- [Narrator] Montana Ag Live is made possible by.

The Montana Department of Agriculture, MSU Extension, the MSU Ag Experiment Stations of the College of Agriculture, the Montana Wheat & Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery & Landscaping, the Northern Pulse Growers Association, and the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

(country music continues) - Good evening.

Welcome to another edition of Montana Ag Live, originating again tonight from the studios of KUSM on the very dynamic campus we call Montana State University and coming to you over your Montana Public Television System.

I'm Jack Riesselman, retired Professor of Plant Pathology.

Happy to be your host this evening.

This is the next to last fall program we have.

We've kind of focused on conservation and as the public wants, we've had more producers on the program as guests this fall.

We have another one tonight and I think you're gonna enjoy the program a lot and of course you're gonna learn a lot too.

So with that, first of all let me introduce the panel tonight.

Way on my left, Abi Saeed.

Abi is our Extension Horticultural Specialist.

If you have questions about plants going into winter, type of apples you're growing, things like that, tonight would be an excellent opportunity to call in and talk to Abi.

She'll answer your question.

Our guest tonight, and I met Lon this past summer, very engaging individual.

He's a rancher from out at Terry, Montana and if you don't know where Terry is you can look it up.

It's kind of 340 miles east of Bozeman.

Great place, right along the Yellowstone River.

Lon, it's good to have you here.

I'm going to come back to you in a minute.

You can tell us a little bit about some of the things you do.

Tim Seipel, he wants to be called a weed ecologist.

(Tim Seipel laughs) I refuse to do that.

He's a weed scientist.

- There you go.

- [Jack Riesselman] And Sam Wyffels.

Sam has been here before.

He's an Extension beef specialist.

Sam is very knowledgeable about beef and we'll get some good interaction going tonight.

Answering the phones tonight, John Holly and Nancy Blake, and thank you guys for being here.

And before I introduce Lon, he's with a company called Cherry Creek Ranch, as I mentioned out by Terry, Montana.

Beautiful part of the state.

I love Eastern Montana.

I'm a good salesman for that part of the state and also Fort Benton.

Lon, you're big in that conservation initiative, Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative.

Tell us what that is.

- In 1991 as great help from a guy named Bob Drake from Oklahoma, there was a group of people that wanted to help refocus the Natural Resources and Conservation Service on grazing lands.

Farmland had been the main focus of the NRCS and the old Soil Conservation Service before that.

And so a group of people got together and they wanted to help refocus a little bit of the NRCS's efforts and monies on rangeland specialists that would be available for people that had questions and wanted to do at that time, it was the beginning of the EQIP program, Environmental Quality Incentive Program.

You know, so the GLCI was kind of dreamed up and born.

A couple, some of the original members were Bob Lee from Judith Gap, John Hollenback's from Gold Creek, Pete Jackson was from the Harrison area, and that was in 1991.

I came on board in 1992 and we're members of a producer steering committee.

And we don't get paid any money for this, but we have a conference call once a month or a Zoom meeting once a month and we meet twice a year.

And we are given a pot of money by the State Range Conservationist for the NRCS.

And we try to divvy that up for projects that are either educational or research throughout the state of Montana.

- You know, I've said this all along this fall, the ranching community, starting probably in the early '90s, late '80s, have really focused more on conservation and going into the next generation, leaving the land better than when you first got it.

How successful is it?

Have you been able to really make a significant difference in some cases out in Eastern Montana with the Coalition?

- I think so, but I think it was before that time period.

I always tell everybody, "I didn't have to save the world, my dad did that."

(Jack Riesselman laughs) I just have to build on what he did.

You know, that the, my father was a young boy in the 1930s and it was a, just a disaster in the making from the homestead era on, you know, the over-utilization, poor farming methods, all that stuff, you know?

And so with the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the conservation programs, that deal just kind of built and built and built.

We actually have lands that were plowed and never, ever seeded back.

They just went back over time.

And so when the, actually 1960s, '70s, the conservation movements, environmental movements of the early 1970s kind of helped focus the government back on continuing the improvements and programs for the land, so.

- I've been impressed.

I really have been.

I've been here since '79 and the changes in the ranching community has been very noticeable and I appreciate that and you guys deserve a lot of credit there.

Before we move on, I've got a question here that I wanted to get to you in a minute.

It came in from Libby.

Before that, I wanna go to Abi.

And this came from Huntley and she thinks she has ladybug infestation in the house.

Why, and if that's the case?

- Yeah, so this is that time of year in the fall where lady beetles are looking for places to hunker down in the winter.

And especially for Asian lady beetles, they need that kind of warmer environment to survive.

So, they find their way into your homes.

That's what they're doing to just get through winter.

They're not gonna reproduce inside your home but any sort of opening they can find, they're looking for a place to hunker down.

That's why they're getting in there.

The best way to manage them if you don't want them in there, make sure any kind of cracks, crevices and things like that are sealed and then vacuum them up.

- What are they, I mean, you gotta have some aphids around if you've got ladybugs.

- Yeah, and yeah, chances are that you probably have some nice, soft-bodied insects that they've been feeding on.

But in general though, this is just that common time of year.

They don't feed during the winter months.

- All right, thank you.

I wanna go to Lon and I've got a question for Tim here.

From Libby, Lon, this person knows that Eastern Montana is generally drier than ranching in the western part of the state.

They wanna know how you supply water to your cattle out there.

