Making a herbicide application after the planter has already gone through the field often involves “a very narrow window of opportunity, especially when temperatures are warm,” says Tom Eubank, assistant Extension and research professor at the Delta Research and Extension Center, Stoneville, Miss. “The approach I advocate is for the planter to chase the sprayer, and where farmers used this approach last year, they didn’t have nearly the injury issues we saw when we were making an application behind the planter."
To reduce the amount of herbicide injury in soybean, says Tom Eubank, growers should “stop chasing the planter with the spray rig, and instead chase the spray rig with the planter.”
While soybean growers have a roster of effective residual herbicides for use against Palmer amaranth (pigweed), he says, they should be aware that crop injury can occur.
“We’ve got to have residual herbicides to manage our weeds,” he said at the annual meeting of the Mississippi Agricultural Consultants Association, “and we may have to accept some level of crop injury as a necessity in order to get the benefits that come from using these products. But we can significantly reduce this injury potential by changing the timing of these applications.”
TOM EUBANK
Eubank, assistant Extension and research professor at the Delta Research and Extension Center, Stoneville, Miss., said the 2013 crop year is a good example of the injury scenario.