Steve Roehl is West Central’s data and research analyst. West Central is a wholesale distributor of crop protection and crop nutrient products based in central Minnesota. He joined West Central in 2010 with nearly 20 years of experience in agriculture research, consultation and sales in the sugarbeet industry. He spent 15 years with the Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative, beginning in 1993 as a territory agriculturist and later as a research agronomist. His areas of expertise include plant nutrition and weed science.
Q: What do you do at West Central that applies toward sugarbeets?
A: I have been with West Central for five years. The first three years I was a regional agronomist and covered sugarbeet production areas in Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska and Colorado. Recently, my responsibilities have shifted toward setting up research experiments with third party researchers and summarizing results for our entire sales geography.
Q: Why did you join West Central?
A:I accepted a position as a regional technical agronomist with West Central, because it presented a wonderful opportunity to utilize the knowledge and experience I had obtained from my education in plant and soil science and my graduate work with weed science. It also allowed me opportunity to learn much more about crop production in many other crops and geographies.
Q: How does the scientific research you do benefit beet growers?
A:West Central has always strived to cultivate a strong relationship with the proactive growers and ag-staffs involved with local sugar cooperatives. We feel that those sugar cooperatives we work with regularly would agree the research we have conducted in conjunction with their research staffs and local universities has resulted in both increased utility in, as well as knowledge of, in-furrow pop-up fertilizer technologies designed to provide early access of nutrients without risk of injury.
In addition, there has been considerable work conducted relating to increasing the scope of Cercospora leaf spot fungicide applications by including certain important nutrients as a foliar application among other spray technologies involving weed control over the years.
Q: Can you offer any recommendations for seed treatments in the different regions?
A: Sugarbeet producers and cooperatives in the Midwest are very familiar with the concept of seed treatments. To my knowledge, all seed sold for production in the United States is protected with mefenoxam (Apron) and Thiram to control pythium and other seedling blights.
SMBSC was the earliest adopter of pellet technology in the U.S. but others followed closely behind such that the industry was significantly pelleted prior to 2000. This adoption to pelleting material build-up on seed paved the way for a natural predisposition for seed treatment technologies. For instance, Tachigaren (hymexazol) is widely used in geographies that struggle with Aphanomyces cochlioides, a devastating root disease for sugarbeet production and root storage. Also, some geographies have quickly adopted some newer fungicidal seed treatment technology designed to provide control of seedling infections of Rhizoctonia.
Another seed treatment option that sugarbeet seed processers make available to sugarbeet producers is a technology involving primed seed. This involves starting seed germination slightly but stopping it at a critical stage for safety. This process can speed germination and emergence when the seed is planted to give the crops a quicker start and avoid certain seedling diseases and insect pressure.
Q: Any tips for growers regarding better pest control?
A: Early detection or prediction is crucial. Sugarbeets are a small-seeded crop, meaning the seedlings are relatively susceptible to early insect and disease pressure. Often by the time a problem is visually observed, it’s too late for acceptable treatment options.
When it comes to both weed and disease pests, it’s always a good idea to utilize effective products and technologies in preceding cropping systems to reduce populations or disease inoculum prior to the sugarbeet production year.
Q: What’s new out there for weed control?
A: The issue with weeds that are becoming resistant to Roundup (glyphosate) and other modes of action appears to be creating a situation in agriculture where what was once old is now new again. The fact is that there are only a few herbicide products that are labeled for fall application for sugarbeets. A couple of seedling shoot growth inhibitor products, such as EPTC or cycloate, can be incorporated late in the fall but before freeze-up. They can provide fair to good control to certain problematic annual broadleaves in the following year.
Perhaps the best strategy is judicious and aggressive use of resistant weed control strategies, including the use of residual PRE herbicides in the other rotational crop years. Maintaining clean fields throughout the entire sugarbeet rotation is paramount to weed control and herbicide resistance strategies in the sugarbeet production year.
An appropriately aggressive fall tillage pass corresponding to the residue of the previous crop will uproot any late germinating weeds or biennials and bury certain susceptible weed seeds, rendering them less likely to germinate the following year. A suitable fall tillage pass can also provide other benefits that include breaking up the soil to prevent silting or sealing and increasing the likelihood for a mellow seed bed and a more effective target to apply a labeled PRE herbicide product in the spring.
Whether a PPI product is used in the fall with tillage or a PRE herbicide is used in the spring, the products that provide a safe and effective soil residual to kill emerging weed seedlings are the most lethal weed control alternatives for sugarbeets.
There are several other soil residual products including ethofumesate, dimethenamid, s-metolachlor, encapsulated acetochlor, and even trifluralin products that can be applied PRE or Layby. These products can be applied in a layered strategy to overlap residual active ingredients and effectiveness and provide excellent weed control.