That's a good question.

- Water in quantity and quality.

We have quality issues too, where we have extremely high pH of our water.

And this can cause a thing called urinary calculi, water belly, stones form in the urethra.

And it's a really serious deal.

Anyway, with the help of the NRCS, sometimes the BLM, we go to great lengths to drill wells, do pipelines.

We have I think eight solar wells at the moment, several windmills.

And if anybody wonders what we do, water is about it.

Many miles of pipeline.

- [Jack Riesselman] Okay.

- I've seen some of the watering stations out towards Lindsay or some other things that EQIP money, putting, paying to move, put pipe in.

- Yeah.

- And put some different watering sources out of the riparian areas, out of some of the areas so you get grazing up on the hills.

I thought that was really interesting.

- Really works, that.

And the GLCI has actually funded some of these studies where in Western Montana especially, we'll put a solar pump in a stream and pump it off to a tank at least a quarter of a mile away and then hire a grad student to keep track of whether the cows water, the stream.

(group laughs) And believe it or not, they like water out of a tank better than walking in the mud and the bugs.

- I would believe that.

And grad student labor comes pretty cheap, thankfully.

(group laughs) I think we were all there one time or another.

Tim, this person from Fairfield says they think they're seeing less wild oats than they used to.

Is there a reason for that?

- Well, maybe.

The Fairfield Bench still has a lot of wild oats, there's no doubt about it.

And there is some really ferocious herbicide resistance in wild oats on the Fairfield Bench.

One of the things that's, might have changed their perception of it a little bit is wild oats are really a great weed of tillage, tillage and center pivots.

So in those malt barley areas where we still have lots of tillage, you get a lot more wild oats.

When you actually go into a no-till system, wild oat doesn't do as well and so you get, because it doesn't like to germinate on that duff in the litter that's left on the top.

So that might be one of the reasons they think they see fewer wild oats out there.

But they're still really tough weed to manage in a lot of situations.

- Okay, thank you.

- Mm-hmm.

- You know, I kind of think I'm not seeing as many as I used to, but yeah.

- You know Dave Wichman, who used to be the Superintendent of the Central Ag Research Station, he said the same thing to me and his, I just gave his answer right now.

- Dave knows what he is doing once in a while.

- [Tim Seipel] Yeah, he does.

- In case he's watching.

- [Tim Seipel] Mm-hmm.

- Sam, most people look at hay as the primary source of forages for cattle.

Are there some other alternatives?

And I've seen corn actually been baled.

Does that work?

And both of you guys can jump in at 'em.

What are some of the other forages that you might be able to use for cattle?

- Yeah, I mean I've seen corn fed to cattle, but usually it's mostly as like a silage or a.

- Right.

- Or maybe even grazing out there.

But yeah, there's a lot of options.

One of the interesting things, last year I was on a tour across Eastern Montana and not too far from your guys' place actually, and some folks talked about growing some kind of sorghum-sudan grass, cover crop type things and they decided that they wanted to graze that and wanna hay that and said it's the best their cattle have been doing in the fall like this in quite a while.

And it's because that, some of those forages hold onto their quality a little better than what our rangelands typically do.

But yeah, there's a lot of options out there, a lot of NRCS programs and others are, to, that promote soil health are planting cover crops.

And what we're finding is that grazing cover crops can add some additional benefits by getting those animals back on that crop ground and integrated it in.

But when you're grazing some of these, I guess my word of caution is.

- [Lon Reukauf] Yeah.

- When you're grazing some of these crop plants, and a lot of 'em have been known to be nitrate accumulators, or potentially maybe some prussic acid issues.

- [Lon Reukauf] Right.

- If we're looking at some of those C4, warm season-type plants.

And so we always recommend to do a forage sample before you do that.

And luckily we know that nitrates can be a problem in Montana, especially with drought-type conditions.

And so most, I would say most of our Extension offices have nitrate quick tests.

And if you test positive on the quick test, they have some areas or some recommendations of what we can do to either get a real hard number on that or to look at sending that off to forage samples or (indistinct).

- We planted 100 acres of sorghum-sudan this year and baled it and it was a fair baling, but then we received some late season rains and we probably have more grazing regrowth than we did hay.

- [Sam Wyffels] Hay.

- But that's one of those crops that you need to wait like four or five days after a very hard frost before you turn in.

You use the least liked cow method.

- [Sam Wyffels] Yeah.

- You turn the worst cow in there and if she's standing up then you turn the rest of them.

(group laughs) - Be careful with the sorghum-sudan and millet, those C4 forages, 'cause millet especially has been the number one vector for Palmer amaranth into North Dakota and into Montana.

First Palmer amaranth was found at Daniels County this year, which was in a millet field.

And it's those really tiny seeds are hard to clean.

- And that is a very, very tough weed to control.

- Yeah.

- You know, Lon, I'm gonna pick on you a little bit.

Gene Server, old friend of ours who used to be a faculty member here said that you made good use of cheatgrass as a forage.

You wanna expand on that a little bit?

- Beggars can't be choosers.

(group laughs) Cheatgrass comes and goes in our country and it's a function of two things.

It can be too much bare ground or you can have too much built up litter and create this seed bed for the cheatgrass.

And so extending your grazing season in the front and the back of the summer can help you utilize cheatgrass.

And so we have a fairly numerous pasture rotation and in the fall, like this last fall here, if the cheatgrass really germinates and comes on, cheatgrass doesn't seed out in the fall.

