With planting underway, it’s hard to believe that it’s already time to start thinking about weeds. Jeff Mink, technical crop manager for Syngenta Crop Protection in the southern fields crops business unit says it’s never too early to talk about weeds, especially glyphosate resistant weeds. Getting started early is going to be the key to a weed-free crop:
"The main weed that we’re looking across the southeast that we’ve been dealing with for several years and that’s been coming into the mid-south very aggressively is pigweed, Palmer Pigweed resistance to glyphosate. It’s very troublesome because it germinates all season long, and so you can think you’ve got them controlled early in the year, and if you take your eye off the ball they can just continue to germinate throughout the season. And once they’ve got any size to them at all, couple of inches, three inches, they become extremely difficult to control at that point.
Chemical companies are trying to get a message to growers about glyphosate resistant weeds:
“What we’re trying to do, or the message that we’re getting out there is you need to continuously overlap your residual herbicides to make sure that you’ve got a protective barrier there to control the weeds as they’re trying to emerge season long. So, you need that herbicide barrier in the soil to help keep them from emerging, so that you don’t get in a situation where you’re battling a weed that’s got any size to it.”
Mink says that when it comes to Palmer Pigweed, there is no such think as “too early”:
“It’s starts all the way at burn down. You’ve really got to be focused on burn down. You’ve got to choose your chemistry’s very wisely. It’s all about knowing your herbicide chemistry, knowing what pre-emerge activity it has, how it’s going to last, and making sure that you’re rotating chemistry, because we’ve gotten into this situation because of an over reliance on glyphosate, and so now glyphosate is ineffective on Palmer Pigweed. So, you really need to be rotating your modes of action, and you also need to make sure that you’re not relying on a single mode of action herbicide now, as well, in the pre-emerge segment so that we don’t over use those molecules as well. “
If all that sounds like you need a degree in chemistry, there’s a helpful tool to keep you in the field and out of the classroom:
“We offer a site called resistance fighter dot com where a grower can go in, and for his geography he can pick what crop he’s going to grow, what his targeted weed is, and it will give him a suggested program that he can follow that takes into account rotating modes of action and things like that.”
Again that Website is resistancefighter.com.
|