This is the sugar beet report, bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the sugar beet growing season. The weather is being helpful for many sugar beet producers. For American Crystal, more than half of the sugar beet planting is complete. According to Joe Hastings, agronomist for the American Crystal Sugar Company. Joe, how is this year's planting season going?

Well, we've been fortunate to have a real nice early planting season. It kicked off the weekend of April 12. And right now, we've got probably 280,000 acres planted, 70% planted on what we plan to plant for this year. So that's great to have the majority of our beets planted in April because it kicks off a lot of crop potential, excellent crop potential being planted this time of year, not later. Kind of to break that down a bit, we've got about 80 of the acres are planted in the Moorhead, Hillsborough, and Crookston districts and at 68% in East Grand Forks and just over 50% up in Drayton. So, again, we're looking at this crop with a lot of positive crop potential right now just by planting date.

What kind of impact does the recent rain have on the start of the season?

Yep. This rain was perfect. You know, we were a little bit dry, so we get these beets planted and having some rainfall on them to help get those germinated is incredibly helpful. But also it was great because it also replenishes the topsoil moisture and also for any remaining acres to be planted we're going to have some moisture to go into. But also we have weed control we're looking at and with the amount of pre emerge herbicides that we have on right after planting, it helped activate those herbicides to control waterhemp, kosha, etcetera, that we have to have on before. Because they're round to pretty resistant plants, this is really our only chance to get a lot of them.

Joe, what are the production concerns at this point in the season?

Well, right now, we still wanna get that out of 38% of the crop planted. Again, this moisture is gonna help with that again. But it looks like some nice warm temperatures coming, so I'm not too worried that we're not gonna get these planted in a nice timely fashion. But other things we're looking at, like weed control, like I said, we're gonna continue with the pre emerge or pre plant incorporated on what fields need to be planted or even recently planted fields. If they're not up yet, if the sugar beets aren't emerged, heck, go out there, get that pre emerge on there, right? Because that's really our only chance for kochia. But also we want to look at later on now in the growing season, be prepared to do a lay by application just to follow that soil applied treatment to control water ramp, right? We want a layered approach out there as we go to the season and typically we start that at the two leaf stage for, sugar beets. Other things we're looking at of course is insects. If you're in a root maggot area, we want to look at using counterap plant is probably the optimal treatment. And also for springtails, for those acres still left to go in if you have a history of springtails. Counter insecticide is probably the best on those. And then towards the May, beginning of June, we're going to be looking for those post applications to occur as needed. When we start seeing Ripmiggid flies start getting up there the population start being out there in the beets. Rhizoctonia, a lot of our beets come with fungicide on the seed, all the seed does, but you might need an at plant fungicide when you have a bad history in the field or depending on what your crop rotation is, if you're following soybeans, edible beans, it's sometimes good to have a at plant Rhizoctonia fungicide treatment. But other than that, just time that post rhizoctonia fungicide treatment for the four to eight leaf seeds. So we got time before that happens. But just some key things to look at early in this planting season that we're gonna focus on.

Thanks, Joe. Our guest has been Joe Hastings, agronomist for the American Crystal Sugar Company. This has been the sugar beet report, bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the sugar beet growing season.