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Dicamba drift interferes with nearby field research

Dicamba drift from a neighbor’s field has interfered with soybean research trials in southern Illinois.

Phil Krieg helps manage the Syngenta Grow More Experience site on the Rend Lake College Campus. He tells Brownfield they did not know dicamba would be sprayed in the field just 150 feet from the test plots. He says they cannot spray dicamba in accordance with the label on their site, but they did plant some dicamba tolerant soybeans and can see the leaves puckering on other varieties on campus up to a quarter mile away. 

“Fortunately that happened early enough that I don’t think it will impact the yield so much, but from a phytotoxicity standpoint in some of our trials where we are looking at herbicide damage on soybeans it did present a challenge.”

Krieg tells Brownfield spraying early is the key with dicamba and residual herbicides are the key to combating resistance in weeds like waterhemp and palmer amaranth. 

“The easiest way to control those weeds is to never let them come up because it is when we start to address those weeds in a post-emergent fashion that we start to build resistance.”

Krieg says while the jury is still out on the future of dicamba he thinks it will remain available, but restrictions will be tightened.