New tool in the weed control battle

Lade said taking the chaff component and destroying the seeds is now something happening on 50 per cent of Australian farms.

Lade said it is due to growing concerns of herbicide resistant weeds.

“Resistance issues have been creeping up on to our farm north of Saskatoon whether it’s group one, group two wild oats. Kochia is coming in pretty hard that’s obviously group two resistant,” Lade said. “It doesn’t matter where you are. Let alone the glyphosate issue being reported not far from us too, and cleavers. You name it.”

“We are in a unique situation, I find that we can really prolong this issue of herbicide resistance just with using multiple modes of action,” Lade said. “I thought, let’s go one step further and incorporate the notion of harvest weed seed control now while we still have effective modes of action rather than wait until those modes of action are no longer available to us.”

Lade said US study showed if you can collect at least 50 per cent of weed seeds at harvest and destroy them you can prolong the life of herbicides by 10 years.

“Canadian harvest conditions are entirely different than Australian harvest. Every day in Australia it’s getting hotter and dryer. For us some of the best conditions are early August and it just gets colder,” Lade said. “We put this machine on for the majority of harvest, we never took it off, never smoked a belt, never had any issues in the 2018 harvest year which was pretty challenging.”

The Conservation Learning Centre (CLC) south of Prince Albert is taking a closer look at the Seed Terminator. There is funding in place to evaluate it for the next three years by collecting chaff material and growing it out.

CLC Manager Robin Brown said a producer collaborator allowed the team to go out into his field.

“There are strips where the Seed Terminator on the plot combine has been used and strips where it has not been used,” Brown said. “Over three years we’ll be doing weed surveys to see what comes up at different times of the year.”

“The past fall we collected chaff from what came out of the Seed Terminator and what didn’t come out and we currently have that planted in pots in a lab and we’re monitoring what does and doesn’t come up,” Brown said.

Lade said if herbicides were fully effective we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“I just feel harvest weed seed control is such a critical point to destroy weed seeds because if you think about a growing season where we seed our crop, we might apply some pre-emergent herbicide and might spray a post emergent herbicide,” Lade said. “We do know we all have some weeds — they may be small. To me those weeds need to be controlled there because they made it through the majority of the season, they are the fittest.”

(submitted video/Josh Lade)

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alice.mcfarlane@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @AliceMcF

by Alice McFarlane

New tool in the weed control battle

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