Any grower who has spent time farming knows no two seasons are alike. From weather conditions to pest pressures and commodity prices, the only thing you can count on each year is unpredictability. But that doesn’t mean you have to let chance dictate how your season will turn out.
For weed management in particular, variable weather can greatly impact your ability to manage weed pressure. So much of farming is time-dependent, and delays in planting can have far-reaching affects on pre-emergence applications. Any further delays with post-emergence applications only add to list of tasks that can derail your carefully planned weed management program.
Rather than taking a reactive approach to weather events and weed pressure, we suggest growers take the steps below to help remove the guesswork and increase the likelihood of success against your toughest weeds in 2019.
- Know your fields’ weed history and what, if any, weeds have shown signs of resistance to any of the herbicide chemistries you’re using.
- Know the conditions that can impact the length of residual control.
- Plan herbicide applications based on the calendar and expected days of residual control, and reapply before weeds begin to break through.
- Use herbicides that provide both contact and residual weed control.
- Visit Resistance Fighter® to find pre-emergence and post-emergence residual herbicides that work for your operation.
- Work with your local agronomist to create a full-season weed management plan that includes crop rotation, reducing the weed seed bank and overlapping residual herbicides with multiple effective sites of action.
While taking these steps will not eliminate the weather challenges you’ll more than likely face, it will put a plan in place that gives you a greater chance of success then just reacting to whatever Mother Nature throws at you this season.