an expert on Woodlands and Plants, Angela Gupta.

Welcome to "Farm Connection."

- [Angela] Thank you so much.

- What a great program you've got, and a lot of research, tell us about it.

- Well, thank you so much.

So I was delighted to talk about Climate-Ready Woods today, and that's a new project that we launched fall of 2023.

And it is really enabling woodland owners who want to rewild and think about preparing for the future climate of Minnesota through native understory trees and plants.

Some of the plants are near natives, in that they are not native to Minnesota today, but are projected to do really well in our future climate and our native to the Eastern United States.

But in addition to thinking about climate, we also incorporated information that the Prussian plants are beneficial to the ecosystem at large.

So think lots of pollinators, bees, small mammals, birds, that kind of thing.

And so people, if they're anxious to make sure that they're providing great habitat for their favorite bird or their favorite pollinators, and they wanna have a climate-resilient woods, then the Climate-Ready Woodland's list at the University of Minnesota would be a good choice.

- Well, Angela, it became very apparent when some of the people started talking about losing tens of ash trees, the change is stressful.

- Yeah.

- Why are trees important?

Why are plants important to our ecosystem and to us as people?

- Yeah, great.

So photosynthesis.

But I won't take you back to elementary school.

So no, trees and plants offer all kinds of great things.

So people, we use wood products in our furniture, in our homes, paper products.

But also, we benefit from photosynthesis and trees and plants through our breathing, our air, our water quality.

These are all services that our trees and forests provide.

And the wildlife that I already mentioned, and the products.

So a lot of people are talking about having lost ash trees to emerald ash borer.

The wood may still have value if you can find someone to borrow it and the market has been kind of flush, but these are all values that are common within woodland owners.

And so we wanna make sure that our forests today continue to provide all those same services in the future, even though the climate around us is changing.

And so while we really work to incorporate all of those things and recognize that every woodland owner has their own goals and objectives, and that's fine, we're just offering them more choices about ways to think about that in different trees and understory plants, which is fairly unique, to have understory plant recommendations, that can do these multiple things for us.

But I think it's super important to realize that we wanna keep trees, forest as forests.

So if your ash has died, this is an opportunity, change is happening, so you can help facilitate the change that you want.

And so we're offering ways in which you can do that through these trees and plant lists.

- When you speak of change, and of course the insect or disease is part of that, but what possibly accentuates those things or accelerates their damage?

- Yeah, so I've mentioned climate change a couple times and I'll stay with that theme for right now.

So Emerald Ash borer has never been found in plant hardiness zone three.

And so for a long time, that was Northern Minnesota, but our new plant hardiness zone maps came out and now zone three is the northern third to even quarter of Minnesota.

So as that zone creeps out of Minnesota, all the ash trees are becoming exposed.

And we actually saw that in the winter, late winter 2023-2024, as they were doing those emerald ash borer surveys, very quickly we found it, just past what had been the edge of zone three, and that's because emerald ash borer knew before the USDA had their new maps out that zone three had creeped north.

The other thing that this matters, two other reasons is invasive plants are super common in our understory, and they can prevent our trees from re-establishing.

The seedlings can't get established in those invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle understories.

And those, we are more resilient for more invasive plants, the warmer and wetter we become.

So invasive plants will continue to be a problem and they're exacerbated by climate change.

The opportunity is some of these natives that thrive in these warmer, wetter, through natives today in southeast Minnesota.

We have a lot of them already 'cause we're the warm wet corner of the state and the eastern deciduous hardwood forest creeps into Minnesota, but the bulk of it is further southeast of us.

So many of those same species are already likely to do well.

And as we get warmer and wetter, that region will just move.

But it's all change.

And change can be really hard, right?

It can be hard for our trees, it can be hard for our forest, it can be hard for us.

And so we really think about how we can create resilient communities that can then steward resilient ecosystems, and part of that is having hope that you can make a difference and you know how to do it.

And we hope that our tree and plant list provide some of that.

You can make a difference.

- Study, plan, make good decisions, right?

- [Angela] Exactly, exactly.

- Well, you certainly helped with that.

And something that came out in the meeting really was several of the participants seemed to love trees.

The sight, sometimes the sound of wind moving through the leaves.

But most of them had trees somewhere on their property and they smiled and thought about enjoying that space.

Did you notice that?

- Oh, of course, everybody loves trees, right?

Sometimes it makes my job really easy, sometimes it makes it hard, but right!

And then we also can get passionate about the specific types of trees.

Do we really love our sugar bush, or are we really passionate about ramps in the spring, or are we really passionate about birch trees up north?

And to identify those passions and then plan for them, there's a way in which you can think about that.

