Teamwork in the Weeds with Dr. Ian Burke

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Drew Lyon: Hello, welcome to the WSU Wheat Beat podcast. I’m your host, Drew Lyon, and I want to thank you for joining me as we explore the world of small grains production and research at Washington State University. In each episode, I speak with researchers from WSU and the USDA-ARS to provide you with insights into the latest research on wheat and barley production.

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My guest today is Dr. Ian Burke. Ian is the R.J. Cook Endowed Chair of Wheat Research and a professor in weed science at Washington State University. Ian started working in weed science in 1999 and joined the faculty at WSU in 2006. His research program is focused on basic aspects of weed biology and ecology, with the goal of integrating such information into practical and economical methods of managing weeds in the environment. Hello, Ian.

Dr. Ian Burke: Hello, Drew.

Drew Lyon: So, Ian, you’re pretty instrumental in getting this Pacific Northwest Herbicide Resistance Initiative started. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Dr. Ian Burke: Yeah, I’ll do my best, and although I had a role, there are a lot of people that we owe a lot of thanks to for what’s evolved into a large and pretty vibrant research program focused on weed management writ large in the PNW.

So, you know, it started with a farmer, as these things always do. I was at an oilseed cropping systems meeting down in Lewiston and Steve Riggers pulled me aside and said—we had a 15-minute conversation—”What are we going to do about this weed problem? Surely, there’s something we can do.” And I think he like–I think many farmers have this view of the land grant university as sort of limitless in its possibility, right? So, surely, we can come to a solution.

And so, that stimulated a number of different meetings and evolved into what wound up being a congressionally funded project through the USDA-ARS that funds three different and new ARS weed scientists in the PNW. And it also funds a number of different research programs here at WSU, at University of Idaho, and at Oregon State University. So, it’s become a large and vibrant program with a lot of capacity behind it.

So, we’re well-resourced and can begin to tackle some of these very difficult problems that we all know exist when it comes to weed management. And it’s really sort of–Carol Mallory-Smith said this out loud here a few years ago and I’ve always really appreciated it—you know, “We sprayed our way into this problem. We’re not going to spray our way out of this problem.” And so, how do we fund long-term cropping systems projects? How do we fund the sort of fundamental research we know we need to be doing, you know, beyond the sort of typical, very short-term commodity commission grants or even a three- or four-year project with NIFA is not really enough time to evaluate some of the things we need to be evaluating? And so that’s what the HRI is. It’s the capacity to ask those hard questions and the resources to do it.

Drew Lyon: Okay. I know in the 80s and 90s, the ARS had quite a few weed scientists and then Roundup Ready crops came out and they just figured weed problem solved. We don’t need weed scientists anymore and they pretty much got rid of most of them. And now, it sounds like they’re coming back. Part of this initiative is to bring in some new weed scientists to get us back kind of to where we were before they decided weeds were taken care of.

Dr. Ian Burke: The USDA-ARS is a great partner in this and it is unfortunate that they’ve felt like weed science as a discipline wasn’t as important to invest in as maybe other things. I guess that’s the right way to put it. But, you know, certainly they’ve heard it. And with this initiative, there’s action there, right? So, we’re there investing and the ARS has fundamentally different capacity to do research than the land grant universities.

And so, those are usually stable long-term funding lines that go into the ARS to fund scientists. So, I’ve already really witnessed the transformative effect of even one of these positions. So, Olivia Landau was hired this spring; she’s already got a staff. She’s got two postdocs, she’s got undergraduate hourlies. And so that’s inertia—you know, people solve problems. The more people we can bring to bear on problems, the faster we’re going to find the array of different solutions I think we need. And having two more, potentially even three more to be hired here in the next year, it’s just really exciting. The more people, the faster we’re going to get to some solutions.

Drew Lyon: Yeah, it really is exciting. And pulling in all the weed scientists from the region to kind of be working a bit as a team rather than the separate entities, that’s also very exciting.

Dr. Ian Burke: You know, the coordination, I think has been key. You know, we’re talking a lot; and in retrospect, we could have been talking a lot but there really wasn’t a motivation to. But, now we we’re obligated to. And so, that’s a little bit different dynamic, isn’t it? When you have to talk to each other.

And so, right or wrong, we meet on a regular basis and all kinds of interesting things have come out of those meetings from a weed science level, from a sort of managerial level. It’s a really good project. It’s working.

Drew Lyon: So, how do you see the Initiative impacting herbicide resistance for wheat growers?

Dr. Ian Burke: Yeah, the resistance is definitely the driving motivator. But I like to think of broad weed management solutions as the outcome, right? So, integrated weed management is going to involve, you know, informed cultural and mechanical and potentially even biological inputs, in addition to understanding the dynamic around resistance evolution and evaluating that in real time and understanding how to, you know, adapt our systems such that they’re complicated enough that evolution is difficult, if not impossible, for weeds to undertake in response to something like a chemical input.

