This is the Sugar Beet Report, bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the sugar beet growing season. Maintaining soil health should be every farmer's goal, but growing sugar beets has extra challenges. Our guest, Anna Cates, University of Minnesota soil health specialist, has the latest research. Anna, why is soil health challenging in sugar beets?

So soil health is challenging in sugar beets because a lot of the traditional practices associated with building soil health like cover crops and reducing tillage are hard to fit in around your sugar beets and rotation. Those practices are important because they reduce disturbance, which protects your natural soil structure and also increase the inputs of organic matter to your soil, which feeds your microbes and, again, builds that soil structure. So when you think about that in the context of producing sugar beets, you have a couple challenges. One, obviously, tillage is necessary to take the beets out of the ground. So you're not going to have a perfect no till, no disturbance situation. The other is the timeline of sugar beets. They go in early, they come out late. And so thinking about when a cover crop grows around that is just really challenging. I think focusing on where we can put, cover crop on pre pile acres is the real low hanging fruit with improving soil health and sugar beets.

How are growers overcoming these challenges?

Well, one is hitting those low hanging fruit elements. Like, we're trying to look at cover crops on pre pile acres and sugar sugar beets, and then we're looking at strip tilling sugar beets. So maybe you do have to, of course, lift out your sugar beets from the ground. But before the sugar beet time, you can use strip tillage instead of full width tillage. And this means that while sugar beets are growing, you've left a lot of your soil structure intact between the rows. By soil structure, I mean aggregates, I mean the large pores between aggregates. And those large pores are what give you water infiltration. And the aggregates are what give you water storage. So depending on whether it's a wet or a dry year, you're gonna be wishing for more of one of those things or the other, but you really need both in your soil. And when you preserve your natural soil structure, then you should get both functions. So a strip till system can give you kind of a sweet spot where you have a tilled row to plant your crop and get good aeration and nutrient cycling in that row. And you also have the space between the row, which is not likely to erode when it has, like, good structure. And it allows more water to get into the system and to move through the system in a year where you have a lot of water like this season.

What kind of changes should growers expect in their operations if they wanna use strip till and cover crops?

Overall, a strip till system can be really efficient. You can have fewer passes on the field, spend less on gas, and you can run it with fewer individuals. So it can be really efficient, but you gotta make a plan for that system, which is not gonna be exactly the same as broadcasting and disking in fall fertilizer. In terms of cover crops, you also need an individual who's gonna plant that. Maybe you wanna talk to your coop. You wanna, again, time that in terms of any other fall work you wanna do around fertilizer application.

Anna, how does your research fit in? What do you know so far?

Well, I'm building on some work done by my colleagues at NDSU, Tom Peters and his graduate student, as well as, my friend Jody DeJong Hughes, who works for University of Minnesota Extension. We're starting to see really consistent evidence that strip till sugar beets are competitive with full width tillage sugar beets. The next thing is to figure out whether when you're incorporating different kinds of cover crops, do your yields stay consistent? We're seeing that whether you have a cover crop, for example, that seeded the fall before your sugar beet crops, you get more coverage the winter before your sugar beet crop. You know, that can give you more soil health benefit because you got more organic matter coming in compared to that spring nurse crop, which I think is more typical in most sugar beet operations. So we're seeing really competitive yields. Getting a little more biomass over the fall before your beet crop isn't gonna hinder your beet yields. That's really important. Then we're looking at different ways to get cover crops into the beet system. We have a few growers who have played around with interseeding cover crops between their beet rows, so there might be something there after that lifter comes through. That seems really hit or miss. Sometimes a little bit is left, depends on the conditions of lifting and the weather conditions that year. Another thing we're trying is running an airplane over the sugar beet field around the defoliation timing. So the defoliation actually incorporates the seed, covers that seed up so that it can germinate again after the lifting. So that can be a nice option. Obviously, it's a cash outlay, but there's cost share for cover crops that can cover that kind of thing. Our research is trying to figure out what are the best options under what situations are they most likely to succeed. And we're seeing that the strip till is really consistent. And the cover crops, it's a little more weather dependent, but there are some options for growers who wanna do it.

Thanks, Anna. Our guest has been Anna Cates, University of Minnesota soil health specialist. This has been the Sugar Beet Report, bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the Sugar Beet growing season.