Greater flexibility, better control and more reasonable prices are what soybean herbicide marketers were offering no-tillers for the 1998 cropping season.

Technical representatives from Zeneca Ag Products, Monsanto, DuPont and American Cyanamid shared popular no-till herbicide programs with attendees at the National No-Tillage Conference in Indianapolis, Ind. Along with No-Till Farmer and IMC- Agrico Co., these four firms sponsored the event.

Zeneca Ag Products

No-tillers have a new formulation of Touchdown herbicide available this growing season.

“During November, Zeneca got Touchdown 5 labeled,” reports Chris Weed, senior technical service representative for Zeneca. “This formulation has a built-in surfactant system.”

Touchdown 5 is labeled as a pre-plant burndown in no-till corn and soybeans. The active ingredient, sulfosate, helps Touchdown 5 control weeds in four to seven days.

There will still be some 6-pound formulations of Touchdown sold in 1998. This formulation needs a non-ionic surfactant added. And for both compounds, you will need to add ammonium sulfate.

Weed, who covers Kentucky, southern Illinois and northern Tennessee, notes that most soybean growers he works with use a tankmix of Fusion and FlexStar.

Fusion is a flexible, broad-spectrum, post-emergence soybean herbicide that controls 27 different annual and perennial grass species. FlexStar is a non-ALS, broad-spectrum, post-emergence soybean herbicide that suppresses 50 broadleaf weeds.

“The number of complaints I had on those two compounds in 1997 was almost zero,” says Weed. “They control tough weeds like crabgrass, fall panicum, foxtail, rhizome Johnsongrass, giant ragweed, waterhemp and pigweed. You just don’t miss many weeds with…