The reality is [that] wheat farmers are really, at least for the foreseeable future, going to be dependent on herbicides. I cannot foresee a situation where in the PNW we’re able to successfully weed the very large farms we operate without something like a herbicide. That is a labor saving tool first and foremost, right? Very few people can weed a lot of area with herbicide.

And so, we’re dependent upon them. And so, that means we’re obligated to understand how to maintain them for the foreseeable future, but also to think critically about what other inputs–something simple like cleaning your tools, like preventative weed management, is something we’re keenly interested in understanding because we know that a lot of these fields are interconnected.

So, there’s a lot of different sort of simple examples I could give you of focused area of active research right now in the HRI that [would not likely] be active if we didn’t have it.

Drew Lyon: I know one of the areas that I have avoided for my entire career is trying to study the soil seed bank because it’s so much work to do, and yet that’s an area that you really are delving into. You have some new tools and some real excitement about that. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about what you’re doing in that regard.

Dr. Ian Burke: Yeah. I feel the same way. I did a little bit of seed bank work for my Ph.D. and I swore I’d never go back to it. And here I am.

So, the reason it’s so hard is because there are a number of different species of weeds in the soil seed bank. They have different ages—the seed have different ages. Their appearance in the seed bank is not that clean weed seed we typically see that when we go run our hands through a patch of weeds, we might see the intact seed– the soil ages them. And so, their appearance is quite a bit different.

And historically what we would do is we would take some soil samples and then put them in a greenhouse and assign an undergraduate hourly or graduate student to routinely check them for emergence and water them. So, it’s like a few hundred samples would occupy multiple greenhouse benches for six to eight months to get some data about what was in the seed bank. And then we really wouldn’t know. We would know what germinated, but we wouldn’t actually know what all was in there.

And so here, at the beginning of the project, we purchased an elutriator that allows us to extract like 48 samples at a time. That’s a lot to extract. So, that was sort of one big hurdle that we’ve overcome. There are additional hurdles, right? So, you can extract a bunch of samples and get to a place where there’s a lot less soil in the sample, but our soil structure is such that we have a lot of what we call PEDs in the sample that are the same size as weed seed, so even now we’re sitting here with extracted samples trying to identify processes to really just get down to just the residue and the weed seed.

But, extracting several hundred samples in a day is quite easy now for us and so these are sort of just technical problems. And when you can actually just go count the seed and you can you have the seed intact in your hand, there’s a lot of different experiments you can do on those. You can start asking a much harder question: so, what fraction of the seed bank sample that I have here actually was set last year? Or the year before? Or the year before that? What’s living on the seed coat? Olivia has got a great project going now where she’s trying to understand the microbiome of the seed, right? So, are there positives and negatives associated with that microbiome of the seed coat itself?

So, there’s a lot of additional work we could be doing as a consequence of overcoming a very sort of simple technical hurdle of being able to do a whole lot all at once. And so, we’re really excited about what that might mean.

Drew Lyon: Yeah, that’s because it was just a lot of labor and time before and so it’s really exciting to see that we might be moving into a new era of really understanding the seed bank, which is really kind of a lot of ways unique to weeds compared to other pests, right? Because they have this bank of seeds of different ages and you might control all this year’s, but then you got everything that’s in the seed bank sitting there. And so, it’s a lot to learn there. So, I’ll be excited to see what you learn over the coming years. It’s pretty exciting work.

Dr. Ian Burke: The seed bank is a really good way to measure the resilience of a system, we’ve decided. So, if the seed bank is declining and it’s fairly diverse, that’s actually probably very good indicator of a healthy crop rotation and I don’t know that we’ve ever thought to sort of measure it that way and then help a farmer think through it, you know, why is one particular weed becoming such an issue so it dominates the seed bank? How do we solve this problem? That’s a sort of a different way to think about the rotations that we currently employ and how to evaluate them.

Drew Lyon: Okay. What do you see as some of the maybe direct output that growers can be looking to see come out of this program over the next several years?

Dr. Ian Burke: So, we’ve got a few different things going.

I’m probably most excited about some of the long-term rotational work that some of us have started. Judit Barroso has got a really an interesting project to understand how to manage Russian thistle and cheatgrass in rotation and that’ll probably start to yield results here in the next few years. Pete Berry has done a great job in taking all [of] our–you know, Joan Campbell, Judit, Pete, Albert Adjesiwor, down in southern Idaho, have done a really great job at testing for resistance over the years. We’ve got this incredible database of tests and we know where the seed came from, but we really don’t have a good way for farmers to access that data. So, Pete’s done a great job and that’s online now. You can go to pnwhri.org and we have a database of resistance by county. It’s not everything’s there. We’re always updating it, but it’s, you know, that’s a resource that farmers can begin to use now to kind of understand what’s going on around them.

