Speaker 1: We’re in an area of the field that has been treated with a full rate of a soil residual herbicide. What you’ll notice here is a relatively clean field. You’ll see a few weed seedlings here and there that have been injured by herbicides and are very small, less than 1 inch tall. Essentially we have a situation here where we do not need to spray a post-emerge herbicide to get full yield out of our corn crop.
This is traditionally the way corn was produced in the Eastern Corn Belt, with full rates of residual herbicides. You would have a relatively clean seedbed for 6 to 10 weeks after planting, and on rare occasions, we would need to use post-emerge herbicides. With the rapid adoption of Roundup Ready and LibertyLink corn, we’re quickly reducing our reliance on soil applied residual herbicides and becoming more reliant on post-emerge strategies.
The problem that we have in the Eastern Corn Belt is the fact that almost every spring is a wet spring and you can count on a 1 to 3 week time period, sometime during the spring, in not being able to get in these fields and get them sprayed in a very timely manner. We’re big proponents of continuing to use soil applied herbicides in corn production, particularly in fields that have heavy weed infestations and have routinely required post-emergence weed management strategies in the past.