The Cutting Edge: Field Notes, Hops with Randy Urness of Fine Bine Farms (Part II), June 24, 2026

00:00:11 Speaker: So yeah, they continue to grow. But yes, we are getting to that point now. We’d like to have them start concentrating more on the side. The side arms and the branches is where you really get the colon production. And so you’d like to see them get to that point where they start to develop nice long branching side arms. Once you got a lot of big, nice sidearms, well, that’s going to help you have more cones.

00:01:03 Speaker: Well, welcome to the Cutting Edge podcast. My name is Jerry Clark. I’m a regional crops and soils educator in Chippewa Dunn in Eau Claire counties for the Division of Extension with UW Madison. Ann Kowenstrot is helping with our, podcast today. So, Ann, want to introduce yourself? Sure thing, Jerry. Thanks. My name is Ann Kowenstrot, I’m a diversified vegetable and emerging crops educator with UW Madison Division of Extension, and I am located in the southeast part of the state in Kenosha and Racine counties. We’re going to continue our discussion with Randy Earnest from fine bean farms as a hop grower. So, Randy, welcome again. Welcome back. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you taking a little bit of time to update us on how the hops are doing, this time of year and what you’re up to. So, how are things looking? I guess right now things are looking pretty good. I believe the last time we talked, we were finishing up, training or we were training the hops, getting them, climbing up the string and really working with that, getting them ready for the spring and ready to go. They’re climbing up. We’ve got some hops that are starting to make it up to the top of the twines, up to the top of the cables and the trellis, which is eighteen foot. The majority of the field, though, for our field is not up that far yet. We do tend to run a little behind, the southern Wisconsin and western Wisconsin actually runs a little ahead of us quite often as well, with temperature prior to Memorial Day. We continued to get some cold nights and that really kind of set things back. So I would say this year we’re probably at about the same point for growth that we were last year, but last year was not a spectacular year in the spring either. So we’re probably a little bit behind where we would like to be, certainly a bit behind where we would like to be for the growth, but they’re getting there. So making some progress. Where would you like to be at the growth stage right now? Right now for around our place, for a couple of varieties I’d like to see maybe fifty or, really getting up to the cable, you know, just starting to get there. It would be nice even if none of them were up there. But if most of them were close, it would help a little bit. That kind of becomes a problem is when you don’t have consistency across all of the different plants in one variety. But there getting more even. Then on some of the other varieties, yeah, I wish that there were about three quarters of the way up right now. We’re getting a little over half. So half of the way up on some of them. What we’d like to see is that everything would be up to the cable, around the Fourth of July or a little after fourth of July. So, a couple of weeks yet, some of the varieties will certainly be well up there by the Fourth of July. That’ll be no problem, and some of the other ones will maybe be just running a little bit after that. So Randy, with the longest day of the year, does that trigger anything within the hop plant or is it all a height thing? And that’s when it’ll start to flower and set cones they always stated Yes, getting to the longest day of the year kind of turns and changes wind. So as you look at it, you would like to have everything up by June twentieth. I took a peek at another hop yard in Wisconsin yesterday when I was traveling for my day job. They’re a little south of us. They do look like they pretty much got their stuff up at the table right now. They’ll probably trigger and get more. Once it’s up to the cable, it’ll start to trigger, growth of sidearms. Um, you know, branching, So yeah, I think that really kind of does work with that. I think there’s a little bit of a give and take with the plants on that as well. I’ve never been entirely certain that that’s exactly what triggers everything. But people also do talk. Well, they try to move out their harvests to different times and stuff by training some varieties a little later and things like that. And if it’s completely driven by that longest day of the year, well then does really moving out those training dates and some of that affect things as well. So I guess I’m not entirely certain with that. And, you know, I’m not sure how you would entirely prove that one way or the other. The other thing too is they will certainly continue to grow longer and climb up after that longest day. And even after they do start to grow some of the sidearms. I’ve also seen them where they will get up to the cable and then they’ll either dangle over the cable or they’ll crawl along