So if things are just right, you can have green cheatgrass, which is incredibly high protein forage, for a long time.

So we'll use every pasture except the one we're gonna use first the next spring.

- [Jack Riesselman] Okay.

- You know, to and boy it, now this year had a lot of challenges.

There was a lot of light calves in our country and we didn't quite get our rains early enough so the cheatgrass would achieve, calves really like eating green cheatgrass.

They do really well on it but it just didn't come quick enough.

- Yeah, okay.

And there's a question here and this is obviously from Missoula.

This person is curious how much grass does it take for an average calf to put on a pound of grain?

That's an interesting question.

Anybody have an answer on that?

- [Sam Wyffels] It depends.

(group laughs) Yeah, yeah, I mean when you're looking at high quality, springtime, good forage stuff, but that's usually when your calves aren't grazing as much, they're more dependent on their moms, yeah, it can be very highly nutritious and cattle can do really well on that.

But when we get into the later fall, after that plant senescence and it's not as high in protein and a little higher in fiber, it takes a little more of that grass to put on that pound.

So it's not a cut and dry answer, I don't think.

- We have problems, a lot of times we will forward contract our calves.

The number one date of forward contract calves is around August 12th.

On average, your market will be best right there, but you never know what the fall's gonna be like.

Are you gonna get some green grass in the fall or are you not?

So guessing the weight of those calves on August 12th, what it's gonna be in mid to late October and not knowing whether you're gonna have a high quality forage fall or not makes it difficult.

- You know, and you say kind of, where do you move your calves to, Lon, and at what weight do you try to move 'em out?

- I'm a bit of a maverick on this one.

So we aim for our calves' weaning weights to be about 500 pounds and definitely not much more and hopefully not much less.

There seems to be buyers buy calves with the thought of when those calves are gonna be finished and ready to process.

And having calves that become beef between the 20th of April and the 20th of October, that's a low point of the year for fat cattle prices and it makes people's calves that weigh in the mid fives to low sixes automatically finish at a low point in the market.

And we've done everything, we've retained ownership.

This year we sold our, all our steer calves and one load of heifer calves on Superior Livestock video in Sheridan, August 22nd, I think it was, to be delivered August 12th or October 12th, sorry.

- Okay, interesting.

I've often wondered about that.

This question came in a couple weeks ago.

Do we still get a premium for?

- Yeah.

- Big calves in this state?

- I wouldn't say we are the premium because the South Dakota, Nebraska, Western Nebraska is really close to the big sources of feed and those are high quality cattle.

But over the whole nation, Montana really does well.

Some, there's a big difference between Western Montana and Eastern Montana 'cause the state is so large.

So the freight from, say, Helena to Scottsbluff, Nebraska is a lot bigger.

I was telling your wife that our house is only 410 miles from Alliance, Nebraska.

- [Jack Riesselman] Yeah.

- And so with the cost of diesel and trucking, it's a big advantage to be closer to the big feed areas.

- I agree, good information.

Abi, this person wants to know what are all those apples of varying sizes doing in front of you?

- That is a good question and I'm glad that you brought that up.

So Jerry Cashman gave me these apples to try.

These are all grown in, here in Bozeman.

And so one of the questions that I get asked a lot, because I do know what couple of these apple varieties are, but one of the questions that I get asked a lot is "How do I tell what apple variety I have?"

Or, "Can I send this apple to somebody for them to be able to tell me what this is?"

And the answer to that, the best way to kind of know that is to go to the source of where you got that apple tree.

So whatever nursery that you went to, I would ask them.

They would know best what cultivar of apple that you have.

And then a lot of times when you're not sure, or if you just wanna propagate an apple that you really like that's in your backyard, you can graft that, take some of the young twigs from there, graft that onto a new one and you can create a new apple or you can create a new tree of the same genetic variety.

And then if you are really, really interested in knowing exactly what apple that you have, University of California has an apple genetic testing lab where you can submit an apple.

I think it costs two or $300, but you can find out exactly what it is.

But we have over 3,000 apple varieties, so some of them can be very distinct but some of them can be pretty difficult to tell which one's which.

- You know, an old friend of ours, Pete Faye, used to make a fair amount of apple cider around here and his neighbor had some cows.

And tell you what, those cows like apples, there's no doubt about it.

And they often ate too much of it, which wasn't pleasant but anyway, enough of that.

- Just one.

- Pete Faye's cider press is still running.

Matt and Jacy Rothschiller are out at Rocky Creek Farms, still run Pete's apple cider press.

- And they make pretty good cider.

- They do, yeah.

- Do you have a recommended book for which varieties of apples might work in the desert?

(Lon Reukauf laughs) - Well, yeah.

Well it would be difficult to grow apples in the desert, but we do have really nice sets of, set of information.

So our Western Ag Research Center, they, their website, MSU Extension's website, Google "Western Ag Research Center", they have a really nice set of apple varieties for Montana and recommendations for, you know, smaller scale, larger scale, depending on how many you wanna grow.

But our apple experts there, Zach Miller, who's the superintendent there, he's extremely knowledgeable about all of the best varieties.

So if there was something I'd be curious to try and figure out, I would go to Zach.

- Thank you.

- You're welcome.

- All right, I have a couple questions for Lon here.

One is a comment.

This came from Custer and it says, "Hey Lon, you got any extra grasshoppers out your way?"

