Using Cows to Battle Pigweed?

Kilarney Farms

Mark Burkett says he’ll keep trying to tame glyphosate-resistant pigweed ‘til the cows come home.
 
“We’re making some progress controlling pigweeds, but we’ve spent a lot of money having them pulled up, I know that,” he says. “On 6,000 acres – which is about what we plant each year – we’ve gone from spending $15,000 or $20,000 a year, to $34,000, to $60,000, and it was right at $75,000 last year. 
 
“We’ve increased what we spend on chemicals. Last year we used 12 ounces of Reflex and 12 ounces (per acre) of Direx behind the planters. We came back with Roundup and Staple when the cotton was four to six inches tall. We used Staple on every acre. We then came back at layby with Valor and Direx. As you can see, we’re using just about every chemical available to try to control our pigweed problem. We’ve used everything there is to use, and we’re still not getting the control we need.” 
 
Burkett, who farms near Donalsonville, GA, says until new chemistries are available, “we’re going to have to do whatever it takes to fight resistance. I’m worried about pigweed developing resistance to Valor. It is one chemical that seems to do a good job controlling pigweed.”
 
Rotating Cotton and Cows?
A common practice of Burkett’s is to plant a cover crop after cotton harvest in some of his fields for his cows to graze on in the winter. 
 
“When we get through in the fall – if it’s a field we want to do this on – we’ll run an Amadas stalk chopper over it,” he says.
 
The Amadas stalk puller/chopper pulls the cotton roots completely out of the ground and chops them into smaller pieces. 
 
“Then we come in with fertilizer trucks and spread two bushels of wheat and three bushels of oats per acre, along with the fertilizer. We disk it in lightly,” Burkett explains. “If we need to turn the center pivots on, we will. Then from the first to the middle of December, we’ll move the cows into those fields.” 
 
“Rotating cotton and cows” is not an entirely accurate description of what Burkett’s doing, but it has a nice ring to it and an interesting side effect: By planting cover crops for his cows to graze on in the winter, in some cases the shade provided by the cover may actually be enough to prevent pigweeds from germinating. Once the cotton is up in the spring and growing vigorously, it can provide its own shade. 
 
“There’s no doubt that if you have enough cover crop left when you burndown, yes, it will help shade pigweed out. There’s no doubt about that,” Burkett says. 
 
But in reality what Burkett does is a matter of economics. 
 
“Instead of feeding hay during the winter, we take advantage of these big fields and center-pivots to plant wheat and oats and water it all up,” he says. “It’s just a cycle. Sometimes a field will stay idle. In fields where we do the grazing, we’ll strip-till. In the ones we don’t plant into grazing, normally we’ll rip and disk.”
 
“We’ll graze them until April, then we move the cows back to the pastures and burndown what they’ve been grazing on.”
 
This spring, Burkett used Valor with Gramoxone as a burndown, and says, “It works real well, based on what I’ve seen, in peanuts and cotton. On the land we strip-till, we have to put it out, wait about seven to 10 days, then come back in with the strip-till rig. Then we apply Staple behind the planters.” 
He plants three Deltapine varieties: DP 1050 B2RF, DP 1048 B2RF and DP 1034 B2RF.
 
Pigweed Hayride
Burkett will sometimes bale peanut straw for hay to feed his cows until his cover crops emerge. 
 
“We take the peanut straw coming out the back of the combine and roll it up with a round hay bailer,” he explains. “We’ll take the rolls of peanut hay and feed the cows while we’re waiting for the cover crop to grow. And we’ll feed them some hay as roughage during the winter.”
But Burkett says using peanut hay comes with an extreme caution.
 
“We won’t roll a field if we haven’t gotten good control of pigweeds. If you do, you’re going to move some of it around,” he explains. “Where you feed the hay, you’re going to wind up having pigweed growing. That’s one way pigweed is being moved around.”
 
One pigweed plant is capable of producing thousands of tiny seeds that can move along on the slightest breeze, in the basket of a cotton picker … even on a cow’s hooves. A seed from a resistant pigweed plant can travel for miles and infest an otherwise resistance-free field. 
 
Resistant pigweed is also showing up in places like sidewalk cracks, drainage ditches, around signs and highway right-of-ways. 
 
“We’ve noticed that the county road departments are spraying Roundup on the ditches now so they don’t have to mow,” Burkett says. “They kill the native grasses and we wind up with strips all up and down the highways full of pigweed.
 
“So you have no native grass, no native cover, and the pigweeds just dominate. You think you’ve done a pretty good job in the fields, but when you ride up and down the highway, you see ditches full of pigweeds. We’ve gone to the county commissioners and talked to them about it, and hopefully they’re going to do more mowing and less spraying. But economics might not make that work for them.” 
 
Stripping vs. Ripping
Burkett says some farmers in his area who had been strip-tilling in the past are now ripping and bedding. And some who had been ripping and bedding are trying strip-till.
 
“Everybody is trying to do something different to control pigweeds, and I don’t know who’s got the right answer,” he says.
 
In his fields that are broken and bedded, Burkett says it’s essential to start clean. 
 
“We’ll burndown if we need to with Direx and Gramoxone,” he explains. “We’ll come back in with Treflan with our fertilizer, and then either Staple or Reflex behind the planters.
 
“When you think about it, farmers are going back to a lot of things we used to do. A lot of people got away from using yellow herbicides. But we never stopped using a yellow herbicide. I use Treflan even where we strip-still. I stayed with it.”
 
Anyone remember rope-wick bars?
 
“I had a field behind wheat that was so bad. The pigweeds came up with the cotton,” he says. “So we bought two wick-bars and ran them across probably a thousand acres. We put straight Gramoxone in them and it killed the pigweeds. That bought us enough time to get the cotton up to where we could plow it and run a layby rig through it.”

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