Burndown Essential to Weed Control in Cotton

Last week at the 25th annual Joint Commodities Conference, Dr. Alan York, professor emeritus in the weed science department at NC State spoke on resistant weeds in cotton, and continuing the stewardship of the herbicides available that are effective on resistant weeds:

“We are doing a much better job today than we were five years ago, but we still have room for improvement. One of the messages is that yes we are doing a good job, but we may be setting ourselves up for problems later. Unfortunately we don’t have a lot of new tools coming.

I will be in a hearing for Section 8 application being cleared for the use of break in cotton which is already being used in GA and SC.

There is a product called Break F2, that is a premix of floridone, an old aquatic herbicide and about a half rate of phomesiden, the active ingredient in Reflex. Floridone is the most widely used aquatic herbicide in the country and cotton has a very good tolerance to it. It has a mode of action that is not being used in any other row crop. So that lets us break up our chemistry a little bit. We are worried about the weeds of tomorrow and we think it could help us and that is why we are asking for a section 18.

What we have been doing was working great for the time, but the system broke and I think we have learned some hard lessons. We are trying to do a better job now than we used to do.

There are some other resistant cotton varieties in the works, they are the Inlist and Extend technologies, 240 and Dicamba resistant cotton. They are going to give us one more mode of action that we have not used. The technology is good, the tolerance within those crops to 240 or Dicamba is good, and while its not the silver bullet, we can put good systems together.