(Jack and Lon laugh) - Many.

Of all the challenges we face, you know, we can kind of manage drought a little bit but the grasshopper deal, there's three things that control grasshoppers, soil type, your cover, how much cover you have on the soil, and weather, and about all we can manage is the cover.

And that helps.

You can affect your grasshoppers quite a bit by the cover, but if the soil type and the weather are against you long enough, you're gonna lose.

- And you've had significant issues with grasshoppers the past few years, correct?

- Yeah, four times in my life and probably nine times in my family's life we've had these several year in a row grasshopper disasters, you know, and I have a theory that I really want to push.

This is (indistinct).

(Jack Riesselman laughs) An old friend of mine named Dale Brown, now long gone, he said in the '30s his dad drove around an old Model A truck and he threw arsenic and bran out the back of his truck for grasshopper bait.

And it was all treated with banana oil and he said he never could eat a banana again.

But the idea of finding attractants for grasshoppers so you don't have to spray such a large area, if you could get these grasshoppers in a smaller zone, 'cause predator insects are a big help in grasshoppers.

And sometimes if you spray the wrong stuff over a large area, you wipe out your predator insects.

- Absolutely.

- And you haven't helped yourself in the long haul.

So that's a tough one.

Dave Branson at the Sidney ARS station is kind of our grasshopper go-to guy and I bug him a lot, so.

- Do any of the ranchers out in your country use Nosema?

- We have, but now this is interesting.

Dave Branson schooled me on this a little.

Nosema, there's like the sinful seven grasshoppers or whatever, so not every grasshopper is eats the same thing.

And there's about seven species of grasshoppers that can be really detrimental.

And Nosema only works on some of them.

So you wanna type your grasshopper or get somebody to help you do it before you invest big money into Nosema 'cause unless you've got the right grasshoppers, you know, that it's a spore that hollows the grasshopper out from the inside out.

And if you've got the right grasshoppers, it works pretty good.

And if you don't, you're, you blew it.

- And that's more of a long-term strategy too, right?

You wouldn't get immediate kind of results from Nosema.

- It happens.

- Yeah?

- It happens faster than you think.

- Mm-hmm.

- But when I say that, it probably isn't gonna bail you out for this year.

- Mm-hmm.

- But you can seriously affect the number of grasshoppers that lay eggs, you know?

And once your grasshopper eggs in the ground, only egg predators can get at that.

Not nuclear war, nothing.

I mean it's stuck, you know?

But the egg predators build with the grasshopper populations and we could talk about that for a long time.

(group laughs) It's important that you don't wreck your predator populations too.

- Predators, absolutely.

That's true with a lot of pests, there's no doubt about it.

Interesting question here, and we throw this from, to Sam and Lon.

Have you seen an increase in calving weight as we have milder winters here in the state of Montana?

- You wanna try that?

(group laughs) So the blood flow in your mother increases with the cold.

And the theory is that as you have more blood flow within your mother, mom to stay warm, that the fetus is fed more.

And so depending on when you get that severely cold weather, the theory, now, I don't know if Sam has information to say this is for sure, but the theory is when a real cold winter you'll have heavier birth weights.

- Yeah, I mean I can't, I guess I never thought of looking at birth weights in relation to winter and then a geographic location of where winter hits, when across the states.

Tricky to probably pull that out.

But I can say that we've seen in the last five to seven years, we've seen some serious winter events across Montana, like I think two 100-year winter events.

And I do know following those winter events we've had serious calf mortality, you know?

Weak calf syndrome, a lot of sickness, scours and issues.

And I think a lot of that has to do with, you know, are we able to maintain that animal's nutrition to keep her energy levels up so she can withstand that and not stress that calf as well?

So yeah, I don't know about birth weights, but I do know that when we have these bad winters that it does affect the health and mortality rates with those calves.

- Okay.

- And the calving a little later, I've never had a calf chill down inside of a cow, so.

(Lon Reukauf laughs) - [Jack Riesselman] Alright.

- So has there been a big shift in the state to later calving, later calving dates that aren't in February, in March?

- I think what happens is you hit one of these really, really bad winters and everybody just about has suicidal thoughts by the end of calving.

- [Tim Seipel] Yeah.

- And so they set their turnout date for their bulls back a little and then we hit a couple good years and they start thinking, "Oh well, if we can creep up a little," and then you get hammered again, you know?

- That's agriculture.

Yeah.

- I've actually done a couple tours across Eastern Montana, all the way down on the Wyoming and South Dakota all the way up to the Hi-Line, and I've noticed that as you go up north, just, this is just anecdotally, but just talking with producers, those calving dates creep a little later in the year.

- Later and later.

- The worst spring storm country in the world is at Black Hills and Ekalaka, Broadus.

- Yeah.

- Setting your calving date back into April for those guys is not really a win 'cause they get the worst April storms.

And whereas I'm a weather watcher also, we don't get near the April storms that say, you know, Ekalaka, Baker.

- Baker.

- They really get hammered.

- Yeah.

- It's almost like the freeway draws a line, I've noticed.

- That's right.

- Yeah, and you go north of that freeway, it's everybody.

- Yeah.

- Everybody's in April and those low pressures come across the middle of Wyoming and they wrap around to the north and they bring it back in.

It hits the Beartooth, the eastern side of the Beartooths that'll wrap the snow into the Beartooths something fierce.

- [Jack Riesselman] And the Black Hills of South Dakota.

