July 18, 2018, Columbia, MO: Two Grow More Experience site participants attempt eating gelatin with different utensils to highlight the importance of using the right tool for the job at hand.

Farming is hard work, and it’s even harder when not using the right tools. To convey this point, we asked 2 participants at a recent Columbia, MO, Grow More^TM Experience event to eat gelatin – one with a knife and the other with a spoon. The participant with the knife struggled, proving that, at least for eating gelatin, a spoon is the better tool of choice.

Just like utensils, herbicides are tools that help achieve a task. And choosing wisely matters. Other than seed selection, herbicides are one of the inputs you can control that have the biggest impact on yield potential. Planting into clean, weed-free fields provides your crop the best opportunity to start strong without competing for valuable nutrients, sunlight and water. Earlier trials at our site showed that early-season weed competition in corn fundamentally alters the way corn plants grow and permanently reduces their yield potential.

When selecting corn and soybean herbicides (tools) for next season, it is important to include multiple effective sites of action (SOAs) for your driver weeds and to not depend on any single SOA for control in either a pre- or post-emergence application.

In soybeans, the use of pre-emergence, residual herbicides like Boundary^®, BroadAxe^® XC and Prefix^® are key to managing multiple resistant weed species. Relying on post-emergence herbicides to effectively manage weeds has become a thing of the past. In PPO-susceptible populations, Flexstar^® and Flexstar GT 3.5 are strong post-emergence options following strong residual pre-emergence products for effective management.

To combat weeds in corn, we recommend a 2-pass system of Acuron® or Acuron Flexi pre-emergence, followed by Halex® GT post-emergence for an additional SOA. Each corn herbicide premix contains multiple SOAs for built-in resistance management and provides long-lasting residual control, especially when layered in a 2-pass system.

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All photos are either the property of Syngenta or are used with permission.