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Weed specialist stresses importance of ‘Harvest Weed Seed Control”

Iowa State University Extension weed specialist Bob Hartzler says farmers need to do a better job of preventing weed seed, produced by weed escapes, from entering the seed bank.

“We just have a lot of growers who tolerate ‘non-economic’ infestations of late-emerging waterhemp, because they’re not affecting yield and they don’t affect the efficiency of harvest,” Hartzler says. “So they just let these late-emerging waterhemps survive because they don’t affect the bottom line in the short run.”

But left uncontrolled, Hartzler says, those weeds are producing thousands of seeds that build up in the seed bank.

“That makes it more difficult to obtain effective control in following years—and it also greatly increases the likelihood of new resistant traits showing up in the field,” he says.

Hartzler says Australia has been a leader in the area of “Harvest Weed Seed Control” (HWSC).

“Surveys of their farmers indicate about 70 percent of them are using some version of Harvest Weed Seed Control, where we try to destroy the weed seeds before they get into the seed bank.”

The Australians are using several different methods. But Hartzler says the ones that are probably most applicable for Midwest cropping systems are chaff mills, devices that destroy weed seed during harvest. “Tools that are attached to the combine that grind the weed seeds as they move through the combine,” he says.

Hartzler says that chaff mill technology is still being perfected, but he expects to see more interest in the U.S. in the years to come.

We visited with Hartzler at an ISU crop management event in late November.

Link to Hartzler’s blog on HWSC

AUDIO: Bob Hartzler

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