I like surprises at farm meetings. And Lee Briese was a pleasant surprise. He call himself "the crazy agronomist."

But I think he makes some sense.

“When a herbicide is broken,” Briese says, referring to resistant weeds, “you can’t fix it with more herbicides.”

Instead, the solution is a more “all of the above” approach. It involves crop rotation, cover crops, mulch on the soil surface and about 20 different methods of controlling weeds and reducing the seed bank that don’t involve the use of herbicide.

Briese – a Centrol crop consultant based out of Jamestown, N.D. – was one of the breakout session presenters at Sow What Now?, a one-day conference on resistant weed management in Fargo, N.D., recently. It was organized by Greg LaPlante, a Wahpeton, N.D., agronomist, and sponsored by the North Dakota Soybean Council and Bayer CropScience.

“I only use a herbicide when I have to,” Briese says.

He seemed most excited about ability of cover crops to control weeds, improve soil health and increase yields -- all at the same time.

“Name anything else that can do that for about $7/a per acre,” he says, referring to the cost of rye seed.

Briese and some of the farmers he works with have been using rye and other cover crops for several years.

Their goals are to keep the soil covered all year around and to have something living growing on fields as long as possible

“Black soil is an invitation to Mother Nature to fill the space. She does it with weeds.”

Another way to think what's going on is to imagine leftovers from a meal  If you leave leftover sunlight, moisture or nutrients in a field, something will grow to make use of them. It's a law of nature.

Briese encourages farmers to think of different, even crazy, ways to control weeds without using a herbicide.

Rye has a natural allopathic effect on weeds. It's not so crazy. Rye puts out its own herbicide to reduce competition.

A thick crop canopy will shade out weeds.

You could kill weeds with steam, he says, but he isn't sure how -- yet.

You could wilt them with ultra violet light. He imagines something like a tanning bed on wheels.

You can cut them off with a weed whacker mounted shafts between crop rows. “You could make this is your own shop,” he says.

You could collect weed seeds with the combine and haul them off the fields. They do it in Australia.

You could run weed seed through a hammer mill right on the combine.

You could zap weeds with electricity or burn them with a flame thrower. Commercial models of both are available.

You could sandblast them.

You could freeze them. A shot of anhydrous ammonia might do the trick, Briese says.

You could surround your fields with living snow fences. Thick stands of corn or sunflowers would catch catch  and prevent tumbleweeds from rolling across your fields in the fall and spreading resistant kochia seed.

You can manage resistant weeds, he says. It's not impossible.

 “You just have to start thinking about it creatively.”

Success may require a change in the way you think about farming and weeds.

“I want to manage an ecosystem,” Briese says. “I don’t want to manage herbicides.”

That doesn't sound so crazy.