And so in this work, we talk about resistance, resilience, and transition.

And resistance would be like retaining what you have and really working to do that.

And that will get harder over time, but it's not impossible.

And then resilience is where you're going to sort of hedge your bets and do a little bit of this for the future and retain some of your species that you love.

And then transition is where you're really leaning into that different future, and you're gonna really diversify some of your trees and understory plants and prepare for that different future.

And we really recommend that people think about this, applying each of those three approaches as a spectrum across their landscape.

So don't lean everything into one, right?

We wanna hedge our bets and not put all of our eggs in one basket.

And I also think this leads a little bit into ecosystem redundancy.

So if we have multiple species that can fill the same niche, then I think that makes us better prepared.

And so one example that we can look back in history and look is when Dutch elm disease came through and killed the elms in our forest, ash trees filled a lot of those ecosystem niches.

And now that emerald ash borer has come through and has taken our ash trees, what's to fill the niche now?

And in some forests it could be cottonwood, it could be silver maple, but in some it might be buckthorn and honeysuckle, right?

And so then intervention would be important, and you can lean into some of these other things.

- You spoke quite a bit about zones, and of course when you go to the nursery we see zones.

Can you expand on what that really means?

- Yeah, so the plant hardiness zone maps are intended to be maps to help us make good decisions on what plants to plant where, but they're shifting, and that's a direct result of climate change.

So in 2023, we saw the USDA come out with a brand new plant hardiness zone map.

And there was pretty significant changes in our zones.

We didn't go from like zone three to zone five, but zone three became much smaller portion of Northern Minnesota, zone four is most of the state, and then there's more zone five in the southern.

That is very different, if you look back to 20 years before when it was mostly zone three in the north, zone four in the south.

And what that means is trees, trees and plants are limited typically by two things, temperature and moisture.

And as we get warmer, more things will grow here, and as we get wetter, more things will grow here.

And so when we look at those plant hardiness zone maps and then we think about the trees and plants that can grow there, we are likely to have more options as we get... And again, that can be a pro and a con, but it does mean that as a woodland owner, you can really think about that a little bit differently.

The other thing I think it's worth reflecting upon is those maps change, right?

I mean we just saw the change from last time.

It was, in my opinion, long overdue.

It had been pretty delayed.

I think you're gonna see more changes.

And if the winter of 2023-2024, I mean that wasn't even included, it was the warmest winter on record, right?

So when that data starts to roll in, I think you're gonna see some other changes, so... - Well, speaking of data, you had some excellent, excellent slides and presentations.

One of them particularly, in 100 years, there was six degrees temperature change in Minnesota.

Can you speak to that a bit?

- Yeah, and so this was something that recently really came top of mind.

So Minnesota being the center of a large continent of North America, isn't buffered by the oceans as much as our coastal neighbors are.

And so that means that this change in temperature is more exacerbated in the center, and we're in the center.

And so we are seeing the largest change in sort of the continental United States.

And as you get north, the changes become more exacerbated.

So Alaska sees really dramatic change, but it means that we are getting warmer faster than our neighbors to the south.

And so I was just reflecting upon this in invasive plant, early spring phenology, and it looks like we are running, so in the spring of 2024, we we're running six to eight weeks earlier than the spring of 2023.

And that is a lot, right?

And that's because we're experiencing these changes more quickly and more drastically than many of their states around us.

- Since our trees like certain soils, certain amounts of moisture, certain soil types, a temperature change plus the precipitation really stresses them, right?

- Yeah, exactly.

And so when I think of myself as a tree, if you will, right?

A big baroque might last for 300 years and that seedling is not moving.

It's gotta adjust or it's not gonna make it.

And that is the same across our landscape, and it is really stressful for all of those trees and plants.

And so you're going to see the shifting and some of these long-lived woodies like trees, they are not as agile as some of those annual plants or even the perennial plants, but that have 10 or 15-year life cycles, right?

They're going to be able to adjust a little bit more quickly and move, but it is going to be stressful and there are going to be changes within the system.

And so part of the foundation of this climate-ready woodlands is this thought about rewilding.

And that's where we're really trying to restore ecosystem functions and we're doing this through diversity.

And so how can we change the plants so they can support the critters?

And that becomes really important, I think as we look about this diversity in the ecosystem and redundancy so we can have resiliency.

- Angela, you gave a lot of great information.

Unfortunately some people couldn't make it today.

Is there a place they can go to see the list of plants and some of the other data and research you've got?

- Yeah, thank you so much for asking, I really appreciate it.

Yes, the Z-link is provided here.

- Awesome, wonderful work, needed work, thank you.

- Thank you so much.

- Stay tuned for more on "Farm Connections."