the cable for another six feet. So yeah, they continue to grow. But yes, we are getting to that point now. We’d like to have them start concentrating more on the side. The sidearms and the branches is where you really get the cone production. And so you’d like to see them get to that point where they start to develop nice long branching sidearms. Once you got a lot of big, nice sidearms, well, that’s going to help you have more cones. So coming up here, a little while after the fourth the plants don’t care that it’s a holiday, but we kind of mark dates by that. We’ll start to see burr formation as well. So it’s nice to have a lot of those side arms and stuff before you really start to get heavy burr formation as well. Because yeah, it just really kind of helps out with, your yields. The more side arms and burr’s you can get, the better your yield. Now, some varieties don’t have a lot of long side arms. We have one variety that has never been really that aggressive on having top long side arms up at the top and being big bushy plants. We’ve got some other ones that they just look like upside down Christmas trees out there with a great big side arms coming off of them up in the top. And you can just see at the top of the plant some heavily loaded and you can see the weight on them then. So those varieties you said that don’t produce a lot of sidearms and sidearms are where the cones are going to be concentrated. What is the benefit to keeping those varieties in your system? Basically what you run into is yes, you have lower yield. And some of those varieties tend to also be a little tougher. Varieties to grow. One of the things that we’ve kind of concentrated on our farm, that has worked out pretty good for us, those varieties, as you can imagine, they’ve got lower yield, you get less cones per acre. They’re falling out of popularity with growers, some including out in the Pacific Northwest. They’re less popular for growth. But there’s still brewers that want those varieties. So we’ve had pretty good luck growing them. There might be a little more work. We may not get as much per acre, but we have pretty good success on selling them. We’ve got one variety of that nature that well actually a couple of those varieties that we pretty much sell out of every year. In fact, one of those varieties we can guarantee will be sold out every year by the first of the year. So we’ve been real happy with some of those. Some of them, we literally have to set aside more or less. They’re not truly contracts, but we set aside for some of our customers so they can get them later on in the year as well, because there is enough demand for them. Very cool. So Randy, from a management standpoint, going with these lateral branching and the burrs and some flowering. Do you target or time your nitrogen applications or what’s your fertility program look like during the growing season? So yeah, and that actually is one of the biggest things that we’re working on and concentrating with right now. We put down our lime earlier this year. We’ve got our first round of potassium out, and got that there for the help with the growth. And then we use a liquid nitrogen or all of our nitrogen applications. We get liquid and we put it on through our irrigation system. So every year I go with the trailer and I pick up a tote of the nitrogen and over the course from the beginning of June, maybe the end of May, start putting out the liquid, break it up into smaller batches. Add more water to it just to make sure we don’t burn anything and put it out with the irrigation, which then thins it out even more and break it up into three different, applications. This coming week will be pretty much wrapping up the application of the nitrogen. The nitrogen promotes plant growth. You get the bigger plants, get things really going. And then prior to it developing burrs and really working on the reproduction stage, we kind of want to stop growing the foliage and have the plant put more energy towards the reproduction. So we’re trying to have the main growth done by then stop with the nitrogen. And then at that point, prior to the burrs really starting to set. I will add another round of potassium to really help out with the reproduction phase on them as well. And then that will pretty much be the end of the fertilizer for the year. We do do a little bit of foliar as we go through the year, adding just a little bit more here and there just to kind of help boost the health of the plants as we go through this summer. So we’ll kind of spread, mix that in a little bit as we’re doing our fungicide treatments as well. Of course, you have to be careful which fungicide you do that with as well. What kind of pests and diseases have you been seeing so far this year. So we really haven’t seen too much as far as problems. But we do work heavily on preventative, you know, we watch the weather. We have had kind of, you know, people wouldn’t think if you look at our total rainfalls, you wouldn’t think it’s been dry, but it has been dry here. The problem is all in June we got most of our June rainfall in