What is in this article?:
- “We have to take it seriously,” said Paul Pilsner, who works the upper Texas coast area for Coastal Crop Consulting.
- Cotton farmers encouraged to use residual herbicides to augment over-the-top applications.
- Farmers are still using pre-emergence herbicides and some are still deep-breaking land every four to five years. Also, some utilize crop rotation.
- Climate may help delay resistance.
- Some farmers are pulling out hooded sprayers to treat herbicide resistant pigweeds, and chopping weed escapes.
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Hooded sprayers
He said using hooded sprayers and keeping residuals “overlapped on the ground” to prevent pigweed from getting established are important options.
“A few growers are taking drastic measures to control pigweed. Some are resorting to using moldboard plows on land that’s been in conservation tillage. And they really don’t want to do that. They’re also using other herbicides and chopping weeds.”
He said harvest machinery moving from a field infested with resistant weeds into a clean field spreads the seed and the problem.
Consultants and the farmers they work for face other challenges.
Pilsner said 2010 was a tough year for pest management in south Texas. “We had the highest number of fleahoppers I’ve seen since I’ve been checking cotton,” he said. A warm, wet winter may have aided survival rate.
After the fleahoppers, farmers had to deal with Creontiades in larger than usual numbers. “Fortunately, they are not hard to kill.”
Stink bugs and plant bugs also posed some problems and he and other consultants expressed concern over potential pest resistance to Bollgard II cotton.