And then, you know, we’re working to understand emergence patterns and how and when weeds—you know, we know that every year there’s weeds that win and weeds that don’t, right? Everyone always says to me, “Well, last year was a really bad common lambsquarter year.” Right? You’ve heard that before.

Drew Lyon: And it was. [laughter]

Dr. Ian Burke: Or, you know, Russian thistle is one we hear a lot of complaints about. So, there’s a reason why the environmental conditions are such that an individual weed species might win or lose, right? And so, I’ve got a graduate student now, Wes Maughan, who’s working on using weather stations co-located in each of his research trials to quantify the environment that that site’s experiencing. He’s using game cameras to take pictures of germination and emergence following, you know, completely clearing an area and conducting tillage and no till next to each other. You know, that has an impact on what emerges and when.

And we’re already starting to see real results and I think that that’s going to be an interesting—so, everyone really gets, you know–everyone tunes into the stripe rust announcements that Dr. Chen puts out. Those are very, you know, useful for farmers as a bit of knowledge. I think we could begin to have announcements for cohorts of weed germination: we’re seeing this, we predict this will happen based on this weather pattern. We’re kind of trying to get that sort of biological information into the hands of farmers, not necessarily because we see how we could really, really effectively use it now, but we know that information is always useful. We just got to get it to a place where someone’s creative enough to figure out how to use it. And so, those are the things we’re thinking about generating.

Drew Lyon: Okay. You mentioned [the] PNWHRI website just a minute ago. What are some other ways that growers can interact with the Initiative?

Dr. Ian Burke: You know, we are working now on surveying farmers. So, you do have an opportunity when you’re out and you’re hearing one of our participants give a presentation, [they’ll] likely show you a QR code that will give you an access to a survey. Fill those surveys out. Those surveys really help us understand where you are and then they also, in turn, help us understand how to allocate resources to address particular problems you might bring up.

You know, many farmers that we work with could also benefit from getting more involved with some of the–we’ve got some pilot projects going where we work with small groups of farmers around a particular innovation. So, you know, you had Nick Bergmann on as a guest in the past, but this idea of co-innovation, and it’s really sort of related to the fundamental land grant mission to work cooperatively with farmers to find solutions, so we’ve got several different groups we’re working with to study things like harvest weed control or crop diversification. If that’s something you’re interested in, there’s no reason why farmers couldn’t reach out to us to think more critically about some projects they might be interested in studying but maybe not understand how to do that. Well, that’s where scientists at the land grant come in. We can, you know, begin to hold meetings to think critically about what we might be able to do and then implement some sort of on-farm experiment that would be useful for the farmers themselves to learn from. So, there’s a lot of different ways to interact with HRI.

Drew Lyon: Okay. And I wonder if you could touch upon the role of the various state commissions because I know this is a federally funded project. Universities, ARS are pretty good at doing science, but it’s really these commissions that are carrying the ball on getting some of that funding. What’s their role and how can growers interact with them if they’re really interested in this Initiative?

Dr. Ian Burke: Yeah. Staying engaged with the commodity commissions is really important from the standpoint of identifying key problems for us to be working on here at the land grant. So, the checkoff dollars go in part to support our research here and the commodity commissions have reaffirmed their commitment to continuing to support us alongside the HRI funding we’re getting as part of a comprehensive look, you know, funding of weed science.

And so, engaging with the commodity commissions is another conduit to making sure that their voices are heard and resources are allocated to particular problems that they might want solved, right? The commodity commissions, you know, I can’t overstate our gratitude. They’ve been incredibly supportive of us. There are, you know, each state has its own flavor of organization around wheat and, you know, all the organizations helped us fund and continue to support us in our efforts to solve these problems on the behalf of the farmer. So, yeah, we can’t thank them enough.

Drew Lyon: Well, this is a really exciting project. It’s really just kind of getting going. And, I think, it has a huge potential so I hope our listeners will stay engaged and watch and interact with us so we can make the type of progress they hope to see from the program. Thanks for your leadership on all this, Ian. Really appreciate it.

Dr. Ian Burke: Thank you. Drew.

Drew Lyon:

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Thanks for joining us and listening to the WSU Wheat Beat podcast. If you like what you hear don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you have questions or topics you’d like to hear on future episodes, please email me at drew.lyon — that’s lyon@wsu.edu — (drew.lyon@wsu.edu). You can find us online at smallgrains.wsu.edu and on Facebook and Twitter [X] @WSUSmallGrains. The WSU Wheat Beat podcast is a production of CAHNRS Communications and the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

I’m Drew Lyon, we’ll see you next time.

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The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests of this podcast are their own and does not imply Washington State University’s endorsement.