This is the Sugar Beet Report bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the sugar beet growing season. There are a host of pathogens that challenge sugar beet producers. These pathogens come in many forms and can be difficult to control. Our expert today is Gary Secor, North Dakota State University plant pathologist. Gary, from your perspective, how does the crop look this year?

From my perspective, it looks like another good crop yield and a good sucrose year. And this is a continuing trend that we've seen in the most recent years. Over the last few years, the yields have been really good. The sucrose has been up, and, of course, are always selling sugar. The bad news is that all this rain and all this heat, especially in the north end of the valley, not good for sugar beet harvest. That really delays them from harvesting.

What is your main work with the sugar beet industry?

We work primarily with foliar diseases of sugar beet. And this includes Fusarium, Alternaria leaf spot, of seedling and leaf diseases. But the biggest share of our work is with Cercospora leaf spot. And Cercospora leaf spot is the number one foliar disease here and everywhere in the world. It's a really important foliar disease. It's managed by host resistance, cultural practices, and timely fungicide applications. And the fungicides are the most important aspect of managing cercospora. That's where the heavy lifting comes in. Over the years, all of those fungicides, cercospora has become resistant to those fungicides. So they're no longer effective. So one of our main programs is to monitor resistance to all of these fungicides. So we can make recommendations to the coops. So then they can implement a strategy of fungicide applications for optimum performance to reduce disease. And we monitor resistance to 7 different fungicides, and we look at about 1200 field samples every year. We also work closely with the USDA ARS scientist Nate Wyatt and Melvin Bolton at the Edward G. Shaper Agriculture Research Center. Not only understand the resistance, but also the mechanisms for those resistance at the molecular level. They use our collection of our cercospora isolates to study these mechanisms. So all of the ice that we've collected over the 24 years, we save them. And so we've got those in a library of cercospora, if you will. Those are all been characterized and cultured, so we can use them to do all kinds of additional studies. We've developed technology to monitor when cercospora spores are present. That helps us know when we should be applying the fungicides. And so we've found out during the last maybe 4 years or so that these spores are present much earlier than we expected. And also we get infection much earlier in the field than we expected in previous years. We've changed our fungicide application model to begin fungicide application much earlier.

Well, why is early detection important?

The industry tells us if they apply fungicides earlier, they actually get better yields and better control of the disease. It's not only what we find in our research, but also in the field. The growers are confirming what we find in our research. Based on all the work we're doing, we're developing an improved disease forecasting model that includes these early events. A new model for predicting the presence of cercospora leaf spot hasn't been updated for maybe 40 years. So this will be an updated model for the forecasting for chocospora where you can use our new technology that's available now to make this model.

Gary, do you have any results yet for 2024?

So we're about halfway through our collection monitoring for this year, and we've got about 400 samples so far. But what we noticed so far this year, it looks like our resistant to tin is reduced compared to previous years. So that's good news.

Thanks, Gary. Our guest has been Gary Secor, North Dakota State University plant pathologist. This is the Sugar Beet Report, bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the Sugar Beet Growing Season.