Soybean piles collected from the following trial treatments at the Dixon, IL, Grow More™ Experience site: Saltro® + Boundary® 6.5 EC (Left); Saltro + Fierce® XLT (Center); ILeVO® + Fierce XLT (Right)

Agronomists at Midwest Grow More™ Experience sites created a few trials in 2020 to help evaluate the crop safety of various early-season inputs and their season-long impact on crop performance. Here are a few variables that they found can impact soybean plant health:

Herbicides

Cool temperatures and rains in the days around preemergence applications can lead to slow crop emergence and extend the amount of time the crop is exposed to active herbicides in the soil. While injury from residual applications is not common during favorable conditions, it is still important to be aware of possible adverse effects of certain preemergence herbicides. Watch this video for an overview of how our preemergence herbicides’ crop safety compared to competitors when the Columbia, MO, Grow More Experience site received 1.4” of rain around crop emergence.

Seed Treatments

In addition to herbicides, seed treatments can play a role in crop safety both above and below ground. Although some soybeans can outgrow early-season above ground plant stress, they may never recover from below ground stress. Root damage has a lasting impact on yield potential because it hinders water and nutrient absorption during the reproductive stage. When comparing the effects of seed treatments above and below ground, we regularly see consistent and uniform growth with our Saltro seed treatment fungicide compared to ILEVO seed treatment. Take a look at this video from our Sheridan, IN, Grow More Experience site to see how early-season stress can impact growth.

Yield Impact

Agronomy service representative Kevin Scholl walks us through how 2 herbicides and 2 seed treatments together impacted soybean yields at the Dixon, IL, Grow More Experience site.

Here are the yield results* sampled from these 3 programs:

• Saltro seed treatment + Boundary 6.5 EC herbicide = 290 pods
• Saltro seed treatment + Fierce® XLT herbicide = 268 pods
• ILEVO® seed treatment + Fierce XLT herbicide = 214 pods

For an all-season, all-weather soybean seed treatment and herbicide program approach, we recommend protecting your beans with Saltro seed treatment. Saltro-treated soybeans had a 4 bu/A yield improvement over ILEVO under SDS pressure.^[1]

Fight tough weeds with a preemergence application of Boundary 6.5 EC, which did not negatively affect crop safety like the competitor. Boundary 6.5 EC provides multiple effective sites of action and can then be followed up with a post-emergence application of Tavium® Plus VaporGrip® Technology herbicide in dicamba-tolerant soybeans. Tavium is the first and only dicamba premix formulation, containing dicamba plus S-metolachlor, offering you a convenient tool to manage key ALS-, PPO- and glyphosate-resistant broadleaf and grass weeds. The combination of contact and residual control from each respective active ingredient means Tavium will manage the weeds you see and help protect against the weeds you don’t see yet.

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Product performance assumes disease presence. Performance assessments are based upon results or analysis of public information, field observations and/or Syngenta evaluations.

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* = Yield results were taken from 5 soybean plants randomly in each trial row.

^[1]U.S. trials with SDS pressure; 2015-2019. Trial locations: AR, IL, IA, KS, KY, MI, MN, MO, TN, WI. Trials with significantly different disease incidence/severity rating between Check and SDS treatment.