Episode 5:

Breanne Tidemann

Transcript

Toban Dyck  00:03

This is the extensionist conversations with great thinkers in agriculture. I’m Toban Dyck,

Jay Whetter  00:08

and I’m Jay Whetter. Hey Toban.

Toban Dyck  00:12

Hey Jay.

Jay Whetter  00:13

Welcome to the podcast.

Toban Dyck  00:15

Always able to hang out with you today,

Jay Whetter  00:17

your shirt, I can’t even see you, like, the mid your torso is invisible, like, it’s just like a hands, a head and some black pants,

Toban Dyck  00:26

like the green screen thing, floating head, green

Jay Whetter  00:29

shirt on a green couch. It

Toban Dyck  00:31

was really, really smart. It’s

Jay Whetter  00:33

like, I turned into a chameleon. Hey, so remember way back near in episode one when you’re talking about camping, yes, and I said I didn’t like camping well, so I update. Well, I just think I needed to put that into a bit of context, because he kind of left me hanging there as like some, some strange person who doesn’t like hanging out in the wilds,

Toban Dyck  01:00

maybe getting listener back last

Jay Whetter  01:04

so many letters, exactly. But I I worked up in Dawson City, Yukon, when I was in university, and there’s not enough housing for the all the young people who go up there to work, and I think they’ve clamped down on this now, but we would just live in our tents out in the forest like not even in a campground. We would go across the Yukon River on the ferry, climb into our tents and then sleep. But it was light all night, because it’s so far north for sure. So I was in a tent, and it was 25 degrees and bright all night long, and I lived in there for four months, and that kind of finished me off. I’ve never really liked camping since then. But are you like a luxury camper? Are you like so suffering out in the

Toban Dyck  01:55

woods? So my wife, Jamie, and I, we’ve gone through a few iterations of our of our camping evolution. So we, you know, started out in our early 20s tenting, and then we graduated to a, I shouldn’t say graduated, because that actually isn’t the hierarchy or trajectory I want to, want to convey. But, like, we got a trailer, so a really small trailer, basically out of some guy’s shelter belt that he hadn’t used in decades. And got it for, like, I think it was, like 400 bucks. It was an old Tripoli probably weighed, like a million, not

Jay Whetter  02:30

a tent trailer, though, but, like, one of those, it was, it was, it

Toban Dyck  02:33

was, it was, like a bit bigger than, like, a bowler, yeah, but, but not fiberglass, right? Like steel, okay. So we captained that thing for a bit, and then we actually moved into a we got a bumper hitch and then a fifth wheel trailer. So we actually had, like, the full, like glam glamping set up. But from then, from from that point, we sold that, we had a seasonal site somewhere, did that whole thing, we sold that all and got really nice, like tent and like tent gear again, and we’ve, we haven’t looked back. So now we’re back into into the like you said, yeah,

Jay Whetter  03:11

it’s not graduating, because that would assume, like, you’re getting better and better all the time. That’s right deep. So you’ve gone away from the glam camping glamping, back to and maybe your tents kind of glam,

Toban Dyck  03:22

but so the industry is really strange, right? Like, it’s, it’s so gear oriented now that no matter what you do, whether it’s tenting or in a fifth wheel, like, there’s so much gear out there for you. So there’s really as much as I’d love to think, it’s kind of more rugged and, like rudimentary. It isn’t because it’s so gear driven. You know, me, I’m like, I’m like, I’m like, I love gear so I don’t know it’s a bit apples and oranges. I like the simplicity. I like not having to tow something, yeah, and I like not having to store a trailer on my farm yard somewhere where mice can get in. I love that. That’s a huge one. Yeah.

Jay Whetter  04:04

Then we’ll get into our conversation with Brianne Tidemann, which has absolutely nothing to do with camping at all, unless sleeping in a bed of weeds or something makes you think of camping entrepreneurs. We’re doing

Toban Dyck  04:27

extension because we

Jay Whetter  04:29

we value it. Farmers are still looking for information, even while governments have pulled away from the job of extension so that so, like you said, yeah, the needs there, and there’s fewer people actually doing extension, and so we thought we’d we’d jump into that, and we hope that sponsors recognize that the service that we’re offering and give us some

Toban Dyck  04:48

support. As much as we are doing that because, because we see a need and we have a passion for it, we’re also doing it because we see a need among some of the groups that could be sponsors, and we see that they are also looking for new ways. To extend. You

Jay Whetter  05:01

know, if anybody else wants to step forward, we’d welcome their support as well. Our guest today is Brianne Tidemann a research scientist with agriculture and agri food Canada out of Lacombe, Alberta. Hey, Brianne, hello.

Toban Dyck  05:18

Welcome to the extensionists. Yeah, we’re, well, how are you good? I said, I said, we’re, well, Jay, sorry, yeah, that’s okay. You can speak for me. I’m staying well,

Jay Whetter  05:31

yeah. Brianne, so you’ve got two kids,

Breanne Tidemann  05:34

I do, yes, two little boys, and

Jay Whetter  05:37

they’re, are you on a mat? Leave right now? Are you back at work?

Breanne Tidemann  05:40

I’m back at work. So I came back in. Let me get years and months straight. October of 22 So, okay, back for two years now.

Jay Whetter  05:47

Okay, I thought your kid was still under one the second. Oh

Breanne Tidemann  05:52

no. I’ve got a six year old and a three year old at this point. Six and

Jay Whetter  05:55

three. Okay, busy. Oh, busy and loud.

Toban Dyck  06:00

Two boys, you said, Uh huh, oh, wow.

Breanne Tidemann  06:04

It’s just as loud as you think it would be. Yeah, Brianne,

Jay Whetter  06:09

we’re going to talk about a lot about weeds, because that’s your yeah specialty, and your first love kids come second. But can you, can you tell us what? Yeah, circle

Toban Dyck  06:21

back to that one.

Jay Whetter  06:22

Give that one a few nods. That’s right. That’s right. Brian, can you tell us what your what your job is? What do you spend most of your time doing? Sure. So

Breanne Tidemann  06:31

as you said, I’m a research scientist with agriculture and agri food Canada, and the focus of my research program is weed management. So looking at managing weeds and agricultural crops. There’s not enough of us that I specialize in any particular crop, so I’m in cereals, canola, pulses, you name it. I’ve probably done a little bit of research in it, at least if it grows in Alberta, in this area. And similar story with weeds, I don’t focus on any one particular weed, so I work with wild oats and cleavers and hemp nettle and shepherds bursts. So far I have avoided Kochia, but I don’t know how much longer that’s going to last, but yeah, and looking at resistance, but also novel ways of managing weeds wherever we

Jay Whetter  07:11

can, right? So we’re going to get into that because, you know, the harvest weed seed destroyers and other things. And Kochia does come into that conversation to some extent, anyway, but I want to go back to something that you told me a couple years ago, and you said

Toban Dyck  07:29

she looks a little nervous. Yeah, it was

Jay Whetter  07:32

about the imposter syndrome. And I think that’s really interesting, because you’re, you’re very well educated, you know, weeds inside and out. You’re a prairie person. You know the prairies, but you came into a tough spot. You were replacing a guy, Neil Harker, who had been doing weeds research on the prairies for decades and was very well known. So I really you know, feel for you, because that’s not easy. But why did you why did you use the word imposter syndrome? What made you feel that way?