Q: Can you share any insights into what’s new in weed science?
A: One of the more intriguing new strategies in weed science isn’t necessarily new active ingredients coming out of manufacturer R&D but rather in the investigation of human behavior as it relates to the implementation of herbicide resistance strategies.
The sugarbeet industry in particular has always been quite aggressive when it comes to weed control strategies going back to pre-Roundup Ready production. This is primarily due to a few factors including relatively late sugarbeet leaf canopy formation that required extended control measures, the relatively small market that sugarbeet production represents in relation to other crop acres and the sensitivity of sugarbeet to many effective herbicide modes of action. These factors have necessitated that sugarbeet cooperatives and growers treat weed control in a proactive fashion. Thus, preserving Roundup Ready production has been a pointed and industry-wide mission since the technology was implemented.
However as the Weed Science Society of America has astutely determined, just because one segment of agriculture or several growers in a growing area are doing a good job of utilizing judicious and proper weed resistance management strategies does not guarantee they can or will effectively avoid the issue of herbicide resistant weeds on their farm. This is because the problem of weed resistance is considered a social issue that creates a Common Pool Resource Problem.
This means that even though land may be owned by an individual grower who conducts appropriate and effective weed control practices, the wind, rain, flooding, birds and animals that spread resistant weed seed is shared by all and requires that everyone do their part to prevent development and spread. The Weed Science Society is calling upon everyone to accept a role in solving this increasingly “wicked” problem.
Aside from utilizing far-reaching and diverse modes of herbicide activity, growers are being asked to consider other weed resistance management strategies. This includes utilizing effective and layered Pre-emerge residual herbicide products in all crops and layering the residual chemistries to obtain season-long control until the crop can canopy and prevent additional weed seed germination. In some cases, it may also require resurrecting a few proven mechanical weed control options of bygone days such as the rotary hoe.
Q: How can Levesol help beet growers this season? Which regions use such a product for in-furrow applications?
A: This is a really exciting time at West Central due in part to the recent launch of a new fertilizer additive called Levesol. But when it comes to sugarbeet production, this technology is definitely not new.
The highly stable and effective chelate represented by Levesol has been investigated for its utility in sugarbeet production going back as far as 2007. This is because the unique chelate found in Levesol is the same technology provided with existing West Central products Soygreen, Redline and Copper-Field that have been available for years.
Early research involved an in-furrow application of Soygreen, a chelated iron product that West Central considers to be the industry standard iron chelate for crops that suffer from iron deficiency chlorosis.
However it did not take long to understand that when it came to sugarbeet and other crops, it wasn’t the iron but rather the chelate that was doing the heavy lifting. Following this discovery, research quickly turned to investigation into more versatile and efficacious product formulations for this chelate.
Redline is a premium starter fertilizer formulation that provides nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, iron, manganese and copper in addition to a research-determined amount of the chelate at the recommended rate to provide for maximum sucrose production. Redline is a complete package of important macro- and micro-nutrients in addition to the chelate to promote more efficient nutrient availability, uptake and translocation. It has been used successfully in sugarbeet production systems since 2010.
Further exploration into this technology has led to the introduction of Levesol. In a contrasting strategy to the complete fertilizer package that Redline effectively provides, Levesol is a fertilizer amendment product designed to protect the nutrients in your fertilizer and make those already in your soil more available by preventing them from tying one another up. All nutrients exist in some sort of ionic form.
When Levesol is added to a grower’s existing starter fertilizer product, it protects these nutrient ions from becoming complexed or bound by other nutrients found in the fertilizer or in the soil. It is through this ion protection that nutrients remain more soluble and accessible to plants resulting in increased uptake into and translocation throughout the plant.
Because the chelate is stable across most soil pH ranges and types and since published research has indicated that it can also be taken up into the plant, it’s capable of providing nutrient protection both in the rhizosphere and in the plant. This is important because it means that this technology will provide for increased nutrient use efficiency in most all regions of the U.S.
Tell me about any other new products you want to mention.
Several sugarbeet ag-saff personnel provided me with a few new products they are excited about. In addition to new crop input products, such as fungicides to combat early Rhizoctonia and biologicals to reduce the impact of sugarbeet cyst nematodes, there is exciting research continuing in the realm of sugarbeet storage.
Relatively modern storage facilities, cooling fans and pile covering, in addition to remote sensing devices (both internal probes) and aerial imaging, have opened new doors in reducing losses relating to beet storage that had historically been painfully accepted as a cost of doing business. This new arena of research designed to preserve the sugar that growers harvest involves USDA research to identify specific storage fungi that predominate storage piles in collaboration with sugarbeet ag-staff.