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April 20, 2020

New-comers causing trouble

How long have you lived where you live? If you’re a long-time local you will have seen new people come and go – some are gone before you get to know them and others stay and find their niche in the community.

Weed communities also change over time and it can take some effort to get to know and understand the new-comers. Will they thrive? Do they fit in? Will they disrupt the way things are done? Or will they go away again, almost unnoticed?

March 30, 2020

The reality of spontaneous mutation

Not surprisingly, de novo mutations are quite rare in the real world – but even rare things can happen if the population is large enough.

When it comes to the evolution of herbicide resistance, there are two biological pathways. The first is simply natural selection where a small number of the population can withstand a particular stress (e.g. herbicide), they set seed and eventually their progeny are the majority, and they generally thrive. Resistant alleles may prolificate at the site of selection (i.e. due to frequent and regular use of a particular herbicide at that site) or they might be imported from another site of selection as seed or pollen.

The second is ‘de novo mutations’ where the parent plants are both susceptible to the herbicide but a spontaneous mutation in the genes of the progeny renders it (and its progeny) resistant. Resistance that arises this way is very rare and often comes with a ‘fitness penalty’.

February 20, 2020

I can’t live without the Internet!! And I can’t farm without glyphosate.

There are certain things that come along and change the world – electricity, the Internet, mobile phones, and GPS to name just a recent few – and it’s very hard to imagine going back to living without them, even though people did for millennia. For farmers, conservation cropping changed the world – saving soil, water and bank balances along the way – and it is unthinkable to go back to full cultivation for weed control. Click through to learn more.

December 20, 2019

AHRI’s top performing insights and podcasts for 2019

We’ve had a fantastic year at AHRI from a research and communications perspective, so we thought it would be fitting to run through some of our top-performing AHRI insights and AHRI Snapshots podcasts for 2019.

December 12, 2019

2,4-D resistance does not affect the fitness of radish

Merv Hughes was not a fit-looking cricketer. Merv was a notorious consumer of food and alcohol, and it showed! Despite this, he was a successful professional sportsman. Mitchell Johnson, on the other hand, was the epitome of a fit, healthy fast bowler. But who had the better bowling average? You guessed it, big swervin’ Mervin!! 28.38 compared to Johnson’s 28.4. Ok, we’re splitting hairs here, but you get the picture, how fit you look is only part of the story.

If you grew 2,4-D resistant radish in pots on its own, and compared that to the good old susceptible radish of yesteryear, you would find that the resistant ones are a bit smaller overall, slightly shorter, have smaller leaves and they are slightly more dormant so they germinate a bit later.

You would think that all of this would add up to a less fit wild radish plant that is less competitive with our crops.

That’s exactly what AHRI researcher, Dr Danica Goggin, thought when she observed these differences in her research to work out how 2,4-D resistance works. So she studied it. Click through to learn what she found!

December 5, 2019

What’s the sticking point? Better pre-em efficacy in stubble retention systems

Pre-emergent herbicides are a valuable tool to underpin crop competition and suppress weed seed production in-crop, but when growers also want to harness the power of retained stubble they often run into a sticking point where pre-emergent herbicide efficacy is compromised. Most growers and advisors are aware that products such as trifluralin are quite tightly bound if they contact stubble during application, however, AHRI research associate Dr Yaseen Khalil has been working to shed light on the behaviour of the newer pre-emergent herbicides and how to use them in no-till, stubble retention farming systems. Click through to learn more.

November 4, 2019

Glyphosate and fitness – the quest continues

Fitness is a big thing amongst the AHRI Comms team. We have bike riders, runners, a kitesurfer, a netballer, a touch footy player – and there’s only seven of us.

Fitness is also a big thing in the world of herbicide resistance.

Perhaps that’s why we’ve talked so much about herbicide resistance and fitness in past AHRI Insights. In particular, how certain types of glyphosate resistance result in a fitness penalty, where resistant plants are weaker and more susceptible to competition from other plants.

Unfortunately, not all types of glyphosate resistance impose a fitness penalty. Click through to learn more.

October 4, 2019

Revealing canola’s super-powers

This AHRI Insight is a follow-up on an earlier article ‘Crops are doin’ it for themselves’ to where we investigated the complex interactions of competitive crops and their weed suppression powers.

While that paper focused on cereals, in this one we will consider the mechanisms at play in canola, a crop from the mustard family, long known for its allelopathic ability and yet the exact mechanisms are still shrouded in mystery.

September 25, 2019

Trending now: herbicide resistance management

‘Trending now’ seems to be everywhere – iTunes, Twitter, the news, so why not herbicide resistance? What have been the #Top5 trends in resistance management over the past decade?

As a young agronomist 20-something years ago (clearly before trending was a thing), I remember learning about the threat of herbicide resistance as if it was a kind of apocalypse. Some growers were genuinely concerned that they wouldn’t be able to continue farming.

We’ve come a long way in a relatively short time. In this insight, we look closely at what’s trending in the herbicide resistance management space.

September 19, 2019

What’s the cost of harvest weed seed control for YOU?

The ad in the paper that reads “Horse, free to a good home” seems to be a good deal at first, but what is the true cost of owning a horse? Roughly similar to running a Lamborghini as I understand!

The ‘do it yourself’ narrow windrow burning chute seems cheap at the time, but what is the true cost?

It depends…