Breanne Tidemann  08:10

I mean, I think it’s something that’s quite common with research scientists or with with folks that work in academia, is there’s always someone smarter than you. There’s always someone that does the things that you do better than you do, and it’s very hard not to compare yourselves to them, but especially Yeah, coming in under Neil, under John O’Donovan, under Bob Blackshaw, under Linda Hall, like all these people that I studied under, they’re all superstars in my industry. They’re the big names. They’re the names everyone knew. They’re the ones that I cited 1800 times in my literature review as a grad student. And so it’s intimidating to be expected to walk into a room and know what Neil knew, because I don’t, I don’t have his experience. I don’t have his knowledge banks. I learned a lot from him, but I’m not him. I don’t know everything he knew, and there’s a lot that I’m going to still learn over my career. So it’s, it’s intimidating to try and step into a role like that, where there’s big expectations, and, you know, you don’t have all that knowledge. So,

Toban Dyck  09:07

so just before this interview, Brianne Jay told me that he was going to mention this, he’s going to talk about imposter syndrome. And he mentioned it as though it’s this kind of this thing, like this imposter syndrome thing. And I’m like, I read it was like, I’m like, Jay, are you telling me that you’ve never felt like an imposter or a fraud? I mean, you know, and then, like, fraud is interesting, because fraud is like, you know, criminal, right? But, but, like, but the imposter? I totally get it. I 100% get imposters. And you felt, did you felt? To complete my thought, I asked Jay, have you ever felt like an imposter? He says confidently, no. So I was like, Yeah, I know so,

Jay Whetter  09:51

so I told Toban. It’s because I wasn’t smart enough to realize I was Yeah. It’s. Like, it’s the Dunning Kruger. Yeah, this person doesn’t, isn’t smart enough to know that he’s in confidence.

Toban Dyck  10:11

But I totally get it. I mean, like, we occupy, like, kind of, you know, kind of soft science spaces in the ag sector, and I often feel like, like an imposter, like, I’ve, you know, just I, you know, what am I doing here? But so, yeah, no, I get, get it for sure. For sure.

Breanne Tidemann  10:27

There’s, there’s definitely times where you get an invitation to talk or something, and you look at the other list of people that are on there, and it’s like, oh, one of these things is not like the other. And that one is,

Toban Dyck  10:39

yeah, what could I possibly add to this? Look

Breanne Tidemann  10:41

at the guests that you’ve had already, and I’m like, How did I end up on here?

Toban Dyck  10:49

And who are we to talk to? Anybody? Well, and

Jay Whetter  10:51

I think that’s I was just a why I maybe didn’t feel it is because my job was to talk to people like Brianne and Neil and John O’Donovan, and so I didn’t, I didn’t need to, you know, be the expert. I was just talking to the experts. So that’s perhaps why I didn’t feel as strongly as, maybe, as someone who’s put on the spot like you were Brian, to be that voice, and all of a sudden you’re like, Wait a second. I just finished university last week, and now I’m the prairie expert on weed management. How did that happen? So I was never in that spot, and

Toban Dyck  11:31

I concluded the chat with Jay before this interview was was, I think that’s a really great trait. I think feeling like an imposter is a great thing, because it shows a level of, I mean, I know it’s it sucks for those who feel it, but yeah, it also speaks to a Duke and a level of reflection and introspection that I think only adds, adds value to whatever you bring to your humility,

Jay Whetter  11:54

to which absolutely, yeah, Yeah, no. I’d

Toban Dyck  11:58

certainly rather talk to somebody who has never mind. All right, should

Jay Whetter  12:12

we talk about weed management? Or have you got another thing you want to ask?

Toban Dyck  12:17

Maybe, yeah, I’m really curious about how you’ve managed to evade Kosha so far. Like, is this Kosha not exist in Lacombe, Alberta or so.

Breanne Tidemann  12:29

The funny thing is, when I started in Lacombe for my PhD, which would have been 2014 I was told by Neil, by the farmers here, we don’t, we don’t have Kochia here. It doesn’t grow this far north. We do not have it. So the last year that Neil was here, so he retired, that would have been 2017 we found kosher twice that year in Lacombe County, and Neil kind of laughed one, haha. Your problem. I’m leaving Bye. I found it substantially more times than that. Now, at this point, within the city of Lacombe alone, there is Kochia everywhere. I took a picture last year with one that was over six feet tall that I really wanted to bring back for a Christmas tree, but my technician said no, and then whatever landowner was cut it down before I could go hang ornaments on it to take a picture. So but the substantial amount of Kosher in the city, but it’s not established on our research station yet, and I don’t want that as my legacy, so I have not seated it onto the research station yet. So so far, I have not. That’s not to say I don’t talk about Kosha, or haven’t learned about Kochia because through Charles, I’ve learned plenty, but I haven’t done any research trials on Kosha on station yet. Just

Jay Whetter  13:49

to jump in, Charles, get it? Yeah, Charles, you mentioned you’re referencing Charles. Get us your research scientist associate or colleague at Lethbridge, right? Yes,

Breanne Tidemann  13:59

yeah. Who thinks far too much about kosher for for anyone’s liking, I think just from the fact that it surrounds him at all times. Yeah, right, but yeah, he considering the location of where it is in Lacombe, which is directly to the west of our research farm fields. And we tend to get westerly winds, so I don’t think it’s too many years before I’ll be saying, Yeah, okay, Charles, put me on the put me on the proposal. It’s here now, but yeah, so far I have evaded it

Jay Whetter  14:28

those six foot kosher plants tumbling through the countryside, west, east, yeah, definitely going to roll through the research station at some point. So why do you think it’s increasing? Though it’s and I know, mean, there’s lots of resistance, but is that the factor, or is it adapting? Or what’s going on?

Breanne Tidemann  14:48

Resistance is part of it, climate change, or just environment is part of it, however you want to look at it. I mean, the droughts the last couple years in this area are key weather for what Kochia likes, hot and dry. Where the crops are suffering and Kosha does not. You can get some pretty healthy Kochia if, if you have any seeds there, I think there’s been introductions. There’s a few different areas where, where you seem to find it, where it’s like, okay, there’s, there’s obvious points of introduction happening here, like

Jay Whetter  15:17

in in hay, or like feed, or find it a lot along,

Breanne Tidemann  15:21

you know thing, areas like railroad, railroads, oh, yeah, or where there’s been construction, where there’s been any topsoil brought in quite often that’s got kosher in it. So if you see road construction and they build a new Meridian quite often, you’ll see kosher pop up in there. Yeah, oil leases is, is another area that we’ve seen, some introductions, but we’ve found Kochia documented Kochia as far north as the peace region, yeah, yeah, healthy, producing numerous 1000s of seeds. We’re

Jay Whetter  15:50

not buying Kochia as an ornamental anymore, right? Which I think is maybe one of the big reasons why it showed up here is people used to buy seed and put it in their gardens. That true? Yeah, yeah,

Breanne Tidemann  16:00

that’s true. I have slides where it’s the Kochia seed packet for 10 cents.

Toban Dyck  16:06

Wow, wow, wow. Is, is it a unique opportunity right now, where you are, because kosher isn’t so prevalent, to kind of, to kind of implement some seed, some weed management strategies to slow its introduction, ideally,

Breanne Tidemann  16:21

yes, but I’m having some trouble convincing people that it’s actually here at the same time, I’ve got folks going, Well, no, I farmed here for 30 years. We don’t have Kochia here. And I’m like, but really we do. I promise it really is around here. So it’s, it’s taking people a little bit by surprise, even though I’m trying to wave red flags around it, but people are very surprised to hear sometimes that we’ve got, we’ve got Kosha in the county. So

Toban Dyck  16:46

what are some of those strategies that you’d like, you’d like to extend to growers? Well,

Breanne Tidemann  16:52

I mean, if you’re finding it, getting it out as soon as possible and not letting it establish, would be number one, and it’s, it’s what we’ve seen with things like Palmer in Manitoba too, right? Palmer Amaranth was found in Manitoba in only a single county, and as far as we know, it’s not gone any further, because it was not allowed to go to seed that year, and it was bagged into garbage bags, and not just pulled and left in the field or anything like that, right? So if you’re noticing it, managing it right away is really, really key, but then also paying attention to the southern Alberta strategies too, right?

