The 2026 Dry Edible Bean Open House will be held on Wednesday, Sept. 2, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Panhandle Research Extension and Education Center in Scottsbluff. Dry bean producers, industry professionals, and the public are invited to meet the specialists who work on dry beans, their management, and ongoing research.
In a few of the webinars leading up to the open house. Dr. Nevin Lawrence, integrated weed management, discussed his research on suppression of the weed Palmer Amaranth. The weed is herbicide-resistant and one of the most severe threats to Nebraska dry bean producers. Lawrence and his colleagues are researching herbicides labeled for soybeans, which might offer some solutions.
“A study that I'm doing along with colleagues at the University of Wyoming where we are screening a number of currently available dry edible bean products along with herbicides that are labeled in other crops such as soybeans,” he said. “We've got some plots that are looking pretty good, no visual injury- seem to be holding the weeds back pretty well. Unfortunately, we also have plots that kind of look like the surface of Mars. So, this is some of the challenge with dry edible beans.”
Another webinar presenter, Dr. Wei-Zhen Liang in biological systems engineering, uses camera and sensor systems for precision management in dry edible beans, focusing on white mold and weed detection in row crops. Liang and her team built the PivotCam system, mounted on irrigation pivots.
“So, for white mold detection, our goal is to improve white mold disease management in dry beans using an AI-driven camera and sensor system. So instead of walking fields every day, we just let the camera and the sensors monitor the crop automatically and send the results to the website and phone app,” she said.
The system continuously captures images in the field from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. at 30-minute sampling intervals, providing near-real-time data to the server and then displaying it on the website and in the cell phone app.
Lawrence, Liang, and the majority of the center’s faculty will be at the Dry Edible Bean Open House, which will include food and networking. The public will then have a chance to visit research plots at PREEC, educational displays, and information booths. Tours of dry edible bean plots will also be available.
