With fewer new herbicides coming on the market each year, no-tillers are paying much closer attention to developing more effective weed-management plans. As a result, no-tillers are intently studying how various herbicide and tankmix combinations perform in their fields.

Four industry representatives who spoke on weed control in no-tilled corn at the recent National No-Tillage Conference offered distinct ideas for the coming year. They included:

• Dane Bowers, a technical support representative for Syngenta Crop Protection from Kokomo, Ind.
• David Lamore, a senior technical service representative with Bayer CropScience at Bryan, Ohio.
• Barry Nash, a technology development manager with Monsanto at Plainfield, Ind.
• Bruce Maddy, a customer agronomist for corn herbicides with Dow AgroSciences at Noblesville, Ind.

Plan For Weed Resistance

Bowers says no-tillers need to think seriously about keeping glyphosate-resistant problems from developing on their farms. “Syngenta’s recommendations are not to use more than two glyphosate applications on any given field in one year during a 2-year period,” he says. “In the year following, you should rotate away from glyphosate and use other herbicide products. This means no-tilling both Roundup Ready soybeans and Roundup Ready corn back to back is not desirable from a resistance management standpoint.”

While the Roundup Ready system is a good program, he maintains that you need to choose whether a no-tilled Roundup Ready corn or Roundup Ready soybean system best fits your farm. One way for no-tillers to strive to prevent resistance is to rotate chemistries, such as using Gramoxone Max as a burndown herbicide…