Bob Henson

Hi, I'm Bob Henson, research agronomist at the NDSU Carrington Research Extension Center. I'm here at the Hettinger field day today to talk about Niger thistle. Many of you are familiar with Niger thistle. It's used as birdseed. There's an annual market of about 70 million pounds in the U.S., all imported. You can see the seeds are very small. It has been tried here in research plots in the past, but the varieties were not adapted; they didn't mature in our growing season. Within the last few years different plant breeders have developed earlier-maturing varieties. This is a variety trial right there. Four different varieties are breeding lines and you can tell the one there on the far end is full of yellow flowers, which is definitely earlier than the others. But we have materials that will fit our growing season now, and we are in a multi-station project with NDSU and the University of Minnesota in Crookston looking at agronomic management; nitrogen fertility level, seeding rate, things like that. And we'll probably get into things like planting date. Although it's called a thistle, the plant really has nothing in common with the thistle other than the seed. You can see the plant, it's actually in the sunflower family, so it's not full of spines. It's actually a fairly nice plant, an attractive plant. But we're working on the agronomic management, and we think that there's a lot of potential with this as a new alternative crop for North Dakota farmers. The marketing aspect, still needs some work. There's a grower's cooperative, Feather Feed Foods in northwest Minnesota, Red Lake Falls, but marketing is something that still has to be worked out more, but we feel good about the progress we've made in the agronomic management. We have genetic material which fits our growing season, and the best thing of all for a potential new crop, is that the market is already there. It's not one of those cases where "yeah, we can grow it, now what do we do with it?" In this case the market is already there, and it's growing.