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THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2024
IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY
Waterhemp peeks out among soybeans.
Waterhemp – know your enemy
once you run it through the com- bine.” At a recent farm show, Brown told producers there is no clear and easy way to control waterhemp. It thrives in hot, dry weather and germinates throughout the summer. Once you have it, it’s almost impossible to get rid of it. What should you do if you detect water hemp on your field? Brown says weed control must be done when the weeds are small, less than 10 cm or four inches. However, “Rescue treatments” of herbicides have resulted in poor control, at best. Brown believes proper consistent management is the key. “You’re not going to get a popu- lation in a field that is 100 percent resistant to absolutely everything. You’re going to have combinations. And that’s why you keep using lots of different products. Some of them are only going to work on some of those plants. But you have to keep throw- ing stuff at it.” Waterhemp does not appear to be a problem in competitive crops like wheat and canola, but it is a serious issue with corn, dry beans, sunflow- ers, and soybeans. Brown says there are lots of things producers can do that don’t involve a lot of extra capital or work. “You could try herbicide layering to get weeds out early when the crop is non-competitive, and in-crop op- tions become limited.” Other options include narrow windrow burning, chaff carts, chaff lining and tramlining, and weed seed impact mills. Optimizing com- bine settings to ensure weed seeds are captured has also been shown to be effective in waterhemp manage- ment. Manitoba Agriculture also encour- ages direct baling, right behind the combine so nothing hits the ground, and the chaff and the straw are dropped on the conveyor belt and go into a baler.
groups 9 (glyphosate), 2 and 14 her- bicides. Glyphosate resistant plants are showing up on Manitoba fields in an alarming number, producing up to a million seeds per plant. “We’ve kept it out until now, but it is here and it’s not going away,” says Kim Brown, a provincial weed spe- cialist who works with Manitoba Ag- riculture and is involved in training and extension of new and existing weed issues. “Getting those invasive plants far away from your field and keep- ing them away should be a prior- ity for every producer. You should pick them out. You should not run it through your combine because you will spread those thousands and thousands of seeds across your field. And that combine will spread it as well. You can’t clean pigweed seeds out. It’s tiny like little flakes of pep- per. It just sticks. You will never clean it out. You will move it to every field
by LORI PENNER M anitoba Agriculture is urg- ing producers to keep their eyes open for waterhemp during the upcoming crop season and do whatever it takes to keep the plant’s insidious seeds from spread- ing. Tall waterhemp (Amaranthus tu- berculatus), is a prolific Tier 1 weed under Manitoba’s Noxious Weed Act that can devastate crop yields. While it’s been problematic in the U.S. for years, it was only discovered in Man- itoba in 2016 and confirmed in 2017. By 2019, it was found in five munici- palities. That number has now risen to eight. These detections have involved a substantial number of acres and sig- nificant hours of mowing and spray- ing to destroy plant material. Tests of Manitoba waterhemp show some plants are resistant to
LORI PENNER THE CARILLON
Kim Brown, Manitoba Agriculture provincial weed specialist.
them, so waterhemp will not seed, but even this measure has limited results. “Everywhere where there is a gap or black dirt, the seeds can take a hold. Every seed is resistant and can grow as big as it wants. We have to do everything we can to stop the seed from returning to the soil. We can do lots of things, like pick a taller variety of crop, seed heavy, and ensure good fertility to get that crop up and going. We want to have good emergence. We need to cover the ground quickly and we won’t have these problems.” Farmers who spot an unusual looking weed should contact their agronomist or Kim Brown at kim. brown@gov.mb.ca. They can also submit samples to the PSI Lab at mbpestlab.ca/about/.
“Those weed seeds are still there, but they’re in that bale. And they’re moved off the field. So that is some- thing that we are very concerned about, but that at least stops them from spreading in that particu- lar field. And if that straw is being used as feed somewhere, we have to watch that manure. Those seeds are not slowed down at all by going through an animal.” Brown says producers need to learn to practice weed control with non-chemical methods. “The chem- icals we have will fail. It’s only going to get worse. So, we have to do ev- erything we can outside the spray tank to reduce the number of weeds we are spraying and the number of weeds on our field.” Manitoba municipalities are watching their ditches and mowing
Accent on Agriculture by JIM RAE T he annual meeting of the Keystone Agricultural Pro- ducers was held last week in
Another speaker quoted the American billionaire, J. Paul Get- ty, who is reputed to have said, “The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.” The speaker pointed out that farmers are among the most meek people in society, but they pay a big price for not being more aggressive, not beating the drum for their con- cerns. But there was another way to showing the state of Manitoba ag- riculture. And that was from who didn’t appear. The only federal pol- itician was John Harvard, a Winni- peg MP and parliamentary secre- tary to the agriculture minister. And no other provincial politi- cian, government or opposition, was there, listening to the issues being debated, or discussing the role government should take. And as for the media, well, the farm press you would expect was there. But the ones farmers would like to show up, like the Winnipeg Free Press and CJOB didn’t. So the story of what’s important to farm- ers, what concerns them, what is getting done, won’t be told. At least, not to the general public. Delegates will tell you it was a successful convention, and it was. But at the same time, it was a dis- appointing one. (Jim Rae is the former host of In- formation Radio on CBC Radio. He retired from the job in 1996, after 30 years as a farm broadcaster. The long-time journalist and author of this column for 27 years, died after an accident Feb 2 , 2024. He was 83)
Winnipeg. It was a real eye-opener if this was one’s first venture into the politics of farming. As a farmer sits on his tractor or milks cows, or trucks animals or grain to market, it seems to them that agriculture is the basis of life. It’s the basic block upon which Manitoba is built. Without food production, where would any of us be? But that’s not the story the rest of society is receiving. There were many examples. The provincial minister of agriculture, Harry Enns, told the delegates that days, weeks, and months go by with not one question for him on agriculture. He said that farmers all think farming is the backbone of the province, but if you sat through a session of the legislature, one would never even know that there was a farm business in the prov- ince. Jack Wilkinson, the Ontario farm- er who is president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, raised a few eyebrows when it took a shot at Premier Gary Filmon for so aggres- sively courting Maple Leaf Foods and its $112 million hog processing plant in Brandon. But then the CFA president told the farmers where he was coming from. He said Canadian farmers invest 6.2 billion dollars in their farms, every year!
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