Georgia Growers Are Anxious to Plant
April 26, 2011 April can sometimes be a month-long exercise in restraint for Doerun, GA, cotton grower Stacy Thaggard.
Like many farmers around the nation, Thaggard is anxious to put seed in the ground once spring gets into full swing. But he knows that timing is the key to producing a cotton crop in South Georgia. And recent weather patterns have led him to the belief that the later he can put a crop down, the better.
“I’ll tell you the difference. We had 40 acres planted April 28 of one variety. It yielded extremely low, due to how dry and hot this year has been. It’s drained me dry,” says Thaggard.
“I had a field of a very similar variety, from the same company, right across the road. I planted it behind some wheat on June 3, and it made 450 pounds better yield, on average.”
Thaggard says 2010 was an unusual year in his state. Drought-like conditions and searing heat for much of the growing season caused problems, especially on dryland acres. In 2009, when Georgia saw plentiful rains throughout the year, Thaggard averaged 1,323 pounds per acre on all of his cotton acres – dryland and irrigated.
“That’s unheard of,” says Thaggard.
In 2010, that same ground yielded significantly less – roughly 500 pounds less per acre. The difference was rainfall, and Thaggard says the later he waits to plant his crop, the better his chances are of catching timely rains. That’s why April is a trying time.
“A lot of these guys around here plant more than I do. And man, they’ll start planting on April 10, and it’s just killing me that I’m not out there planting and getting that cotton up,” Thaggard says, laughing.
“You know, it’s just hard to sit there and not start planting. But man, it’s been making a difference. I told my dad and one of my buddies that if I try to put a planter out there before May 5, flatten the tires on it to stop me.”
Battling the Weeds
Like nearly all growers in Georgia, Thaggard also struggles with glyphosate-resistant weeds on many of his cotton acres. In addition to running his 2,000-acre farming operation, Thaggard is also the General Manager of Doerun Gin Co. From that position, he’s seen first hand the toll glyphosate-resistance has taken on cotton growers in the surrounding area.
“When it first exploded out here, around 2006 or so, it was so bad that you couldn’t pick your cotton. You literally could not get a picker through it. I don’t think anyone around here abandoned anything, you just couldn’t do a quality job picking it. You couldn’t get anything done time-wise. You were off the picker more than you were on it, getting that stuff out of the picker,” he says.
But Georgia growers like Thaggard are poised to get a firm handle on the resistance issue, thanks to aggressive weed management plans. Thaggard says his strategy is to be proactive throughout the year.
“We’ve always used Prowl regardless of whether we’ve had resistance. And now we’ve gone back to using Reflex and Diuron behind the planter on every acre of cotton we plant,” says Thaggard.
Of course, Thaggard’s strategy to wait out timely rains plays a major role in getting his residual herbicides activated, especially on his dryland cotton.
“I like to strip till, but the only problem with that is if you’re not getting these chemicals to that ground, then you haven’t done anything. And if you’ve got a good, thick cover crop down, like we do sometimes, then you’re not getting it to the ground. You’re just about wasting it, unless you’ve got a pivot where you can turn around and water right in, and we do that where we’ve got a pivot. We try to get it in there within a day. As quick as we can get it planted we want to get those chemicals in the ground anyway,” he says.
Thaggard also takes variety selection into account when devising his weed management plans. He says he utilizes Bayer’s LibertyLink varieties like FM 1835LLB2 to take advantage of Ignite herbicide technology.
“On a LibertyLink variety, we can buy a bigger window — meaning we are able to just hit it while it’s in the cotton. My program in 2010 was that we hit most of the LibertyLink cotton twice with Ignite. And then once it was big enough, we came in with the layby rig and ran Valor and MSMA under the cotton. And it seemed to work really well,” he says.
“This past year was my third year growing LibertyLink cotton, and I’ve got it figured out better now. It’s a great product, but you’ve got to stay on top of it with the sprayer. If the weeds are small you can kill them. If they get up on you, you might not get all them all,” he says.
Thaggard says his weed program sometimes boils down to getting out in the field and manually pulling larger weeds out of the soil. While it’s a time consuming process, he knows that the alternative – letting the weeds go to seed – would spell disaster.
“Pigweed is a plant that gives you 400,000 or more seeds. So if you miss 100 of them, you can expect to see a whole bunch more. You’re right back in that mess again,” he says.
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