Irrigation is the best option for helping dicamba-injured soybeans recover yield, but be warned it is not all of the yield.

In a recent University of Missouri Integrated Pest & Crop Management newsletter, MU weed scientist Kevin Bradley and master’s student Brian Dintelmann shared the results of a three-season research trial to determine what tactics, if any, could be used as a recovery treatment for dicamba-injured soybeans.

“Collectively, results from all three years of this study indicate that if your soybeans have become injured with dicamba, the best thing you can do is to irrigate if you are able,” the two noted. “This will help them recover some, but not all, of the yield that would have been there had the injury not occurred.”

Dicamba recovery study

Coming to that conclusion required these researchers to intentionally injure the soybean plant at the V3 or R2 growth stage. They simulated a drift event by spraying one-one hundredth of the normal rate of dicamba.

Two weeks later, they came back with 10 recovery treatment options ranging from fertilizer products to fungicides to growth hormones to weekly irrigation.

The study took place from 2017 to 2019.

Results are in

“Over the three years that the study was conducted, the results are pretty straightforward,” they report. “Weekly irrigation was the only recovery treatment that resulted in yields that were higher than dicamba-injured control.”

However, the two also pointed out that none of the treatments, even the irrigation, produced yields as high as the control, which was free of dicamba drift.

For more on the 10 treatment options and to see how they fared in relation to one another, visit the MU IPM webpage.