Australia
March 29, 2016
Everything is bigger in America (go big or go home). Cars, food, supermarkets, houses (McMansions), weeds…
American weeds are huge. Weeds like tall waterhemp and Palmer pigweed grow 2 to 3 metres tall (six to ten feet in “American”) and can have seed set of up to 1 million seeds per plant.
And these aren’t even the big ones.
Tall waterhemp and pigweed represent the world’s biggest herbicide resistance problem. These weeds infest millions of hectares and are resistant to multiple herbicides (with glyphosate resistance the biggest problem).
Herbicide bills for some farmers went from $75/ha pre-resistance to over $250/ha once glyphosate resistance set in.
The good news is that Dr Jason Norsworthy and others from the University of Arkansas have looked at the biology of pigweed and found its Achilles heel.
Seed retention.
Sure, these weeds set a lot of seed, but they retain 99.5% of them at harvest. Bingo!
Harvest weed seed control (HWSC) has a lot to offer and a little country down under has the answers. Australian farmers and researchers are world leaders in harvest weed seed control. We’ve invented seven different techniques, including the most recent innovation, the integrated Harrington Seed Destructor (iHSD).
As Albert Einstein wrote: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”.
In other words, herbicides are not the answer to herbicide resistance. Herbicides will definitely play a major part, but alone they aren’t the answer.
To learn more about these American weeds and just how big an opportunity HWSC presents to American grain growers…
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