A North Dakota State University researcher at the Langdon Research Extension Center is harnessing bumble bees, and soon honeybees, to help curb Sclerotinia head rot, a crippling fungal disease in sunflowers, that also affects soybean, dry beans, canola and several other crops. He’s using the bees as mini “crop dusters” to spread a “good” fungus in his sunflower test plots to counter the fungus responsible for Sclerotinia.
Now completing his second year of research into this new approach to disease management, Dr. Venkat Chapara, a plant pathologist and Assistant Research Professor at the Langdon, ND lab, will share his results to date as the kick-off presentation for the 2018 BrownBagger series sponsored by the USDA-ARS Northern Plains Agricultural Research Laboratory (NPARL) in Sidney on Friday, Feb. 16.
Dr. Chapara’s presentation is entitled: Management of Head Rot in Sunflowers Using Bee Vectoring Technology. His talk will be held from noon to 1 pm in the Tech Transfer Room at the Sidney ARS lab, located at 1500 N. Central Avenue.
Dr. Chapara is a graduate of NDSU with a doctorate degree in Plant Pathology. He worked as a post-doctoral research associate with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for three years. He has a master’s in Entomology from Gujarat Agricultural University in India. Currently his research is focused on applied plant pathology on diseases that cause economic losses in crops grown in northeastern North Dakota (primarily canola, small grains, sunflowers, soybeans, faba beans).
NPARL invites all interested persons to join us for this very enlightening presentation at noon this Friday, Feb. 16. Bring your lunch. We’ll provide the dessert!
In addition to Dr. Chapara, other upcoming speakers scheduled for NPARL’s 2018 BrownBagger season include:
• Feb. 23 – Patrick Gilchrist, Warning Coordination Meteorologist, NOAA, Glasgow, MT; (Topic: What’s to come? A look at climate change and what it means for northeast Montana)
• Mar. 9 –Natalie West, Research Ecologist, USDA-ARS-NPARL, Sidney, MT (Topic: Biological Control of Rangeland Weeds)
• Mar. 23 – Amanda Stahlke, University of Idaho, PhD Candidate and Research Assistant in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Program; (Topic – Leafy Spurge Biocontrol Revisited)
• Apr. 6 – John Gaskin, Research Botanist, USDA-ARS-NPARL, Sidney, MT (Topic: Invasive Trees)
Note: all days listed are Fridays and all presentations begin at noon in the Tech Transfer Room at the Sidney ARS lab.
For questions or more information on Sidney ARS’ 2018 BrownBagger, contact Beth Redlin at 406-433-9427 or [email protected].
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