Australia
April 18, 2017

Ask any farmer how hard it is to wash the yellow trifluralin stain out of their clothes and you had better be ready for a tirade of domestic hardship!

“I just throw them straight in the bin these days”, commented one irate farmer. "I would sooner try and wash off a tattoo than remove that horrible yellow stuff from my work shirts."

No wonder the urban myth tells us that trifluralin was originally developed as clothes dye.

If Yaseen Khalil’s recent research is anything to go by, trifluralin would make a wonderful dye and it’s just about as hard to wash off stubble, as it is clothes.

Yaseen is completing his PhD at UWA under Ken Flower and has done some fantastic research to help understand which herbicides wash off wheat residue with rainfall and which are more tightly bound.

Yaseen compared Sakura, Trifluralin and Arcade (prosulfocarb) herbicides by spraying them onto wheat stubble then trying a whole range of techniques to wash the herbicides off the residue with simulated rainfall.

He found:

• Sakura washes off easily, Arcade less so and trifluralin less so again
• 5mm of rainfall was enough to wash all Sakura off residue and into the soil
• Herbicides sprayed onto wet stubble are more tightly bound than dry stubble
• Rainfall intensity had little effect

While this is good news for Sakura, this research also showed that rainfall, in general, does wash a range of the herbicides from stubble, just some more than others.

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Website: http://www.ahri.uwa.edu.au/

Published: April 18, 2017