(bright music) (upbeat music) - "Farm Connection's Best Practices," brought to you by Absolute Energy, and AgVantage Software.

(upbeat music fades) - Hi, I'm Ryan Miller, crop extension educator with the University of Minnesota Extension, and this is today's "Best Practices" segment.

Well, we're getting late in the year here.

We're out scouting some soybeans.

They're in the reproductive stage.

So we thought we'd take a little bit of time today to talk about best practices around defoliating insects.

And there's one particular insect out here today that's causing some damage to the soybean plants and that's the Japanese beetle.

They're small, probably about the size of a dime, dark color, and then they can have a metallic green-orange appearance.

Very easy to identify when you're out in the field.

But these pests do cause some foliar damage.

They feed on the leaves.

In this field, they tend to be pretty distributed throughout the field, but then they kind of aggregate on individual plants and feed.

So they're not completely uniformly distributed, but they are out here.

And so soybean defoliated, there's kind of three different thresholds for defoliating insects.

First is those early vegetative stages.

We can tolerate more leaf loss at those stages.

Now that we've moved into the reproductive stages, the tolerance for loss goes down.

Early in the season we can get 30% defoliation before we need to institute a control measure to control that insect and stop it from feeding.

When we get to these later reproductive stages, we can tolerate only 20% defoliation.

And so it's human nature to kind of overestimate foliar damage of the soybeans.

And so what we're gonna do is take a look of a plant.

Our general recommendation would be on a field to look at 10 plants.

If you're on a very large farm, you're gonna need to look at more than 10 plants.

But typically you can look at 10 plants and get away with that.

Actually see some beetles on this, and normally I would move throughout the field and pick another random plant out here.

But for the cases here to explain kind of what we're looking for, we can see the beetles are gonna now fly away from this leaf here, but we're looking at this top leaflet or set of leaflets.

And you can see there is some damage here, and it's not very high.

There may be five to 10% leaf loss on this particular leaf.

When you look at all three leaflets, it's probably closer to 5%.

But again, if we go down into the mid canopy, select off another leaf, we can see there's 0%.

And if we go down the lower canopy again, we're not gonna see any damage.

So if we were going to sample all the plants in this field and kind of come up with an estimate of defoliation, I'm sure we'd be at or just below 5% defoliation in this particular field.

So again, it would not warrant a control measure.

Other things to think about when we're trying to decide.

If we do cross that defoliation threshold and decide to make a treatment, the thing to consider is pre-harvest interval, to choose a product that's not going to put us out of our desired harvest window because we have to wait longer than we'd like to do the harvest.

So we've gotta pay attention to that when we get later in the season here.

So one last thing to to think about when we're talking about some of the insects that cause defoliation damage, and there are a handful of insects we have in Minnesota that can feed on the pods and cause some damage there.

And so we've gotta be considerate of that to look for damage to the pods.

We don't have any of those pests out here, but things like bean leaf beetle, stink bugs, as well as grasshoppers can actually cause some damage to the pods.

Bean leaf beetle can spread a virus.

So those are some things to consider too when we're out evaluating late season insects or in the reproductive stage to kind of limit damage to the pods.

And generally the kind of rule of thumb there is to institute some kind of control when you have 10% damage to pods.

So pay attention, I know in some places in Minnesota this year it's been drier, they might be seeing some damage to pods from things like grasshoppers.

Again, in this field, if we looked around, our pods are intact, it's been just primarily that defoliation on the upper canopy here in these soybeans.

I'm Ryan Miller, crops extension educator with the University of Minnesota extension, and this has been today's "Best Practices" segment.

(no audio) - "Farm Connections" is onsite in Owatonna, Minnesota at the Carbon Intensity Workshop.

And with me is Mark Gutierrez of the Minnesota Soil Health Coalition.

Mark, welcome to the show.

- Thanks for having me.

- Well, as executive director, you have some really great responsibilities and a great organization.

What do you do and what is it?

And we do have a great organization.

- The Minnesota Soil Health Coalition is a farmer-led, farmer-run organization and we educate about soil health and help farmers implement the practices.

- Well that's a lot in itself.

What do you do as executive director?

- Well, I work with the board members to host onsite field days and conferences educating about soil health.

And we coordinate farmer mentors and other farmers who are experienced in these practices to host these and lead our education programming.

- Well, today was an excellent example of good education.

What part did you have in that?

- Yeah, well yeah, we helped kind of come up with the idea and worked on picking the location, picking the speakers, sourcing the ethanol plant guys like Don Burnes to come and speak today.

All the above, coordinating the food, coordinating everything.

- Well it was standing room only, and it was certainly very important that you shared this message.

Why did you want this group gathered in this particular spot?

