Put a Hood On It
February 13, 2012 If there is one crop protection issue that growers have grown to hate over recent years, it’s weed control. More specifically, it’s glyphosate resistance management and prevention across much of the Cotton Belt.
So a sustained period of great marketing prices for cotton should help to ease the burden of weed management, according to University of Tennessee Extension Weed Specialist Chris Main.
“The fact that we do have dollar cotton does make weed control much more attractive, and makes it easier to implement a lot of the practices you hear my colleagues in weed science and myself talking about,” Main says. “We’re talking about things like making sure we use multiple residuals in the crop, making sure we get the hoods back through there, making sure we do have that hand-hoe crew coming in and eliminating those escapes.
“Otherwise, especially if we were looking at loan value cotton, we wouldn’t be able to implement all those practices to get this resistant population of weeds under control,” Main says.
Main and his colleagues encourage growers to invest what they can of their profits into weed prevention and management. And one of the products he feels strongly about this season are the new hooded sprayers that are available on the market.
“Probably what we’re seeing a little bit more of than what I was expecting, is these guys transitioning to some of these new-style hooded sprayers that have a different configuration with the open front to get the weeds through. I think these guys are already transitioning some of that profit into getting some of these weeds under control,” Main says.
Because new hooded sprayers were used in abundance in the Mid-South in 2011, Main was able to gauge how effective they’ve been. The hoods have proven essential in areas where the weather didn’t cooperate with weed management plans.
“The places where we saw the sprayers used with really great success was in areas where we had problems getting pre-emergence herbicides activated, and they got a few pigweeds up in the field, and we couldn’t get control of them with Roundup,” Main says. “They were able to come in with these hoods and use things like Gramoxone and Valor under them.”
And like any good piece of equipment, Main says the hooded sprayers can also help to save money, in this case on the back end of weed protection systems. It’s no secret that in many cases, hoe crews provide the highest cost in a weed management program.
“For the smaller grower who maybe is more diversified, yes there’s a very steep expense that is incurred when you have to go sign a contract crew to come in and go do that hand-hoeing,” Main says.
The labor wages for large crews can be staggering, especially if weeds are prevalent enough to cause the crews to work long hours. Main insists hooded sprayers can help control that input cost.
“In places where resistant weeds were bad, if the growers were able to implement a hooded sprayer, they were at least able to clean up these row middles and make them manageable where a crew of hand-hoers could come in and finish removing the few pigweeds that were left in the row. That made the hand-hoeing operation much more economically manageable,” he says.
GET THE NEWSLETTER TODAY!