Jay Whetter  17:26

Brianne, there’s this notion that, I mean, I shouldn’t say it’s a notion, but these practices don’t work. Like, yeah, you tell me to do this, but it’s just gonna end up being there anyway. But you’re saying that in the case of of a truly novel weed, or uncommon weed, like Palmer Amaranth or kosher at your research station that that one act of you know, if you find it, cut it down, bag, it, burn it, whatever, so that it doesn’t set seed. That actually is effective.

Breanne Tidemann  17:56

It can be. But you also need to identify the source of introduction to because if it got there once, it’s probably going to come again. So where did it come from? And how do you actually stop that introduction then too, I think is really important. If you never have any idea how it got there, where do you watch?

Toban Dyck  18:16

What are the most what are some of the more you know, I farm in southern Manitoba. I’m around a lot of farmers and a lot of discussions about weeds and weed management. And I’m guessing you could probably guess what some of those discussions are like. But like, what do you find are they are some of the biggest challenges in and not to put you on the spot or get you to say something you don’t want to say, but just the weed management extension. What are some of the biggest challenges, biggest messages to get through to growers?

Breanne Tidemann  18:47

I think the biggest challenge that we have is the understanding that there’s not a new herbicide coming that’s going to solve everything we’ve we’ve kind of always had that new herbicide come, like when we’re struggling with wild oats, then we had the group one herbicides, and when we had group one resistance, then we had the group two herbicides, and then we had the roundup ready crops, which helped deal with the group one and two resistance to an extent. And so there’s kind of this mindset that, well, Something’s coming. It’s got to be in the pipeline. Something’s coming, and it’ll fix our problem. But getting folks to understand that you’re not going to spray your way out of herbicide resistance. All that a new herbicide does is add selection pressure for resistance to that new herbicide, and

Jay Whetter  19:30

you end up with a stacked weeds with stacked resistance. Yeah, yeah. So that’s

Breanne Tidemann  19:36

where you know you don’t just have group one resistant Wild Oat. Now you have group one and two resistant Wild Oat, and possibly group one two and eight resistant Wild Oat. And you see the same thing in kosher. We have group two resistance, we’ll use the we’ll use Roundup. Well, now we have group two and group nine resistance, well, we’ll use Dicamba. Well, now we’ve got Dicamba resistance. Roxburgh, oh, we got that too, group 14. Oh, look, here’s resistance, right? It’s just a treadmill, yeah. So if all. You’re doing is relying on the next new product. You’re just on the herbicide treadmill, and you’re running and running and running to

Jay Whetter  20:05

stay in place. Is that message getting through now? Maybe more than than it has in the in the past number of decades, in terms of these integrated weed management practices. Are you seeing increased adoption? I

Breanne Tidemann  20:17

don’t know if we’re at the point of adoption yet. I would say we’re at the point where I am very disappointing as a speaker when I come out and say, I don’t have a brand new herbicide solution, and there’s probably not one coming. So there’s a lot of just utter disappointment after I talk, I think at that point, because they’re hoping I’m going to come out with the new solution, I would say there’s more awareness now of integrated weed management and some, I guess, grudging acceptance that we really are going to have to diversify into a lot of these other areas, and I think it depends a bit on their experience. If herbicide resistant wild oats or Kochia are very common on a farm, those are the producers that are a lot more open to talking integrated weed management or novel strategies versus those that are, you know, I don’t have that issue yet.

Jay Whetter  20:59

I gave you some not quite grief, but it was on a social media post and about how, how many farmers were using harvest weed seed destroyers, because I know you’ve done some research on that, and it can be effective in certain scenarios, which we’ll get to, but I think I was saying, yeah, there’s only, there’s only, like, six farmers who have these. Like, it’s not very much in the way of adoption. And you’re like, well, actually, the fact that there are six now is progress. So yeah. So instead of just talking about these machines, you’re starting to see them show up on farm, yeah.

Breanne Tidemann  21:36

And I mean, that’s been really exciting for me, because I started some of that work as as a PhD student, and there were none in Canada. There was zero. The the only one thinking or really working on them was me. So it wasn’t a very big audience. When I’m talking to farmers about harvest, we see control. And they’re like, what is that? I don’t I’m not interested. Move along. Kind of thing where now it’s like, oh, okay, I’ve heard of these things. Tell me more. How do they work? When will they work? What do they cost? That kind of question. So there’s actual interest in them from the side of adoption, instead of just, you know, the the pie in the sky weed control technique that might come down and might help us. So that’s been exciting for me to see it actually start showing up on farms where, you know, we’ve got, I, there’s an estimated 30 to 35 mills in use after this harvest, which is a whole lot more than zero. So I’m happy. So

Jay Whetter  22:28

you’re up, okay, we’re up to 30 to 35 okay, so it’s more than six, yeah, 30 to 35

Breanne Tidemann  22:33

mils. So the the survey that I did was the one that we had engaged on, I think, was after a survey that I did of early adopters, and there was about 10 farmers that responded, and they accounted for about 18 of the mills. So it was a small sample size, but it’s a small sample size to pull from, so it’s hard to get in touch with everyone that uses them. You

Jay Whetter  22:53

call them Mills because they actually are, like hammer Mills, right there, yeah.

Breanne Tidemann  22:57

So when we started the work, we always call them seed destructors, yeah, but that’s really a brand name. So the integrated Harrington Seed Destructor, the ihsd is a brand name. You’ve also got the seed terminators, the seed control units, and the weed hogs, all different kinds of what we call impact mills. And

Jay Whetter  23:16

so you said the three questions you often get, or how, how do they work? Maybe, when, when to use them, and how much do they cost? Can Can we quickly go through those? You want to start with the

Breanne Tidemann  23:26

cost, sure. Yeah, the wheat seeds that are still in the field, when you go through with a combine harvester, are also going to go into the combine and most of the time they get, you know, through the threshing process, through the soiling process, they’re going to end up in the chaff. Now, if you have something like wild and oat and wheat, yes, some will go into the grain tank, but generally where you see them expelled from the combine is in the chaff. And all that does, since we have great spreaders and things on our combines now, is it essentially broadcast seeds, those weed seeds, back onto the field. So we’re nicely distributing them, so they don’t have a lot of competition, and they all have fair space to grow next year. So the impact mills and harvest weed seed control in general, tries to do something to that chaff stream to stop those weed seeds from growing. So the impact mill, or the different impact Mills, takes that chaff and processes it, for lack of another word, into small, teeny, tiny, small bits. It beats the heck out of it so that every the weed seeds are broken up into small pieces that won’t grow. And

Jay Whetter  24:27

what weeds or are we targeting?

Breanne Tidemann  24:30

So the weeds that we’re targeting are the ones that still have seeds on them at harvest. So volunteer, canola, great. Target, cleavers, great. Target, hemp, nettle, great target. Wild Oat, not such a good target because it drops a lot of its seeds before we actually get in to harvest the crop, something like annual South thistle, where those seeds are attached to the little fuzz that blows away in the wind. Not such a good target because it floats away when we hit it with the combine. I. Um, not that we’ve tried to chase it or anything, but yeah, some of those things are our challenges. So we’re looking at the the weeds that still have seeds on them when you go in with

Jay Whetter  25:07

COVID. Did you? I’m just picturing you chasing those South thistle,

Toban Dyck  25:15

chasing a bubble or something like that.

