New black grass chemistry on the way?

[Ian at Bayer]

We might be needing a new non selective herbicide soon enough... If glyphosate goes will you try to get glufosinate reregistered?

Unfortunately the re-registration of glufosinate in the UK is not a realistic proposition.

 

[Brisel]

Unfortunately the re-registration of glufosinate in the UK is not a realistic proposition.

Ouch. Even with no diquat or glyphosate to compete? What criteria would CRD deny it on?

 

[Godber]

I did last year. We returned to rotational ploughing ahead of the second wheat and hybrid barley (grown in 2nd cereal slot). No doubt that the hybrid barley suffered less Blackgrass than the second wheat, even though both were ploughed before planting.

This year, not so sure after this awful Spring. The advice is to get your nitrogen on early. If the barley won't grow, the Blackgrass will and takes over.

Blackgrass is also bad in the First wheat slot this year, where we had complete control in the preceding OSR.

I'm going to try putting hybrid barley in the first wheat slot where BG is really bad this autumn and hope like hell we get a warmer, drier Spring

Syngenta offered a prize for a quote on how good hybrid barley is at helping with BG control. My quote was "if only that were true".

Having said that, it didn't help that we suffered badly from BYVD and Gout fly. We will now insist that the seed is Redigo Deter dressed (Syngenta don't sell this). It won't be offloaded from the Lorry if it isn't.

@Two Tone you had complete control of Blackgrass in your preceding OSR but what cultivations followed?

 

[Oat]

Not a option here. There wouldn't be anything left!

A couple of years ago, I came up with the idea of weed-wiping the Blackgrass heads above the Wheat to stop the return of seed to the ground.

We hand painted a few 1 square metre patches of heads with Roundup to see what would happen. As the Blackgrass collapsed, it transferred the Roundup onto the wheat and killed it too.

The chemical should have dried on and been absorbed by the blackgrass by the time the plants collapsed, so the chemical shouldn't have transferred. If the blackgrass plants were collapsing because of death, then that suggests that the chemical should have been taken up and I doubt any residue on the leaf would remain active

 

[casemx 270]

Is glufosinate still on patent ? Or can any chem company take it on and hopefully run with it ?

 

[Brisel]

It is Bayer's. See above

 

[Two Tone]

@Two Tone you had complete control of Blackgrass in your preceding OSR but what cultivations followed?

Hi @Godber. The cultivations following the Rape, are once through with a 3 metre shakerator towing a 3 m furrow press. We shakerate as deep as we can to not burst ant BG seed up from below. The press sliced any large clods and leaves a good tilth to allow any BG and volunteer ORS to grow.

We then wait for a good chit and spray off with Roundup (twice if necessary) No need to disturb the ground again for the second flush of Blackgrass. It will start to grow as soon as the first lot starts to die.

Then we Sumo Trio ahead of the drill with the discs set shallow enough not to pull up any BG seed from below 2 inches

 

[Godber]

Hi @Godber. The cultivations following the Rape, are once through with a 3 metre shakerator towing a 3 m furrow press. We shakerate as deep as we can to not burst ant BG seed up from below. The press sliced any large clods and leaves a good tilth to allow any BG and volunteer ORS to grow.

We then wait for a good chit and spray off with Roundup (twice if necessary) No need to disturb the ground again for the second flush of Blackgrass. It will start to grow as soon as the first lot starts to die.

Then we Sumo Trio ahead of the drill with the discs set shallow enough not to pull up any BG seed from below 2 inches

We try to cultipress, with A points, a couple of passes no more than half the depth of the ploughing which is done every 3 years. You feel the need to move more ground but it is stirring up your Blackgrass. Maybe in a wet year like the last one we should move a bit deeper(we used to every year) if the soil structure is poor as this can be evident in a few places now.. Blackgrass is ruling the roost.

 

[Two Tone]

We try to cultipress, with A points, a couple of passes no more than half the depth of the ploughing which is done every 3 years. You feel the need to move more ground but it is stirring up your Blackgrass. Maybe in a wet year like the last one we should move a bit deeper(we used to every year) if the soil structure is poor as this can be evident in a few places now.. Blackgrass is ruling the roost.

Yes, it's b-gger. You need to help the drainage, because BG loves wet soils. If the water can't get down, it hangs around in the very top of the soil, starves the crop roots of oxygen and the BG takes over.

But you mustn't work deeper than the top 2 inches or you will drag up more BG seed.

We know that 70% of BG seed will die if buried more than 2 inches each year. And 70% of 70% in the second year, etrc, etc. Ploughing definitely helps but must not be done every year, because you pull the seed back up again. We plough every 3 years. Theoretically that means only 3% of what was ploughed down last time should be viable. But that 3% is still a hell of a lot.

If we get a Spring like this and we end up with a dire problem, we will be returning a massive amount of BG seed to the soil and a back at square one.

As I said, we didn't have a BG problem this year until March. Everything we had done worked well up until then. The Spring turned out to be a prolonged Winter. The pre-ems ran out of steam, the crops stopped growing and lost tiller, which allowed a new flush of BG to take over.

Believe it or not, we actually had 3 weeks of relatively dry weather in March, but no sun. The ground would not dry, we could not drill anything other then light or boys land, it stayed cold and everything just sat there, dormant or loosing tillers, except for the bl--dy BG!

Somebody needs to design a cultivator that makes a tilth on the top two inches, makes clods of the next 5 inches(without bringing any to the top) and Subsoils the down to 10 - 12 inches. The top 2 inches must not cap to allow water to get down to the clods and then into the fissures the subsoiler tines make. Nobody can do it unless you have uniform soil types in every field

What works one year doesn't the next, because extreme weather means you either did too much or not enough. If the top is too fine, you get a wonderful kill of BG in the Autumn, but it turns to mud in a very wet long winter. Too cloddy traps the BG seed in the colds, which are released and grow in the Spring.

What we need more than anything else is luck and a lot of it!

 

[Brisel]

Great Plains SL with LD tines?

 

[Rob Holmes]

Great Plains SL with LD tines?

*Kubota

 

[Two Tone]

The chemical should have dried on and been absorbed by the blackgrass by the time the plants collapsed, so the chemical shouldn't have transferred. If the blackgrass plants were collapsing because of death, then that suggests that the chemical should have been taken up and I doubt any residue on the leaf would remain active

That is exactly what you would think should happen. Unfortunately it didn't and all the wheat died. I wasn't the only one to try it and everybody I know suffered the same result.

I was convinced that if it had worked, we could hang some Wiper bags below the sprayer booms, use a Norrac to control the exact height above the crop and do the whole farm. It would have meant travelling at no more than 6KPH, but probably only have needed a relatively small volume of dilute spray.

 

[turbo]

I went and had a look today at the field that had system 50 in the spring,you would struggle to find many bg plants in it so I am coming to the idea that spring germinating bg is the problem.I have noticed that the bg is not like normal bg in that it only has 1 or 2 seed heads per plant(still to many) .