- In South Dakota, yeah.

- Really get hammered in the spring, no doubt about it.

Okay, we are getting behind on a few questions here.

(group laughs) - Purslane in a garden, quickly, what can you do about it?

- [Tim Seipel] Eat it.

- [Abi Saeed] Eat it.

- Eat it.

Purslane in the garden.

So it's a late season weed.

Those seeds will live forever.

It is absolutely edible.

Myself and Roland Ebel, who's in the Sustainable Foods Bioenergy Systems here at MSU, we've fermented it and we've made pesto and we served the pesto dip at the President's Dinner and everyone thought it was delicious, so.

- [Jack Riesselman] I'm more interested in the fermenting process.

(group laughs) Alright, thank you.

And this is a question that I've often wondered about.

A caller asks how many days after frost and the last hay cutting should producers wait to graze that alfalfa safely?

- Isn't it a little risky to graze your alfalfa later in the season?

- After frost.

- Right after that frost it can be deadly.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- Like that next morning, you know?

And it kind of depends on the regrowth a little bit.

Like if you get a killing frost and your alfalfa turns brown, you're good.

- [Sam Wyffels] Yeah.

- But if it's just an early flash frost and the alfalfa regrows and you just never know.

- Yeah, the theory is that there's some proteins in there and when the animal consumes the protein, it foams up in the ruminant and it causes bloat issues.

And so you wanna graze at a point in time, like you say, when it turns brown after that frost, that those aren't viable proteins for bloat issues.

- Yeah and I guess I was, I've heard that if you graze your alfalfa late you'll cause mortality to your alfalfa, if it's still green and still a little bit actively growing in those situations.

But I don't know.

- Be cautious.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, it's always a very cautious game - Caller from Jordan.

We don't get many calls from Jordan.

I appreciate somebody up there giving us a yell.

They would like to know what Lon is doing that is successful in his grazing and how do you measure that success?

- I think having it more sustainable, getting through the drought and the amount of root depth.

And as far as what we're doing, we started off, we have three different allotments and three different grazing systems.

And we started off with kind of like three pasture systems and we found that that really, these were summertime grazing systems and that wasn't enough pastures.

And so six isn't some magic number, it was just easiest to split three into six.

And it made a big difference about the revegetation of the cow trails being on that land a little shorter.

So we take a few more AUMs in a shorter time period and leave, you know?

And a fairly long rest period.

And when we get towards the back of the season, then we kind of assess what's out there and what's left and we might regraze certain pastures.

Try to always rest the one that we're gonna use first the next year the most.

So the last one in '23 will become the first one in '24.

- Okay, good answer, thank you.

Abi, from Livingston.

And this is an issue this fall.

What do you need to do to get rid of all those leaves that fell just before the snow?

- Yeah, so the, that's something that I just dealt with this week too once the snow melted because I, the snow took me by surprise a little bit and I didn't get to do my regular maintenance.

But my favorite way is to use those nutrients from those leaves and keep them in your garden.

And so what I would do is I mow my lawn over top of those leaves, so I'll mow those leaves to shred them a little bit.

It helps them break down a little bit faster.

You can also take those and shred them and put them on your garden beds to help mulch that and slowly they'll kind of decompose underneath the next batch of snow and add those nutrients back into your soil.

So I like to just take my lawnmower on the highest setting and just mow over all those leaves so it distributes them.

- [Jack Riesselman] Do you bag it, then?

- Nope, I keep them on top of my lawn so it adds those nutrients back in.

- See, I have a different plan.

- Yeah?

- I cut it really short and then hope the wind comes up.

(Abi Saeed laughs) That blows the leaves into my neighbor's yard.

(group laughs) And that's been fairly successful at times.

Not this year, because with snow interrupted that.

Interesting question here.

What's the difference between a Red Angus and a Black Angus?

You wanna do that one?

- Yeah, I mean this might not be the most popular answer but the color.

(group laughs) - I agree, yeah.

- It's basically color, isn't it?

- Yeah, so Red Angus, believe it or not, is just a recessive gene of Angus that makes them red.

And then there's quite a few producers out there that have preferred that red gene and so they perpetuated that and actually made their own breed association, the Red Angus Association.

But in terms of the animal itself, it's a recessive gene associated with just Angus breed in general.

- The gene pool of the Red Angus is slightly smaller.

It might be just a hair less variable.

You know, the Black Angus gene pool these days is huge.

- [Jack Riesselman] Yes, that's true.

- There's a lot of 'em, you know?

And so the Red Angus might be slightly more predictable.

- I'm, yeah, correct me if I'm wrong and I'm not an animal scientist by any stretch, but I've been told that Black Angus are generally slightly larger than the Red Angus, is that correct?

- I don't think so.

- Okay.

- I think the (indistinct) Research Center has some pretty good data on that if you wanna, I would say the opposite.

- [Jack Riesselman] Okay, I was, that's what I'd heard and I was just curious.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

This is interesting.

A Great Falls caller asked what should replace pine trees that have been killed by beetles?

- Well if, yeah, if you've had issues with a certain type of pest and if you've had kill like that, I would avoid replacing them with the same species.

So if you've had, and I'm not sure what exact kind of beetles you're talking about there, could be a few different beetle pests, I would probably replace it with a different type of tree that works well in that soil.

The options are pretty open.

And so first suggested ideas, the first thing I tell people is to get a soil test, see what soil you're working with and then you can choose a tree that will work well in that type of landscape.