two days. Um may we kind of had a little bit of that as well. Although May we did have more spread out rain and and so that helps. We’ve been running our irrigation, pretty much daily since about Memorial Day. When we get those bursts of rain, we do like to see it, but, having that less rain. Okay. Well, we have to run irrigation, but it keeps the plants dry. We haven’t seen the downy mildew pressure that we might see other years. But we also spray our fungicide kind of as a preventative. You know, you really got to treat and protect once you start to see the downy mildew. You might already be too late to prevent extensive damage. So not right now as well. We’re scouting a lot for leafhoppers. They took the hay off of our field last week. So generally when they take the crop off of the field out there, then they will move to the hops and we have to watch it. So another round of spraying coming up in a few days here for the fungicide. And I’ll determine whether or not I need to do something, based on scouting if I need to do something for leafhoppers. Sometimes we will be all right and not have to put anything on for the leafhoppers. But looking at it right now, it’s like, yeah, that’s something we really got to watch. It might be, you know, add in something for the leafhoppers too. And then we continue to watch. Usually we would see leafhoppers earlier than spider mites, but we also be scouting and really keeping an eye out for spider mites as well. Those are kind of the two main pests that we have to spray for and watch for. Later in the year, the new pests we will have is Japanese beetles, but there’s just so little we can do for that. So regarding the Japanese beetle, is that primarily at the top of the plant, or do they kind of get all over the the whole plant. They will get all over the plant, but they do concentrate. They like the top of the plant. I guess getting up in the sun, you’ll see the top of some varieties that are just lace. You know, they turn that leaf into a lace and they turn the entire top a lace. And they are another thing that is variety specific. They will go to some varieties and just hang there and they’ll stay with those until they’ve either got them, you know, pretty much stripped down or until you harvest them because it’s around probably just prior to harvest is when we start to really see them. They’re building, we’re getting more each year. And so we’ll see. We might start to see them a little heavy earlier as well. So we’ll see how they are this year. So Randy, with your fungicide applications, with the watching the weather. Do you treat on a calendar or is it pretty much as needed regarding the weather and as that preventative? Yes, both. Really. Um we do it kind of by calendar but we also really okay, if the pressure is light, we’ll extend out the amount of time between sprays so that calendar will push out a little, hopefully we can push the calendar out it, have fewer sprays, hopefully take one spraying out, okay, if we’ve got them spread out over two weeks rather than over ten days apart, it doesn’t take long before it’s like, we have one less spray this year. Really we look at for both ways on, when we plan, when we do the spray, try to spread it out. Every year I’ve got kind of a plan that I’m following for spraying and every year it gets changed and I don’t quite follow it and I mix it up. Because that I mean, and mixing it up is another big part of that as well. I’m using a different spray every time that I go out and spray now they may repeat, but I don’t actually use anything twice in a row. The labels actually say, you can use some of them. You can use up to two or three times in a row, but I try to use something different every time I spray. Just to avoid that resistance. Yeah. That’s a good integrated pest management approach. I think with diseases is they can build resistance relatively quickly. So using a different race of formulation, I believe is what they what they recommend. Correct. Different codes. I’ll be excited to hear how the next few weeks go. And when is harvest typically, Randy, what are we looking at? We usually start about the second week of August. We really are going heavy. We might take a variety or two prior to mid-August. At the beginning of August, we try to have everything set up and ready to harvest. And if we see something’s ready to go, we’ll try to get it off at that point. Just because, we need to spread out that harvest window. It takes a while for just the two of us to get all of this harvested. So anything we can take early or we try to, and it helps avoid some of the other stuff being out there too long and getting a little brown at all. Yeah. I think it would be good to check in right before harvest, maybe the end of July, first week in August, so we can see what your thoughts are and then catch you afterwards and see how it all went. Okay, that sounds like a good plan. All right. Thank you, Randy. We’ll check in with you in a few weeks. All right. Thanks.

JASON FISCHBACH 49:00
Brought to you by the University of Wisconsin Madison Division of Extension.