Spraying Your Fields to Bed

After a long year in the field, the last thing you want to think about is going across your farm with a sprayer one last time.  However, this could be exactly what it needs, not only for weed control, but also for buying a little time in the spring.

Depending on the moisture received during post-harvest, you could see a flush of new weeds.  Although spraying post-harvest wheat stubble has become a mainstay year in and year out, many people don’t think about another application in the late fall to put that field to bed.  There are a few advantages in doing so:

• The late fall application can pick up any weeds you possibly missed earlier to keep them from going to seed.  This is also a great time to control certain weeds that can be more susceptible as the temperatures start to drop, such as bindweed.  As resistance spreads to more chemistries and weed biotypes, killing weeds so they don’t go to seed has never been more important.
• We never know what the weather has in store for us, and if it keeps us out of the field, we can be backed up with a lot of acres to cover in a pre-plant burndown scenario.  This is where a late fall application will help in spades.  The picture above shows what an October burndown application looked like in late May vs. a quarter that received no fall treatment.

Helena provides many burndown herbicides that can help your farming operation stay clean moving forward.  Our acid technology products will help get a quicker, more complete kill in every application.  Please contact your local Helena representative to learn more about our pre-mix burndown herbicides.

- Joe Janecke, Product Manager