- Okay, thank you.

- Abi, what's the best, I've been, you know, the wind's coming up, but I've been thinking what's the best shelter belt construction here in Montana?

If we're thinking of trees or Great Falls where you had some pine trees die out, how do you put together a good shelter belt around your house and think about that?

- Yeah, that's a good question.

We have, I can't off the top of my head think of the variety, but we have a really nice publication that talks about the species to incorporate in shelter belt trees.

And so for those kind of larger systems, you usually have like a larger, like a pine type tree and then people have a, usually a hedge in addition to that, like Caragana is used in shelter belts a lot, and then a smaller, kind of third story of plants.

But we have a really nice publication so contact your county Extension agent and they can give you that publication that tells you all the different species that work well in a shelter belt.

- [Tim Seipel] Okay.

- [Lon Reukauf] If you want Russian olives, you gotta drive to Beach, North Dakota.

(group laughs) - We'll leave that topic for a little bit.

- Isn't there a new Russian olive that is approved that is not considered a noxious?

I think there is, - Well I'm not sure about that but I know some people at USD ARS in Sidney are working on a biocontrol for Russian olive.

- I knew that.

- That will prevent it from making seed and so that we could keep the Russian olives that are out there and since they're now considered a noxious weed by some and they're working on a biocontrol, I don't know if it'll be successful or not.

- [Jack Riesselman] That may be what I'm thinking of.

- Yeah.

- You know, I'm gonna put a plug in for the Stockgrowers Association here and Lon's a big member, you're a member, I'm sure.

I'm actually a member even though I, but a little bit of history on the cattle industry in this state.

Conrad Kohrs, and this is kind of hard to believe, was one of the persons that, person that founded the Stockgrowers back in 1885.

You're not the oldest, the Wool Growers have got you by two years.

- Yeah.

- But tell us a little bit how the Stockgrowers came together and what they do for Montana.

It's a great organization, so.

- So actually Granville Stuart, there was two in 1884, there was two groups.

One was called the Montana Stockgrowers and one was called the Eastern Montana Stockgrowers.

And they both come about the same time in 1884, four or five years before statehood.

And they had a lot of fairly large operators and there was all kinds of people that were sort of borrowing cattle at the edges from these operations.

And there were several prominent, fairly wealthy people like Teddy Roosevelt and Marquis de Morès that wanted to form an organization to prevent cattle rustling and deal with predators.

And at that time they were worried about the Indians being hungry and taking their cattle after all the buffalo had been wiped out to get, persecute the Indians, you might say.

Anyway, they come together, one group in Helena, one in Mile City.

The one in Mile City was April 30th, 1884.

And so these two groups kind of communicated back and forth together.

And by 1885 they were one group and Granville Stuart was the first President of Montana Stockgrowers, okay.

And throughout all these years, the mission of the Stockgrowers is pretty much to be cattle raisers' and range land users' lobbying arm in Helena during state legislature.

And then there's all kinds of educational opportunities with Stockgrowers.

When we have our convention, we have what are called Cattlemen's Colleges, and I think this year we have 12 different Cattlemen's Colleges and you can go and attend an hour-long session and ask questions about the topic of your choice.

And we have a staff of six I think.

And so if you need help with land management issues, the Stockgrowers can be pretty active, we have a legal fund that we use to help people out if we feel that the members want to pursue that avenue of helping someone out, so.

- [Jack Riesselman] Okay, good organization.

- Yeah.

If you are interested, you could text beef, those four letters to this 855-965-4006.

You don't have to be a member, but you'll get a text back about once a week maybe for what the Stockgrowers think is going on in the cattle industry.

- Those meetings are really great meetings too.

They have a great trade show.

- Yeah.

- A lot of producers from around the state are there so you get a lot of producer interaction.

Yeah and they, you know, they really keep everybody up to speed what's going on with beef and the politics and everything else.

And just natural resource management even, so there's a lot of great stuff that happens there.

- [Lon Reukauf] Cheatgrass management.

- Yeah.

(group laughs) - [Jack Riesselman] Cheat, okay.

- And the Stockgrowers policy is has to be done by the members.

So I'm on the board of directors for the Stockgrowers and we meet five, six times a year.

But we cannot set down a policy that the members don't approve at the next annual convention.

So the board of directors and the leadership, president, vice president, second vice, we don't set policy.

We follow policy but we're not the drivers, the membership is.

- Okay, and that's good.

I like that.

I'm gonna come back to you in a minute 'cause I'm curious about these books.

Before that, Tim, what's a good way to manage Russian thistle post harvest?

Russian thistle's a big problem in the state and it's a good forage, I'm told.

- Oh really?

I didn't know that.

I only know it in its spiny ball form.

(group laughs) Once it gets a little bit bigger.

Yeah, after you take crops off a lot of times, especially winter wheat or some of spring wheat, you can get a big flush of Russian thistle or it may have been down there and then when you take it, take everything off with the combine, it opens up the space for it.

Post-harvest, a lot of people recommend a herbicide called Kochiavore.

It eats kochia and it's Bromoxynil, 2, 4-D and Fluroxypyr, that's one of them.

Another is just two, having 2, 4-D and Sharpen together, and Sharpen's used a lot in pulse crops.

If you have the next year in your pulse crops, Prowl and Outlook are, tend to be a really good combination for getting the kochia and the Russian thistle.