Breanne Tidemann  25:17

I haven’t done it very much with South thistle. We admitted defeat on those ones, pretty good. But even trying to measure seed retention on some of the other ones, where you have a very light paper bag and you get a dust devil come through, those do go flying across the trial area and your technician laughs while you scramble about madly trying to save them,

Jay Whetter  25:35

chasing a paper bag across the countryside. Because

Breanne Tidemann  25:39

I really need to know how many seats are in there. Yep.

Toban Dyck  25:43

Like, I’ve heard a lot about, like, integrated weed management and talking about kind of, you know, these kinds of discussions around weeds, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard it explicitly stated that there is no new herbicide coming that’s going to change. And I could see, like, the silver bullet approach is right, like, we’re not going to get another round up that’s going to just, just change the the world. And I think where I’m going at with this is, I do think, I think that’s a very interesting way to put it, because I do think there’s a lot of sentiment out there that still is subconsciously believing that they don’t need to pay attention to these things, because there is going to be that silver bullet down the pipe. And I think I would bet I’d place money on the fact that a lot of those people don’t even know if that’s what they’re thinking or believing, but they’re just used to being dependent on it, and they just have confidence that’ll that will always be and that these other things are fads that will just kind of continue in the periphery. But I think, I think it’s a strong message. I think that’s a really strong way of putting it.

Breanne Tidemann  26:52

You know, glyphosate did substantially change our weed management. It did, but even it was not a silver bullet. If you you know, look in the rear view mirror, we have resistance to glyphosate. It wasn’t the silver bullet that we thought it was at the time. It just wasn’t. And so I think those of us that have come up sort of through that era of of Weed Science, and we’re looking in the rear view mirror at glyphosate going we don’t want to make that mistake. We don’t want to start promising things that then break right, because that did happen to an extent with glyphosate. There’s articles that say there will never be resistance, and yeah, there is the weeds responded in a way we hadn’t seen before. My colleague joy at North Dakota State University, I just did a podcast with him, their war against weed pods, war against weeds podcast. And they have a tagline on their podcast that I absolutely adore, and I’ve started using it this extension season. Silver Bullets are for werewolves, not

Toban Dyck  27:55

weeds. Nice. I like it.

Breanne Tidemann  27:58

It just says it so clearly that, yeah, you know, we’re not trying to solve herbicide resistance at this point. We’re trying to manage it. It’s a different perspective, and

Toban Dyck  28:08

it’s spooky season. So talking about werewolves is very fitting. Perfect, perfect.

Jay Whetter  28:14

Brianne. We didn’t, we didn’t answer the question about the cost of these harvest weed seed distorts before we get too far away from that one. I just wanted to bring it back. Bring it back to that. Thank

Breanne Tidemann  28:23

you for looping me back to that. By and large. I mean, there’s variation between the brands. Yada yada yada. About 100 grand for a wheat mill to be installed on a combine. Some of the there is a newer brand that’s just starting to be commercialized that is meant for smaller class combines, which I believe will end up being a little bit less, but I’m not 100% on that. And then there’s some other, I guess, innovation happening in that space, where they’re they’re looking to be a better fit for smaller class combines that also hope to bring that price point down as well.

Jay Whetter  29:00

And it sounds like a lot, but a sprayer is 700,000 or more now. A combine is a million dollars. Managing weeds is an expense, and this is maybe, you know, for the life of the machine might not be actually that expensive, even though the tick, the sticker shock, might be up there, yeah, well, I

Breanne Tidemann  29:25

mean, it depends how many acres you’re you’re running that combine on too. So you spend 100 grand. But if it’s over 2000 acres, or if it’s over 8000 acres, makes a big difference for your dollars per acre in terms of weed management, when you compare it to a herbicide, right? Because that’s, that’s where the main comparison comes in is, well, it only cost me whatever, 1012, bucks an acre for my weed management program right now. So 100,000 is ridiculous. Well, how many acres is that 100,000 being spread over? Though? Yeah, that changes that price tag significantly. Yeah, yeah. But that I get a lot of. What is the dollars per it’s like, well, how many acres do you farm? How many combines Do you run like? It’s, it’s not an answer. I can just give you. It’s, it’s farm specific,

Jay Whetter  30:07

yeah, but if a combine is doing three to 5000 acres a year, and the thing lasts, even if it lasts five years, so that’s 2515 to 25,000 acres per mill. So that’s what for four to $6 an acre for another weed management approach, yeah,

Toban Dyck  30:30

yeah, yeah, yeah. It becomes so daunting as a, as a, as a farmer, to, like, calculate all these kind of ROIs on these different, yeah, these different techniques, right? Do you think? And Jay and I were chatting earlier too. It’s, you know, I have a field that has tons and tons of kosher, like, just, it’s a, it was past your land for for a number of years, for decades. And I, you know, I broke it probably six or seven years ago, maybe, maybe longer. And, yeah, it has, it has a whole bunch of Kosher that we’re trying to kind of manage. And you think about kind of doing some strategies, or implementing some strategies, and it becomes, it’s difficult to invest in those strategies now, knowing that that that soil bank is just full of Kosher seats. So it’s like, what? What difference am I going to make implementing anything on that piece? You know? I mean, it’s, as much as it’s kind of a fatalistic question, it’s also a real one, like is, with putting that on my combine, would I see what I see change in five years? You know, I don’t know.

Breanne Tidemann  31:42

And you’re more likely to see change with something like Kochia that has a shorter seed bank. If you can prevent those seed bank inputs year over year, it might only take a couple years something like Wild Oat, it’s going to take a lot longer, because that seed bank lasts so much longer. And so that’s definitely part of the challenge as well. And part of the messaging is, do not put this thing on and expect to have no weeds next year. That’s that’s not how this works. It’s a long term investment. It’s a long term plan. But you’re right. It dissuades people right off the hop, because it’s like, well, I’m not going to see that ROI in the next two, three years, but I just spent all this money. Yeah, yeah. Maybe I’ll just add another herbicide or two in the tank instead that I can see those weeds dying when I spray them. It’s a visual thing that you can see them die, dead. Great, perfect. I did what I wanted to do, whereas the seed bank is this mysterious underground thing that we can’t see and we can’t tell if we’re having an effect for, you know, 567, years,

Toban Dyck  32:40

yeah, yeah. And that’s a real that’s a hard message to get this again for sure. Yeah, no, yeah,

Jay Whetter  32:45

yeah. ABN, before we talked, I was reading some some notes about you, and it was said that you used the phrase that weeds punk us. Oh, yeah, what? What do you mean by that,

Breanne Tidemann  33:00

I did say that, didn’t I,

Jay Whetter  33:05

you know, I think I’m just thinking we’re trying to go back in history

Breanne Tidemann  33:08

over and over again. We think we’ve got weeds figured out. We’ve got this new herbicide, we’ve got this new solution. We have solved the problem of weeds. And then, without fail, the weeds populations respond in some way to that selection pressure that we just did not expect. So glyphosate resistance is sort of the obvious example for me. You know, we had to work really hard to develop Roundup Ready crops to find a mutation in that enzyme and add detoxifying agents that would allow that plant to survive with that mutation, which is why it was thought that glyphosate resistance would be impossible, and then it’s sort of like the weeds went, Haha, suckers, we’ll just make more of the enzyme, then we won’t bother with the mutation. We’ll just make more of it, and look, you still can’t kill us. So it’s every Yes, I anthropomorphize weeds in my head.

