Extend your weed destroying options

Late season pigweed

August is always an interesting of year on the farm.  We are trying to wrap up irrigation for the year and get ready for 2 important things...Huskers and Harvest.  But there is always one sight that will ruin my day and that is weeds in my soybean fields.  Yes, there may only be a few of them but they stick out like a miniature pimple on the prom queen's forehead.

While the actual yield robbing components of the weeds may be gone, they are a potential problem for next year.  Some of these weeds can produce multi-millions of seeds per plant and so making sure they die a painful death is very important to making sure we go into next year with less weed pressure than we had this year.  At this stage in the farming year it may not be economical or even allowable to apply a herbicide to control them.  Plus the soybeans are very hard to walk through and makes removing the weeds via human labor hard and expensive as well.

Even those these weeds may be a problem now, hopefully with some new technology that, in very short order, will be available on the farm.  Technology that will be available to add to our arsenal especially for troublesome weeds. Any time we can utilize technologies on the farm that will allow us to continue to produce a healthy and safe product we will gladly try it out.

In this case I am talking about dicamba tolerant soybeans also know as Roundup Ready Extend.  It will be a soybean that allows farmers to go after those troublesome weeds including those that come up late in the season and can cause problems for the next years to come.  It gives us another weapon in our arsenal to fight weeds, rotate crop protection products, and work at preventing resistance to develop in certain weed species.  And with the new formulation of dicamba it will a low volatility mixture meaning that the drift issues will be lessened protecting vulnerable crops like the neighbors garden. (I would be better off mowing the neighbors sweet corn crop mess with this lady's garden)  

A couple weeks ago I saw an infield trial of this technology and was very impressed with how clean the field was.  It definitely reiterated how important having technologies like this are to the farming community not just now but also in the future.  If you are a farmer I would greatly encourage you to add your voice of support to this great product, which was discovered at the University of Nebraska.  Which is a great reminder of how important our land grant universities continue to be.  To add your voice go to http://1.usa.gov/NYqD1N.  Just remember that if we want more technologically innovative products in the future it is important to protect the ones we have and voice our support for the ones coming out.