News

Dicamba drift damages soybeans in Arkansas

Thousands of acres of Arkansas soybeans have been damaged by drifting dicamba, and the number of damaged acres is expected to increase.

Arkansas Seed Growers Association President Scooter Hodges tells Brownfield he’s seen damage and has heard that as much as 20,000 acres has been hit with off-target dicamba herbicide.

“That will grow,” Hodges told Brownfield Ag News Wednesday in a soybean test plot at Forrest City, Arkansas.  “That will grow, because all of our soybeans are at different stages; some haven’t even come up, some are just now being planted.  Hodges, who works for Simplex Seed Company, lives in Cabot, Arkansas, and saw a damaged field at Forrest City.

“There is a field of soybeans damaged about 3 ½ to 4 miles south of here,” said Hodges.

University of Arkansas cotton specialist Bill Robertson tells Brownfield some of the damaged can be explained by applicator error, but he says some of the damage is hard to explain.

“[Applicators] were using the right droplet, they were using the right gallonage, their boom height was good, they were doing everything as good as they could, and then they would see drift symptomology upwind from that,” Roberson told Brownfield Ag News.

So far, university specialists aren’t  sure if drift complaints are the result of newer lower-volatility formulations of the herbicide, or from older formulations.

AUDIO: Scooter Hodges (3 min. MP3)

AUDIO: Bill Robertson (7 min. MP3)