Toban Dyck  33:57

I love it. I love it. It’s great. They’re right for I was gonna, yeah,

Breanne Tidemann  34:05

everyone goes weeds will never be resistant to X, Y or Z. And I’m like, I really wish we’d quit saying that, because it seems like every time we say that, Mother Nature finds a way, and look, we have some kind of evasion of that resistance that

Jay Whetter  34:20

was the anthropomorphization of weeds. I’m just thinking of weeds as a bunch of grade nine boys or something like, Haha, yeah, yeah, you’ve

Toban Dyck  34:31

been punked, yeah. I love it. It does. It’s true, it’s true. I love it. I love it. And

Breanne Tidemann  34:37

I mean, it’s, it’s again, as you look back over history, I mean, we had weeds start mimicking crops to evade hand weeding, right? So it’s when people go, Oh, you’ll never get resistance to that. I’m like, I really wish we’d just not say that, because some way, somehow there’s a response, and it might be, yes, you’ve fully controlled Kosha, but oh, look now you have downy bro, like it might not be with. In that species, but within the weed populations and within the communities, something will respond. You’re not going to eliminate weeds altogether.

Jay Whetter  35:07

You need to tell us more about the weed that evolved to look like the crops to sidestep hand weeding. Can you get Can you tell us more about that? That’s pretty amazing.

Breanne Tidemann  35:17

This was a study that came out in the 50s, I think by Barrett at all. It’s an it’s an old study where they were managing barnyard grass in rice with hand weeding because they had, I think they had herbicide resistance, or for whatever reason, there wasn’t herbicides that they could apply. And over time, what they ended up selecting for was barnyard grass that mimicked the phenotype of rice, so you could no longer tell what was barnyard grass and what was rice, so you couldn’t hand weed it out. So there’s, actually, there’s work happening right now by Guy Coleman in I think he’s over in Denmark now, doing a postdoc where he’s looking at whether or not we’ll see a similar kind of response from weeds, in response to artificial intelligence and the recognition the weed recognition software where it’s, you know, the cameras are identifying this is weed and this is crop, if you will, not end up selecting for the weed that mimics the crop and the the AI algorithm can no longer tell it apart. Oh,

Jay Whetter  36:16

that’s amazing. Well, I think of this evolution as happening over pumpkin Yeah, it’s happening over 1000s of years, but it seems like this can happen within a couple of weed generations, within a couple of years. Is that possible? Depending

Breanne Tidemann  36:32

how genetically diverse the weed is and how much diversity there is, it can happen fairly quickly. Again, I think the work that guy’s doing, he’s on on whatever it’s called now, Twitter. X, you know what? I mean, he’s on social media, and he’s got, I think the pictures are from the second or third generation of rye grass that he’s working with. And you can already see divergent phonologies just from a couple generations. No, that’s where one is growing very upright and one is not. It’s It’s crazy. Well,

Jay Whetter  37:00

if those mutations are in the population, and your AI or your robot is taking out all the ones that that it’s thinking it needs to take out, then those ones, those mutations, set seed and pretty rapidly become the population. Yeah, okay, I can see how that does happen faster, yep, especially

Breanne Tidemann  37:19

if it’s a dominant biotype, right? So you only need one copy of the gene. If it’s an out crossing weed, it it spreads really quickly. That’s why we see resistance spread so fast in Kochia, is it shares those genes very quickly with other plants, and it’s a dominant gene, so you only need one copy of the gene, and you’re off to the races kind of thing. So it’s, it’s, you see a lot of differences between, say, how kosher spreads with resistance versus wild oats, and that goes back to their biology. So

Toban Dyck  37:49

if you could build kind of one, you know, you had your way, and there was, like, you say, my farm, I’m like, Brianne, take control of the weeds in my farm without knowing the specific weed pressures that I that I face. What? What is that? What does that ideal strategy look like for for a farmer, for for an operation?

Breanne Tidemann  38:15

Such a hard question.

Toban Dyck  38:16

You got five seconds. No, just kidding,

Breanne Tidemann  38:20

it’d be rotationally diverse, so there’d be false cereals or perennials in there. I’d have increased seeding rates. Herbicides would still be included. I’d be looking either on farm or to a neighbor for livestock, and incorporating that in combination with perennials, or to make sure there’s a market for some of those perennials or silages. Yeah, using competitive crops where possible. And the one that I think sometimes gets missed is just using all the good agronomic recommendations, seeding rates, seeding, depth, seeding, speed, seeding, date, your management of your insects and your diseases, all of that plays into your weeds too, right? If you have a crop that’s weakened by, you know we had here on station, we had really severe pea leaf weevil in some of our pea plots. Well, they knocked that crop back enough that our cleavers took off because the crop was so injured by the insect. So there’s all those interactions to take into account too. Yeah,

Toban Dyck  39:16

that that is, that is interesting. So then a grower should kind of just stay up to date on on all those recommendations from their commodity group or agronomists and and factor that all in.

Breanne Tidemann  39:26

It’s really important because if your crop is not competitive, you’ve already missed your most important tool, right? That’s, that’s the most simple, basic one is choosing a competitive crop. And if your crop is not competitive, for whatever reason, you seeded your canola three inches deep. Or, you know, you seeded it before, when the soil was still cold, or what have you, you’ve already lost that first tool.

Toban Dyck  39:48

Yeah, that is, that’s a good reminder, for sure. Yeah,

Jay Whetter  39:52

Brianne, you mentioned X earlier. You’re pretty active on x. Is that? Is that your favorite social media still? Or which which ones do you use?

Breanne Tidemann  40:01

I use a lot of them. I find that still where I get the most interaction with the ag industry, particularly with farmers or agronomists, that seems to be where I can engage with them the most. So that’s probably still the one I use the most. But I also use LinkedIn and Instagram, and I’m also on blue sky, so I’m almost everywhere,

Jay Whetter  40:24

all right. So on, on X, yes, you have weed ID Wednesday, I do, and that what would encourage you to start that.

Toban Dyck  40:36

So on, what tool? What is it? What

Jay Whetter  40:38

is it? Yeah, okay, sure. What is weed ID Wednesday?

Breanne Tidemann  40:42

Weed ID Wednesday? It’s, it’s a weekly thing where I post a picture, usually of a mystery weed. Sometimes it’s, I’ll tell you what the weed is and ask for characteristics or some spin on it. But usually it’s a picture of a weed, and the goal is to guess what weed it is based on, on the picture, or what species sometimes, sometimes it’s a, you know, there’s two or three species in the picture, and tell me what they are. It started, actually during the pandemic, I was at home, working at home, and wandered out into my yard, and I happened to have wild buckwheat and lamb’s quarters growing side by side in my yard, and they’re ones that people often struggle to tell apart, so I took pictures of them side by side, and it was a Wednesday, so I posted it as a weed ID Wednesday, and sort of challenged people to tell it apart. And then it was sort of like, Yay, let’s do this again next week. And I went, Oh, I started something. Okay. So the first year, it was only through the field season, and then it kind of morphed into through the winter, and then I do weed seeds, and I do dead weed skeletons, and it just kind of whatever I find that kind of makes sense. It’s mostly weekly, except for when it’s not because I forget or I get busy with something. It’s an attempt to be weekly, yeah,

Jay Whetter  42:00

but as a tool to to extend weed management, yeah, I think you have fun with it. You also get some immediate interaction. Is it effective?

