This is the sugar beet report, bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the sugar beet growing season. Sugar beet planting is wrapping up, and producers are preparing for early season insects. Mark Boetel, NDSU Extension entomologist, has the latest concerning these early season pests. Mark, now that most of the beets are planted, what are the pest issues we should be concerned about?

Yeah. You know, early on, we want people to you know, and most growers do this anyway, but monitoring seedling emergence, making sure, emergence is even and looks normal. We've got a lot of early planted fields this year, and so some of those fields are gonna be at risk for springtails, things like wireworms potentially, and even cutworms as well, so we need to be on the watch for that. We don't have real high grasshopper risk this year, but there are pockets certainly where we had problems last year, especially down in the Southern Min area and also, the Southern Red River Valley, Mindaq growing area. So, yeah, those are things to be watching out for.

What are the best control options if a grower has issues with these pests?

You know, the answer is fairly easy if it's grasshoppers or cutworms. Foliar broadcast insecticides work very well. The key to that is catching them early. With cutworms, because they're primarily active during the evening and overnight hours, a late afternoon, early evening insecticide application will work really well. Rescue insecticides will not work well for springtails or wireworms though, so really the best option is if the stand loss is sufficient enough and you just wanna replant those areas and probably use a at plant insecticide or at least an insecticide treated seed.

Alright, Mark. Let's talk about my favorite villain

Alright.

The root maggot. What do you expect this year?

I often say that last year's, hot spots can kinda tell us a lot about what to expect this year and that's no exception this year. However, there's sort of a curveball because we believe we had more root maggot flies out there last year than what our traps indicated. The June was very windy last year and I think it kept a lot of those flies down from being captured on our sticky traps. So it's something to at least watch out for. If I'm wrong, then great. It's great for the growers. However, if that is the case, then we could have, you know, hot spot areas that are more problematic than expected. The highest risk areas in the valley on the North Dakota side include Auburn, Buxton, Cavalier, Cashel, Crystal, and Reynolds, as well as Saint Thomas and Vestleyville up north. In Minnesota, Ada, Boreup area, then Crookston, a little farther up north, and then way south, as far as the Rootmaggot territory goes, the Glynn and Sabin area is also at fairly high risk. Just want to remind people too that we're going to still be collaborating with MnDak at American Crystal on, doing the fly counts. Those are three days every week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and they're posted online for free viewing. So very easy to find just searching for NDSU root maggot fly counts, and you'll find them.

I know it's super early, Mark, but what does your model predict for peak fly?

Yeah. I just ran the model and it's looking like now and ran that with the extended weather forecast as well, the ten day forecast, suggests that we're probably about three days ahead of average for degree day accumulations. So that certainly could change. We'll what happens in the next couple of weeks, and so we'll be able to zero in on things more. So I would just advise people to watch and listen for updates like this on various ag radio sources, the end issue crop and pest report, as well as text alerts from your coop as well.

And your model is available for the public. Correct?

That is correct. Yeah. So growers and pest management advisers can, monitor degree day unit accumulations and track that as we progress toward peak fly activity. So it's publicly available on the NDON website at NDSU, and it helps us predict peak fly activity, but it also does include degree day accumulation recommendations for when insecticides should be applied.

Thanks, Mark. Our guest has been Mark Boetel, NDSU Extension Entomologist. This is the sugar beet report, bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the sugar beet growing season.