- All right, thank you, mm-hmm.

I always ask for comments.

- [Tim Seipel] That was a weed science question.

- Yes it was.

(group laughs) And that's why I like to call you a weed scientist.

- Yeah, there you go.

- Okay, you'll get a kick outta this one, Lon.

Lon, this caller from Glasgow says that in 1967 they went to a barn dance at the Reukauf Ranch the night before he went to Vietnam.

Do you still have barn dances?

- Yes we do.

(group laughs) You gotta bring your own booze.

(group laughs) - Sounds like a big party.

- It's fun.

- Okay, now you know the answer.

Another question.

From Missoula, just simple question and I don't know the answer to this either.

How long does a cow, an average cow, useful would be a way to put it?

How long can you use one?

- That's an interesting question.

And you know, we actually just did a research project on some of this looking at lifetime productivity of cattle and can we find some metrics within a cow herd that relate to how long that cow stays productive as a heifer into the system?

And one of the things that we found in, and this is kind of one of those no-brainer type things, is that as some of the heifer calves out of older cows in the herd stay in the herd longer, which you would think that those older cows in that group have essentially proven themselves in that environment and based off of the management that producer operates, and so that's one thing we found.

But I will say that research literature usually presents that you'll find about age eight or 10 that the productivity of that cow is gonna start declining.

That doesn't mean that she's not producing a calf, it's just maybe her calves aren't as big as they were when she was a four through six year old.

But I know there's folks out there that have 14 year old cows that are still in the herd and still producing calves every year, so it kind of depends on a producer by producer management on how they want to manage their calf crop and their genetics, but they can be in there for a while.

- So with calf or cow numbers down, I think they're starting to rebound a little bit if I, my information's correct, did we get rid of a lot of the older calves or cows?

- I think this year there was a significant part of Montana where we'd been hanging onto these old cows for a while and this grasshopper deal really hammered the older cows 'cause they're doing fine as long as conditions are pretty good.

But boy, when things get tough, your poor old cows really have trouble.

And so we had a, the highest failure to breed rate in our cow herd that we've ever had this fall.

And it was because we sold a significant number of cows that were from 10 to 13 and we didn't have many young cows that were dry.

But those older cows, when the going got tough, it was hard on them.

- Okay.

Those books, Lon, quickly tell us about those 'cause I got a bunch more questions coming up.

- I got these books off of C-SPAN.

I watch C-SPAN once in a while and they interviewed this author and there are two books.

"1491" is about what North and South America and some of the Old World were like before Columbus connected them.

And there's a term for that.

It's called the Columbian Exchange, what happened when Columbus connected the Old and New World and how things changed.

They're very extensive books.

And this Charles Mann, the author, just compiled a lot of information from and anthropologists about that.

And so a lot of people don't realize how numerous and how, what huge societies the Indigenous peoples in North and South America actually had.

- [Tim Seipel] Yeah.

- You know, it was accepted doctrine for a long time that the Indians, there was just a few Indians here and a few Indians there and, but that wasn't the way it was.

They were incredible societies.

And so I would urge everyone to read these books.

There's a lot of eye-opening stuff there that challenge orthodoxy that was in college in the '70s when I was there.

- I'll back up Lon on that one.

"1491" is one of my favorite books, actually, and partially because of the descriptions of using biochar in the Amazon, all about a lot of the agriculture that went on in the Americas.

You know, the Americas had amazing plants.

When we think of potatoes, tomatoes, chilies, corn, beans, those all were from the Americas and all domesticated by the Indigenous societies here.

- [Jack Riesselman] That's fascinating.

- [Tim Seipel] Yeah.

- [Jack Riesselman] I'm, I have not read it but now you've convinced me.

- [Lon Reukauf] Yeah.

- I'm gonna have to read that.

A couple other questions here.

A comment from Conrad, first.

A retired Stockgrowers thinks the group or thanks the group for the best show he has seen lately.

So that's this week's.

(group laughs) Thanks.

This is interesting.

Bozeman caller asked what Lon's and/or the general Stockgrowers' opinions are on populations of coyotes in Eastern Montana, more or less are about the same?

Do you have an issue with them?

- We do.

And this year was an excellent year for young pup coyotes.

The grasshopper thing is really good for the coyotes 'cause the young pups get all they want to eat of a really high protein food.

So the survival, and then coyote females respond in a big way to the food that they eat.

My son shot a female coyote off of a cow that was calving this spring and that female had seven pups inside of her.

And that's just, you know, in the past, two or three would be normal.

And so these coyotes, we've got a lot of wildlife, we've got a lot of birds.

The coyotes get to eat really well and so their reproduction amps up.

- Yeah, ramps up, I agree.

We have another question here similar to that but before we go to that from Billings, the caller wants to move some chokecherry trees.

When is the best time to transplant them, spring or fall?

- I like to say spring.

Spring is my favorite time to transplant.

You can do it in the fall.

If I'm doing it in the fall, I usually wait until they're dormant to do it 'cause those soil, the roots are still gonna grow before that soil is frozen.

But I like to air, aim for the spring.

I think it gives them the best shot for really establishing well during that year going into another winter.

So I would say wait until the soils warm up in the spring.

- Why can't we get more chokecherries?

We, I know they robins do a big number on 'em, but there's a worm that gets in 'em too.

- Yeah, there's a fly, there's a type of fly larvae that will attack them too.