Breanne Tidemann  42:12

I don’t know. Um, I really don’t know. It seems to get a lot of interaction. If nothing else, people seem to find me, which sometimes then leads to follow up questions, or, you know, additional follows. So then I just get a bit of a wider audience to talk about weeds to. I would say one thing that it’s driven is I have a lot more either direct messages or emails come in with people going, what is this? What am I dealing with? Here’s here’s these pictures, here’s where I am. What the heck is this thing which has led to me recruiting some of the botany folks in in a Canada quite quickly, going help. I don’t know what the heck this is. I’ve never seen it before. Help me figure out what this is. So I think that’s been beneficial. And it’s just kind of, in some ways, helped get my name out a little bit. There’s a lot of people, oh, you’re that we girl on Twitter. Yep, that’s me. That would be me sort of thing. And so I get questions that way, because they know I’m that weed girl on Twitter, and I’ve got a weed question, so I’ll go ask her. So

Jay Whetter  43:10

Right? Well, I’ve been going back to our conversation earlier about identifying potentially quite serious weeds before they take a hold in a field. I mean, that kind of service that you’re offering where farmers can D or agronomists can DM you with a with a weed question, more or less anonymously. They don’t have to post it on social media for everybody to see. But mean, there may be cases where identifying that weed early is really important, and so you’re mean, you’re offering one way for them to do that. And

Breanne Tidemann  43:44

I do not always have an answer, even with the botany folks there, sometimes we’re like, we don’t not know what that is. We need a picture of the flower, or we need a picture of this characteristic, or what have you. And sometimes they’re able to go back, and sometimes they’re not, but we do what we can. And mean

Jay Whetter  43:59

from from weed management perspective, then, does that really get you curious? If the botanist can’t identify a weed, then maybe this is something to go take a look at. Not to say that’s what. That’s within your mandate, but maybe you can find the people who can head out there and do that.

Breanne Tidemann  44:16

I have learned so many new weeds from people sending them to me that I have just never seen before, some that I go back and it’s like, oh, that’s a native who knew. Like, I it’s not one we typically see around here, but it does help me also get a feel for, you know, I’ve had quite a few is this Kosha questions come in and from far north of normal kosher realms, and I’m like, where are you again? Like, what counts are you in? Because, yeah, we need to talk. Or it’s like, Nope, it’s not, don’t worry. That’s Wormwood, not a big deal. Not that it’s not a big deal. But it’s not Kochia. You don’t have to freak out about it being kosher kind of thing. So it does help that way for me to keep a bit of a finger on the pulse of what people are seeing and what they’re dealing. With. And I’d say weed ID Wednesday also has helped with that. I didn’t realize how many people absolutely detest purslane until I posted that one. I more interaction than I’ve ever had before, mostly from people with gardens going, I hate that thing. It doesn’t ever die. Kosher gets quite a reaction. Field, horse tail. Oh, man, does that one get a reaction? Because it gives me areas of like, okay, these are sore spots for people.

Toban Dyck  45:27

This weed celebrities, yeah, purslane.

Jay Whetter  45:30

When I grew up in southwest Manitoba, and we called it portulaca. I don’t know whether that was the bright name for it, right, but it’s funny how weeds have different names in different names in different regions, different provinces. So that must be a bit of a challenge, too. Like, what are you talking about?

Breanne Tidemann  45:46

Yeah, it gets interesting because I’ll also have folks from Australia, or I had one from Greece at one point, you know, weighing in, I had wild baby’s breath on there, and they’re like, that is not a weed. Like, we cultivate that. I’m like, Yes, but here it is actually a wild, invasive, like, it is actually a problem. So it’s, it’s interesting that way, because very different perspectives. And, yeah, the number of names people send in, I’m like that. That’s a new one. Okay, yes, sure. I think we’re talking about the same thing so

Toban Dyck  46:21

deep a sense of, like, the like, the history of weeds, like, I think in the notes here, it says you’re a bit of a nerd in high school, so I’m gonna, I’m gonna love nerds, yeah, I think that’d be interesting. Is that you have a sense of like, kind of, most of the weeds that you deal with, like, how they came and when they came, and kind of their, their trajectory,

Breanne Tidemann  46:49

some of them, it’s something I’d love to sit down and read the history of weeds, but I just haven’t had time to really do it. But in in our biology of Canadian weeds series, which is a series through Canadian Journal, Canadian Journal of plant science. There is a section on the history of each of those weeds that are covered in those articles, where they came from, how they potentially got here, that kind of thing. I also through the Canadian Weed Science Society. I host the archives here in Lacombe, and so we’ve done a lot of sorting of the archives over the last couple of years, and man, is there some cool stuff in there. Our first national meeting on on weeds was held in 1929 Wow, back in Edmonton, and it was called the destruction of weeds by chemical means, which I absolutely love. It again, going back to that whole eliminating versus managing perspective shift that we’ve had, I think, over the years,

Jay Whetter  47:40

what’s your favorite weed?

Breanne Tidemann  47:42

Hello, my I have my favorite weed is also my least favorite weed all at the same time, and that would be cleavers or false cleavers.

Jay Whetter  47:51

Oh, yeah, you’ve you’ve had a real hate on for cleavers for as long as I’ve known you. But I love this too, because they’re so cool. They are different looking.

Breanne Tidemann  48:00

Why are they cool? They’re sticky. So they’ve got little Velcro, like hooks on them, so the plants stick to you, but so do the seeds. So I just think they’re they’re fascinating. They’re they grow differently. They don’t respond to our management in the same kind of way, because they can climb and then they stick to things. And so they’re really cool weed that way. And I like them, but they are also horrendous to work with.

Jay Whetter  48:23

Square stem.

Breanne Tidemann  48:24

Is that square stem? Yep.

Jay Whetter  48:26

But are they sticky because of little, tiny hairs or burrs? Are they sticky because there’s because of some sap or something?

Breanne Tidemann  48:34

No, it’s the little hairs on them. Yeah. So they, but they, they will stick to your skin, and then when you peel them off, then your skin welts and it leaves little scratches. And if you have sunscreen or bug spray on them, and that gets in the scratches, it’s great fun. That’s why you love them. I tried really hard to get them out of my PhD project. I kept leaving them off the target weed list, and Linda and Neil, who are my co supervisors, kept putting them back on, and I would take them off and they’d put them back on, and they won. Yeah, now I have my own projects on them, which my technicians do not always appreciate, but

Jay Whetter  49:12

like, really, like morbid, like, where you’re like, doing really nasty experiments on them to get revenge.

Toban Dyck  49:22

No, I I

Breanne Tidemann  49:27

mean, I’ve, I’ve often said at extension talks that we’d scientists are slightly diabolical, because we typically plant our weeds to try and kill them, so you’re not far off. Jay, yeah, we do do things like that.

Jay Whetter  49:44

You have a favorite weed Toban.

