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Weed Control is a Lot Like the Game “Hide and Seek”

Posted by Aaron Esser | June 17, 2020

As a kid, my sibling and I would often play a game of Hide and Seek (no we didn’t have video games and cell phones to keep us entertained). These games would inevitably end in an argument about cheating because someone counted too fast or someone was hiding out-of-bounds, etc., etc. Okay, what does this have to do with weeds and controlling weeds in our cropping systems. We have to do a better job of cheating if we want to win!

In a game of Hide and Seek, if you hide in the bedroom closet every time you quickly become easy to find, and I relate this to continuous winter or spring wheat production. If you are practicing this cropping system, weed control options are very limited and the potential for severe infestations and herbicide resistance are much greater, even if you have an opportunity to use a herbicide-tolerant wheat crop like the Clearfield System or the newly released CoAXium Wheat System. If you hide in the bedroom closet or the bathroom shower you become a little bit more difficult to find and this is similar to a winter wheat-summer fallow crop rotation or a winter wheat-legume rotation. In this system you have a few more options than a continuous cereal rotation with additional grassy weed control options in legumes and the use of non-selective herbicides during the fallow period. If you hide in the bedroom closet, the bathroom shower or under your bed you are less predictable and more difficult to find, and this is related to a three-year crop rotation that might include fallow, winter wheat and spring cereal or legume. In these cropping systems you are still limited on your weed control but have more options than the previous two systems, including time. Time is the years between crop, so in this system winter wheat is every three years.

Okay, now let’s cheat and hide out of bounds, and I relate this to incorporating a crop such as canola into your rotation that you normally don’t raise. Canola has a lot of valuable weed control tools including the active ingredients clethodim and quizalofop, and traits we traditionally don’t have available in our cereal grain crops like Roundup- and Liberty-resistant cultivars. Liberty herbicide is a Group 10 herbicide that has the active ingredient glufosinate. This is really our only means to get this technology incorporated into our cropping system.

Figure 1.
Figure 1.

Three-year average economic return over input costs of 3-year, 4-year, and continuous cropping systems at the WSU Wilke Research and Extension Farm. Costs do not include fixed costs associated with the farm. Means within columns assigned different case letters are significantly different (P < 0.10).

I know as a farmer you are screaming FOUL!!!! What about the economics! You are correct, in the short-term, economics are more favorable in the simple crop rotation system. However, in the long-term, expanding your crop rotation, and incorporating additional weed control strategies into your cropping systems should greatly reduce the potential for herbicide resistance and be economically beneficial. At the WSU Wilke Research and Extension Farm near Davenport, Washington we have the facility divided into a continuous crop rotation and a three- and four-year crop rotation. The three-year rotation is very traditional and includes fallow, winter wheat and spring cereal. The four-year rotation includes fallow, winter wheat, spring broadleaf (mostly canola) and spring cereal. The continuous rotation has no fallow and prior to 2017, was a cereal based rotation only. Over the last six years there has been no significant difference in economic returns over input costs between the more traditional three-year cropping system and enhanced four-year crop rotation (Figure 1). Both of these systems have been more profitable then the continuous cropping system. As the one who make the weed control decisions, I can tell you it’s much easier in the four-year crop rotation, and I can assure you having full-blown herbicide resistant (pick your weed or weeds) across the farm will greatly limit both short and long-term economics!

Just an FYI, you can cheat even further and work with your neighbors and form local weed control networks like they have implemented in other regions of the world where they are dealing with herbicide resistant weeds so that a more coordinated effort can be completed across a region. What are your suggestions or ideas to cheat?

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