management

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 11, 2020

Luximax gets its own NEW box

We all put things in boxes inside our head to help us organise our brain. A few of the important boxes I have inside my head – fishing spots, great moments in sport, top five meals of all time, jokes, song lyrics, useless trivia, movie quotes, WA town license plates, and of course the nothing box (the place every man retreats to when he has five minutes of peace and quiet!). Ok, it’s not an over-achieving brain but it gets me by.

However, sometimes something new will come along and it won’t fit into your existing boxes. It might need a new box.

Knowing how to use a new product in mixes and rotations with other herbicides can be a little confusing, hence the development of the “boxes” by the AHRI team a couple of years ago to help you put the right herbicides in the right boxes inside your head.

So, when considering this, what box do we put Luximax (Cinmethylin®)? Well… it gets its own NEW box!

AHRI researcher Dr Roberto Busi is helping us to understand some of these new products before they come to market. He recently investigated the product Cinmethylin which is a new BASF product called Luximax

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 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.

October 15, 2019

Mixing herbicides wins again

What sort of person goes to a cocktail party and sticks strictly to beer?

A smart one! We all know that mixing drinks can hurt the next day.

We can’t say the same for herbicide mixing though. The smart farmers and agronomists are mixing two or more herbicides targeting the same resistant weed to delay resistance and maximise weed control, and the science is supporting this approach.

AHRI researcher Roberto Busi is a long-term advocate of herbicide mixing and in his recent paper which describes some computer modelling that he undertook with the help of Michael Renton.

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…

July 26, 2019

Crops are doin’ it for themselves

We answer a few poignant questions in this insight, including: ‘Can crops do more of the heavy lifting when it comes to weed control than modern farming methods have allowed them?’

or

‘Have we tried so hard to protect crops from weeds that we have forgotten that they have innate mechanisms to ‘stand on their own two feet’ and ‘do it for themselves’?’

A series of important studies into the practical implications of harnessing the crop’s ability to defend itself against weeds are starting to produce important results, leading to improvements in farming practice and the development of new cultivars.

July 11, 2019

No knockdown, no worries, if…

As AHRI and Weedsmart Western region agronomist, Pete recently gave a presentation to a group of high rainfall farmers who were concerned that they hadn’t had a decent knockdown for three years in a row.  What he came up with, based on research and experience, was that we definitely should not be waiting for a knockdown, but we need to throw enough weed management at the farming system to make it work. No knockdown, no worries, if… To find out what the “ifs” are, click through to read the insight.

July 2, 2019

Thermal weed control – just hot air, or site-specific reality?

Did you know that rotary hoeing requires less energy than steaming? Or that offset discing requires less energy than microwaving?

Well, that’s the case when it comes to controlling weeds.

An epic effort to review 170 papers by a team from the University of Sydney (Guy Coleman et al) has shown that mechanical weed control options (eg. tillage) can use significantly less energy than thermal options (eg. heat) to kill weeds. Herbicide energy use sits somewhere in the middle.