- That's a great question, and really comes down to the board members that are behind me.

Those folks are the ones who, they tell us what their needs are as farmers.

And so when we hear what their needs are, then we work to meet those needs.

And so they had a lot of questions about, "What is the CIS score, how does it help me, how can I get paid off of it?"

And so we hosted an educational event to help get that word out, 'cause if they need to know it, then every other farmer needs to know it too.

- You mentioned CIS score, Can you tell us more about what that acronym means and why is it important?

- Sure, that stands for Carbon Intensity Score.

And in a nutshell, the government is giving a tax break to ethanol plants for lowering their carbon score.

And one of the main ways they can do that is to buy low-carbon corn.

And the way they can buy low-carbon corn is from a farmer who's implementing soil health practices.

They're the ones who are growing low-carbon corn.

- Sounds like there's ways that are more environmentally-friendly to grow crops versus - Some that are not.

- Definitely, there is a ton of environmental benefits from the soil health practices, holding the soil in place, so stopping wind and rain erosion.

That holds your nutrients in place, keeps the runoff from going into the rivers and going downstream to the gulf.

So it also is good for profitability for farms, right?

Holding those nutrients in place actually is a good investment of their money.

So it's both environmentally good and it's good for the farmer.

- And economically, each year hopefully there's an incentive because the crop is better quality and higher yield.

Is that a possibility?

- Yeah, absolutely.

And it's definitely a better quality and it builds these soil health practices, when the principles are followed as a system, they build resilience into the system.

They help weather the storm and heavy rainfall, which is what we see.

We see more heavy, intense rains, and having these practices in place over time can make you resilient and make you survive those.

You're not gonna get the damage to your fields.

You're not gonna lose as much crop.

I've even seen windstorms come through and corn crop on no-till cover crop, the corn is still standing because there's structure and the roots are firmly in the ground and they're deep and that stability helps that corn plant stay standing.

- Well, that's important each year of course to get a crop.

If you do things right consecutively for a number of years in regards to soil health, what would the outcomes be?

- So, well there's a ton of benefits that come from it, with that resiliency, but what we see when somebody is implementing soil practices for a long time is that they have increased soil structure, increased earthworms, nutrient cycling, increased water holding capacity.

And in a lot of cases yields go up as they've developed their biology in their soil and that biology is cycling nutrients and feeding those crops and making them a higher-quality crop.

- Today was a fairly successful event, if not top end, right?

- [Mark] Yes sir, it was very successful.

- What was your greatest joy as you worked with the group today?

- I think my greatest joy was really hearing and seeing people gather a good understanding of how they can change what they're doing on their farm because they heard from the farmers how to do that, and they heard from the ethanol plants how they can make money off of it and be more profitable.

- How do we learn more about the Minnesota Soil Health Coalition?

- Yeah, you could check us out at www.mnsoilhealth.org or Google Minnesota Soil Health and we'll come right to the top, and on our website there's a ton of great information.

We've got some fact sheets, we've got links to videos.

We also have a mentor network out there of farmers who are volunteering their time to help others as they are changing their management practices to try something new.

You wanna try cover crops?

Go check out our mentor list, reach out to 'em.

They can tell you all kinds of things like termination, seeding rates, what chemicals to be aware of so you don't have residual chemical issues, how to set your equipment up for success when you plant.

All of those things and you can work farmer-to-farmer on it.

- Really important, and you're governed by a seven-member farmer board, is that what you said?

- Yes, sir, that's correct.

- [Dan] So they're elected?

- They're elected by the members of the organization and like you said, there's seven of 'em, there're spread out throughout the state, we're actually looking and expanding to nine.

So hopefully we'll be able to grow that a little bit.

And these folks are also farmer mentors as part of being on the board.

And how does one become a member?

It's super easy, 25 bucks a year, you can sign up online, you can go print the form off of our website and mail a check.

And with those benefits, you get access to all the events we host, you get notification in a newsletter, we put out information on cost share, we put out information on field days, and sometimes we put out some important agronomic or other grant information that's important to farmers.

- We had many farmers here today who are all invested in a good agricultural system that produces crops.

What if we have somebody in the audience that's not a farmer, but wants to support your work?

- Absolutely, we have folks who are non-farmer who are members, it's the same thing, it's 25 bucks.

We are a farmer organization first, and so voting members are farmers.

But you don't have to be a voting member to still have a say and have input and be a part of it and volunteer with us and be a member.

- Awesome information.

Thank you, Mark.

- Yeah, thank you very much, I appreciate you having me.

(upbeat music) - Well that just about does it here for today's episode of "Farm Connections."

I'm Dan Hoffman, thank you for joining us.

(upbeat music continues) (bright music)