Toban Dyck  49:46

I mean, it’s, it’s going to be kosher just because it’s the same kind of it’s love and it’s hate, and it’s just the thing that I have strong feelings towards and takes up a lot of my time. So it’d be kosher. Yeah, yeah. I feel like it’s a similar relationship between Brianne and Cleaver, like it’s like a lot of hate, yeah, yeah. What about your stick? Yeah? Oh,

Jay Whetter  50:11

well. The only thing that comes to mind is when I was a kid in the garden that was overrun by French weed. And I’m sorry to all French people, but that’s what they call it. That’s what we called it. It has a different name. I can’t remember what it is. I don’t know we call it French weed. I want to say, go look it up. Yeah, it’s, it’s kind of a tall weed, and it’s got, I think the seeds are kind of in that they’ve got kind of a flat, almost translucent membrane around them, and they have, like a fairly busy panicle. And they’re round seed within a and that’s like a dime sized, almost translucent circle with the seed in the middle. And they probably grow two feet tall, up to two feet tall. Anyway, our garden was, was, well, this side garden that mom didn’t plant any vegetables in was full of them. And so as kids, we would kind of rip out little pathways and drive our Tonka Trucks in there. So that’s what very nice as a bizarre story about why that’s my favorite weed. I’m gonna have to look that up and we’ll, we’ll share with the actual Latin name and what’s called in Alberta, because I know it does have a different name, and world is cut it entirely.

Toban Dyck  51:25

Nobody would ask Jay what his weed

Jay Whetter  51:26

is. Jay talking about playing with his trucks. Let’s just chop

Toban Dyck  51:34

so. Bria, when? When did you quit feeling like an imposter? I’ll let you know if it ever happens. The right answer, right about now, talking to these two idiots, pretty smart. No, this has been great. It

Jay Whetter  51:56

has Brianna, is there anything that you had on your list that you really wanted to share with us that we didn’t get around to talking about. I

Breanne Tidemann  52:05

guess my only other thing is that I took a sharp turn into agriculture with no intention of ever working in agriculture. I want to talk about that I left high school planning to be a dentist, wow, possibly an orthodontist. Realized I didn’t like teeth two years in and had no idea what to do with my life. Had a mini life crisis at that point, and I ended up working for ag Canada as a summer student, and fell in love with ag research because it was applied science. You know, I was a science student. I’ve always been the very, very annoying. Why child? My boys are now doing it to me, and I know it’s full payback for all of my why questions, but, man, it’s annoying, well, but I really missed the application and

Jay Whetter  52:49

on the on the teeth and the like, who, who would like that? Like, there’s a reason dentists get paid well, because I don’t, I don’t know why anyone would want to make a career out of staring into someone’s mouth all day long, but maybe, yeah, maybe people like, Well,

Breanne Tidemann  53:06

I mean, we’ve already mentioned I was the nerd in high school, and it people just kind of asked me, as I got closer to high school, are you going to, you know, Dr dentist? Lawyer was sort of the three I was always asked, and it wasn’t going to be lawyer. That’s just no, too much legalese for me, and I don’t mind medicine stuff, but I don’t want to poke or jab anyone. No, thank you. And so that kind of left me with dentists. So that was where I set my direction, and I was all in. I wrote the dental aptitude test, which is, you know, like the m cap of for dentists, and did all my prerequisites and everything else. And then it was like, What am I doing so

Jay Whetter  53:41

So would you would? What would you say to future dentists who might not have considered a career in agriculture? It’s an interesting

Breanne Tidemann  53:51

I don’t know if it was the the goal for dentistry that made me, made me a fit for agriculture so much. But I think you know, even growing I grew up in rural Saskatchewan. I grew up in farmland, and to me, agriculture was farming and or sand, right? That was the only two careers that I thought of when I thought agriculture. And there’s so much more out there that just, I don’t think it’s talked about enough, and I don’t think there’s enough exposure to it. So there’s, there’s this whole area of agriculture, whether it’s communications or marketing or research or what have you that people don’t really think about,

Jay Whetter  54:27

like any science you can imagine has a fit in agriculture somewhere, like I just talked about meeting people from NASA who now, they now have an agriculture division. So you could, you could go work for NASA and be involved in agriculture, yeah, yeah, there’s, there are so many opportunities. Do you have a chance to talk to students? Do you? Do you get that opportunity?

Breanne Tidemann  54:48

Sometimes, I was actually at a sort of open house Field Day at the Scott Research Farm, which is where I started as a student with a Canada to talk to grade 11 students about a. Careers in agriculture, that we’re not just farming. And I do get to talk at, you know, Red Deer polytech, I do a guest lecture there to their science students about, you know, applied science research and how it fits into my life. But yeah, not, not maybe as much as I would like to sort of that grade nine to 12 group, where they’re actually starting to think careers, but I do what I can, and I try and be very open about my, you know, dentistry longings at the start of things before I came to the dark side. So Well,

Jay Whetter  55:33

thank goodness you’re not a dentist. We’re so happy to have you in agriculture. Yeah,

Toban Dyck  55:37

no, absolutely, just like on the on the topic of Ag, extension, do you do you see, like opportunities there for for the industry to be better at at extending information and what, and just maybe talk to that a little

Breanne Tidemann  55:53

bit? Yeah. I mean, from, from my perspective as a weed scientist, there’s not a lot of us in Canada period, let alone in Western Canada. And my colleagues at universities also have their teaching responsibilities, which limits how much they can actually do on the extension side of things. So we get a lot of extension talks, and we simply cannot do them all. And it’s sort of like if we’re not there, who is talking about weeds, right? Where, where do we get that assistance in getting information out? So, you know, things like this podcast, things like the Ag media, I think, is really critical for us, because we just, we don’t have the coverage, we don’t have the capacity to to actually get our message out there to the people that need it. Yeah,

Toban Dyck  56:35

yeah. Well, hopefully this podcast reaches the the millions of people.

Breanne Tidemann  56:43

That’s why I’m on eight different kinds of social media. Is just trying to cover my bases and get information out where I can, because I cannot physically be in all of these places. So yeah,

Jay Whetter  56:54

I imagine, but you can correct me that this isn’t part of your job description necessarily, as being on eight different social media. You’re doing it because you have the passion and you love it and and that that drives you is, is rewarding conversations and getting getting the word out there to the people who need to hear it.

Breanne Tidemann  57:15

Well, I mean, for me, the reason I loved agriculture, the reason I fell in love with AG, research was, it was applied science. I could see how the work that was being done could affect my dad’s farm, could affect my uncle’s farm, could affect my brother’s farm. Now, right? It’s, it’s work that actually has an application, but it’s only going to be applied if they know about it. And so for me, it’s, it’s important, you know, there’s no point to me doing the research if it never gets to the people that should be using it, and even if it’s an idea and they go, you’re insane, I’m never going to do that. At least they know it’s an option. Maybe 10 years down the road, it’s like, okay, maybe it’s not so insane, or maybe it’ll always be insane. But without that direction, how do I continue to actually provide any service to them? So our rules are technically 100% research. We’re not technically obliged to do any extension. But what’s the point of the research if the extension doesn’t happen?

Toban Dyck  58:11

Is there is there a key message you find you have to repeat over and over again with the you know, in your in your in your job, when you think of extension

Breanne Tidemann  58:22

on the integrated weed management side of things, it’s, you know, diversity is key, and that’s part of it, for me, is herbicides. I’m not saying herbicides are bad. I’m not saying stop using them. I’m saying add I’m saying add something else in. It’s don’t use herbicides alone. Diversity is really key. The Silver Bullet discussion that we’ve already had, that it’s it’s probably not coming. I I hope I’m wrong, but it’s probably not coming. That’s just going to solve every issue that we have. And I think the big one for me is that weed populations respond. You know, we’re not doing this in a bubble. There will be a response. So I talk about harvest, weed seed control, and people go, so you’re saying we’ll never have resistance to that? I’m like, Oh no, we will. Of course we will. But if we’re using it with herbicides, with cultural management, with physical management, then it lasts longer term, and it’s harder for resistance to develop to everything. So hopefully, by having that diversity and redundancy, something else will pick it up instead of having a blowout of, you know, I only use herbicides, and now I’ve got Wild Oat everywhere, because that was all I was relying on. Yeah.

