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A three-year study looks at 10 strategies to mitigate yield loss from dicamba injury.

Mindy Ward, Editor, Missouri Ruralist

July 20, 2021

1 Min Read
soybean plants with dicamba damage
DAMAGE CONTROL: Once a soybean field is hit with dicamba drift, it causes cupping of leaves. It can produce yield loss. University of Missouri researchers looked at ways to help soybeans recover from a dicamba event. Mindy Ward

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.

About the Author(s)

Mindy Ward

Editor, Missouri Ruralist

Mindy resides on a small farm just outside of Holstein, Mo, about 80 miles southwest of St. Louis.

After graduating from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a bachelor’s degree in agricultural journalism, she worked briefly at a public relations firm in Kansas City. Her husband’s career led the couple north to Minnesota.

There, she reported on large-scale production of corn, soybeans, sugar beets, and dairy, as well as, biofuels for The Land. After 10 years, the couple returned to Missouri and she began covering agriculture in the Show-Me State.

“In all my 15 years of writing about agriculture, I have found some of the most progressive thinkers are farmers,” she says. “They are constantly searching for ways to do more with less, improve their land and leave their legacy to the next generation.”

Mindy and her husband, Stacy, together with their daughters, Elisa and Cassidy, operate Showtime Farms in southern Warren County. The family spends a great deal of time caring for and showing Dorset, Oxford and crossbred sheep.

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