Post

Harvest is good time to evaluate herbicide program

corn harvest-nebraska corn board 10-14Harvest is a good time to evaluate your herbicide program and look for resistant weeds, according to Dawn Refsel, a field market development specialist with Valent.

“You’re covering every acre with your combine, going back and forth, and so you get a really good sense of scale of what’s escaped through your herbicide program that you had this year,” Refsel says. “It may only be carcasses, but you still can determine if you have a grass problem—and the waterhemp plants are still out there.”

And Refsel says there’s another factor to consider.

“Now what you’ve just harvested, you’ve just spread all those seeds all over your field—and so now you have a sense going into next year what your weed problems are going to be, based on what escaped through this year and what you saw at harvest,” she says.

If a herbicide-resistant weed population is present or suspected in a particular field, University of Illinois weed specialist Aaron Hager suggests you should consider harvesting that field last. That will prevent introducing the seed from the resistant plants into the combine and spreading it to other fields. Another option, Hager says, is to avoid patches of weeds during harvest operations.

(Photo courtesy Nebraska Corn Board)

 

Add Comment

Your email address will not be published.


 

Stay Up to Date

Subscribe for our newsletter today and receive relevant news straight to your inbox!