Toban Dyck  59:31

I mean, I again, like, I think that’s such a strong message, that whole idea, that one silver bullet, you know, that attitude, that one silver bullet is going to be good for your whole farm. And I like the idea too, of when you think of strategies, like, often, like with with work, or, like, not even just outside of farm, you think of strategies as or workflows that you just you implement, and then you keep in place forever, and you get some sort of, there’s, there’s a comfortability with that, right? You figured it out. You figured out a story. Strategy. Great, that’s done onto the next thing. But with so many strategies, especially with farming, you can’t think of it that way. You have a strategy for 2024, 2025, is a brand new growing season, and that strategy is going to have to change. So you have to kind of that whole idea of it’s not just a silver bullet in terms of a herbicide, but it’s not even a silver bullet in terms of a strategy that always has to evolve and morph. And I think that’s a healthy way of looking at it.

Breanne Tidemann  1:00:26

Yeah, it’s, you know, we think about agriculture as just grain production, but it is ecology, it is evolution, it’s all those things intertwined. And so when we, when we put out a management strategy. There is evolution that occurs, and there is responses that occur, and we have to take that into account over time, because it is there, whether we want it to be there or not.

Toban Dyck  1:00:49

Yeah, yeah.

Jay Whetter  1:00:52

Brianne, we have to wrap up. We’re down. Time flew by.

Breanne Tidemann  1:00:55

Thank you for having me. You

Jay Whetter  1:01:09

it Toban, okay, so we use this word silver bullet. Yeah, quite a bit we did. And you you teed it up with one of your questions near the end as kind of what we’re getting at. But it’s one product or one tool that does everything you need it to do. So we don’t need anything else. We have this silver bullet. It takes care of all the weeds for us. Yeah, and, and so we use that term a lot in agriculture to describe practices and but there isn’t really a silver bullet for much of anything, but, but I know where that comes from. Where does that turn No, come from. You

Toban Dyck  1:01:45

had, you had somebody like a Western.

Jay Whetter  1:01:48

Well, it just sounds like something from the Lone Ranger, does? His horse was silver? Wasn’t or was it? Maybe his horse was trigger. Oh, my I feel but I feel like fire,

Toban Dyck  1:01:57

yeah, I feel like you’re right. I feel like I’m gonna Google it. The Lone Ranger had silver

Jay Whetter  1:02:03

bullets and a horse name trigger. Yeah,

Toban Dyck  1:02:05

I’m gonna go, I’m googling this right now. Also, what? But don’t like with silver bullets, just as a concept, don’t you want them? Like, I’m not asking, in a broad sense, but I look for them like, when I want to think of what, almost anything, whether it’s like a business solution, I mean, even on the farm or in life, you kind of look for that one thing, like, if you’re dealing with something, you just want that one thing that’s going to handle it all. And you you don’t really want that. Well, it’s going to take time and a nuanced approach, and it’s going to take, you know, multiple, you know, ways of dealing with it. That’s always the thing you like. I don’t want. I’m always looking

Jay Whetter  1:02:45

for this. Maybe for some people like the microwave is the silver bullet for cooking, because they can follow their cooking with a microwave. And for some it’s a good analogy

Toban Dyck  1:02:57

the microwave. But you see that I, like, you kind of want, you know, a little bit, like a, you know, an Occam razor, but like that kind of, like, just the simple, right, singular, the

Jay Whetter  1:03:12

easiest solution is likely the

Toban Dyck  1:03:14

regular, so Occam’s Twitter doesn’t apply, but, but it came up in a podcast Occam’s Razor not that long ago. And I was like, oh, that’s an interesting, I

Jay Whetter  1:03:22

gotta remember to use that one.

Toban Dyck  1:03:24

It makes you sound really smart, even though it’s completely misapplied. You know, Occam’s razor, which doesn’t apply, here is a thing, yeah. But I really enjoyed that discussion, and it makes me, you know, I was chatting with you, also like to have a like a bit that couple things, to not treat any strategy I have today as static when it comes to weeds, to always think of it as something that needs to kind of morph and evolve and change, because the weeds do, and everything around US does. So it only makes sense. And the notion of just learning a little bit more about like, weeds,

Jay Whetter  1:04:07

where they came from, she mentioned the 10 cent packet of Kosher that you would put in your garden. And I think a lot of our weeds are ornamentals. Is that true? Yeah. So they came in as garden ornamentals, and they became big time weeds. So

Toban Dyck  1:04:24

is this like, is this now the ag industry versus the gardening

Jay Whetter  1:04:28

the horticulture industry? Yeah,

Toban Dyck  1:04:32

no, that that’s that’s very interesting. That is very interesting. I’m looking up here. Where does the term Silver Bullet come from? What between having trying to have thoughts

Jay Whetter  1:04:43

you want me to stretch while you’re thinking exactly, here we go. Here we go. Well, while you’re looking that up, I’ve chatted with Brianne a few times about these harvest weed seed destroyers, and she’s probably the formal stacks. On them on the prairies, and we didn’t get into one of our more recent projects, which also looked at chaff lining, which is to to have a little tool at the back of the combine that drops the chaff and the seeds just into a very concentrated row. And then you hope that either they out compete each other, or they’re kind of trapped in the chaff, and then they die. And I think she, she found that that wasn’t as effective, so it but, but I think it’s important to do that research. You know, if you find a result that doesn’t work, oftentimes that is just as valuable as finding a result that does work, because then you eliminate that, yeah, you don’t, you don’t wonder anymore. Oh, should I be doing this? Well, now we have research that says, You know what? That actually, that technique actually doesn’t work that well. It’s probably worth spending your time and money on something else. Often

Toban Dyck  1:05:52

wish, with people who occupy positions like, like Brian said, are like, very it’s very important work, very important research, and, you know, to lots of people, they don’t, they don’t necessarily know about it. They don’t know the amount of work, the amount of, like, education, and all the expertise that goes into that. What I have to think about this, what would farming look like today without her research? Right? Like, you know, you know, there’s always that kind of fight to kind of, you know, I have a strong message, and it’s a good one. And, you know, listen to me, which is very important that extension piece. But then it’s like, if you took today, what would it look like without that key piece of like that, AFC, investing in, you know, in weed research, you know, would we have, I don’t know. I just, there’s no answer to that. It’s just a thought exercise. But I think, I think sometimes the image we would have as a result of that would would really show the value of some of these, of some of these positions and some of this research, when we could see what life would be like without it.

Jay Whetter  1:06:56

Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.

Toban Dyck  1:07:00

It’s werewolves. It’s like werewolves is the, is the it’s all about how silver bullets

Jay Whetter  1:07:05

were werewolves. Yeah, did you ever,

Toban Dyck  1:07:08

did you find it? Yeah, that was the, that was the thing. We kind of came from that lore of like vampires, and so

Jay Whetter  1:07:15

the silver bullet was an effective tool against werewolves. I

Toban Dyck  1:07:20

mean, I guess the question, it just doesn’t, just leads to the question of, like, why that? But we’re gonna stop there right on. I like that.

Jay Whetter  1:07:33

This has been a burr forest group production. We also want to thank the people you don’t see. We’re

Toban Dyck  1:07:37

here. We’re chatting away with our guests. But there’s tons of people who work behind the scenes to make this podcast happen.

Jay Whetter  1:07:43

Brian Sanchez, our director, Ashley Robinson is the coordinator, and Abby wall is our producer and editor. You.