And sometimes, you know, lots of critters will eat that fruit because it's tasty.

- [Jack Riesselman] It's tough to make chokecherry wine anymore, I know that.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- So I have chokecherries and I have one chokecherry tree and the birds pick it completely clean.

And the other chokecherry tree, they don't eat as much off of and I can't figure out, maybe it's the position of where it's at, something like that.

But we did make some nice chokecherry syrup this year, but I had to cut it with flathead cherries because that taste, the almond-y.

- [Jack Riesselman] Rosin-y, yeah.

- Yeah, was, it was pretty serious.

- Okay, a question from Facebook for Lon, what opportunities does he see for developing partnerships with Fish, Wildlife and Parks for the purpose of achieving shared objectives for rangeland and wildlife conservation?

You could talk for hours on that but time's getting low.

(group laughs) - We are one of the first participants in Fish, Wildlife and Parks Block Management Program.

And there's several ranches that are our neighbors and we have the largest block management area in the state.

And I believe there's nine or 10 ranches in this area and we all band together to negotiate with Fish, Wildlife and Parks about the compensation and the way the land's gonna be used.

And one of our deals is we are getting a big elk herd, believe it or not, and.

- [Jack Riesselman] You shouldn't say that here.

- I, we'd like to, I just wish that we didn't have so many.

And I was telling the panel earlier that they leave on Columbus Day and they come home for Thanksgiving and that's when the rifle season is.

And so one of the big problems that the Stockgrowers goes around and around with on this elk deal is how do you get the hunters where you need 'em to be to harvest the elk, you know?

'Cause a lot of people have an aversion to having unknown folks walking around with high powered rifles, and some people want to keep the elk for themselves.

And then those of us that have hay fields and stuff that the elk camp on, we'd like to run a lot more mule deer and less elk.

- [Jack Riesselman] Okay.

- And that, and we could run probably more antelope, but elk are just a large animal.

They eat a lot and they break a lot of things.

- I've been told that, no doubt about that.

Interesting question from Bozeman here.

I'll let Sam and/or Lon do this one.

Is there a breed of cattle that is better suited to finish on grass?

- I like these questions.

- I think so.

- But, and more than the breed, it's the frame size.

Larger animals, you know, do way better on corn and smaller framed animals will develop a fat cover because they reach the peak of their growth curve a little younger and a little smaller.

So we sell, our ranch sells some grass-fed hamburger and we use almost all young females that lose a calf.

And then about mid-July, we'll take those to a federally-inspected so we can sell packages of hamburger.

And, but I, your last show had Dave Mannix talking about their grass-fed program and he explained that really well, how they do that and how it takes a little longer and you gotta time the grass just right.

It's a lot to it.

- Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily say there's like a breed per se that would be better.

I mean there's certainly breeds you wouldn't want to try to grass.

- [Lon Reukauf] Yeah.

- Finish on.

But I think it has to do more, like you said, the frame size of those cattle, what their growth rates are, what kind of growth curve you're looking at.

Certainly there's some smaller breeds of cattle that would maybe be quicker on grass maybe, but yeah, mostly it's just a time thing, making sure that you have enough time on grass and time that grass just right to get your growth curves where you want 'em.

- Good answer.

I'm gonna come back to Lon in a minute.

Before we do that, I'm gonna plug one other thing here for MSU.

It's called the OLLI Program, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute here at If you're interested, people I believe over 55 qualify for this program.

They have some excellent, excellent opportunities for continuing education.

If you're interested, go online and look up OLLI.

It's a great program.

Environmental stewardship, great program that ranchers have.

We don't have a lot of time.

Tell us Lon, I know you were a winner in '19.

- 2016.

- 2016, Dave Mannix or Mannix Brother Ranch this year.

Tell us about that real briefly.

- This is a program that we put together to try to highlight stewards of the land that we think are doing a really positive job.

And the environmental stewardship program has a twofold deal.

We try to invite people to go on a in-person tour and we try to pick like media people, or this year we tried to focus them on dieticians, different people in different phases of education to let 'em see just exactly how your beef comes about and how it's grown.

And so the other half of that is we try to do all kinds of videos on the actual tour.

So if you aren't on the tour, you can access the video via YouTube or the MSGA website.

It's mtbeef.org, I think.

And so that's why the program was developed.

There's a small amount of checkoff money that helps fund this.

The majority of it comes from the Montana Stockgrowers Foundation, which is different than Montana Stockgrowers, and the GLCI kicks in a little money, so.

- You know, I got invited this year and I absolutely enjoyed it.

And I'm old enough that I can still learn a little bit here and there.

Actually, I learned a lot.

So that's great, folks, we're getting down to an end of another fun program.

(country music plays) I wanna thank Lon for coming over, Abi, Tim, and of course Sam.

I didn't pick on you very much tonight.

Usually the person next to me gets picked on.

Next week, our guest is gonna be Tara Mastel.

She's kind of a community development specialist working on rural Montana communities.

I think you'll enjoy that program a lot.

Thanks again, see you next week, goodnight.

- [Narrator] For more information and resources, visit Montanapbs.org/aglive.

(country music continues) - [Narrator 2] Montana Ag Live is made possible by the Montana Department of Agriculture, MSU Extension, the MSU Ag Experiment Stations of the College of Agriculture, the Montana Wheat & Barley Committee, Cashman Nursery & Landscaping, the Northern Pulse Growers Association and the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

(upbeat music plays)