Controlling Tomorrow’s Weeds, Today
It’s hard to believe harvest is finishing up and just like that, another crop year is coming to a close. As you move from field to field this fall, it is the perfect time to reflect on the past season, especially how it started. Think about the early season weed pressure and how that battle played out through the rest of the crop year (maybe still an issue).
Winter annuals like marestail, pennycress, prickly lettuce, and dandelion (to name a few), start to germinate in the early fall as temperatures start to drop. They then overwinter and begin the aggressive part of their life cycle when temperatures start climbing in the spring.
While many have chosen to fight these winter annual weeds in the spring, there are numerous opportunities and advantages to starting the battle in the fall.
- There is a greater likelihood of gaining control of winter annuals in the fall when weeds are smaller, younger, and much easier to eliminate. Once winter annuals begin to elongate in the spring, they become more difficult to control.
- If soil moisture is hard to come by, gaining control of winter annual weeds in the fall may help reduce the use of water in the springtime.
- Reduce your workload in the spring by moving to fall application. It’s a natural safeguard in the case of a compressed spring season.
- If the 2019 spring turns out wet, you don’t have to worry about getting your spring residual applied or feel the pressure of winter annuals growing out of control while you wait for ground conditions to become fit. Speaking of a compressed spring season, applying in the fall with a residual not only gives you a clean seedbed to plant into but it also relieves the worry of planting interval restrictions with some herbicides.
- Help reduce reliance on the herbicides we typically use in the springtime by adding a different mode of action in the fall, all the while reducing the risk of developing resistance to frequently used herbicides.
There are many options available that give you the flexibility to plant either soybeans or corn next
spring. Fall applications of 2,4-D or dicamba with the addition of residuals like Bayer’s Autumn, can be
both economical and effective when it comes to starting off clean in early spring. Get a leg up on the
weed battle by taking care of tomorrow’s problems today.