Crop Protection Moves Focus to Managing Weed Control Systems
February 19, 2020 Our CropLife 100 report in December indicated that retailers, by the numbers, had a steady if not stellar year in crop protection sales. About two-thirds of retail respondents said sales revenue increased or stayed flat in all three major categories. This occurred even in the face of a historically challenging cropping year through a hefty portion of the Midwest.
But the numbers belie some significant stressors in the crop protection market in the season ahead, driven by both the overall trends and market conditions and the manufacturer approach to marketing programs.
On the supply side, there’s a significant hangover from the 2019 season, in particular where prevent plant acres were dominant. In northwest Ohio, where retailer Luckey Farmers operates, trying to move last year’s leftover inventory is job one. “Everyone here at Luckey agrees we’ve never seen a year like this and never want to again,” says Mike Molnar, Agronomy Sales and Marketing Manager.
Weed Control Programs
After three seasons of working through the dicamba labyrinth of evolving regulation and challenging field conditions, along with new traits and options coming online, retailers are inclined to speak of the challenges of managing weed control programs rather than using one system option.
In Illinois, one of the hotbeds of dicamba complaints in 2018 and 2019, the state Department of Agriculture placed the 2020 cutoff date for dicamba application at June 20 and placed a temperature threshold of 85°F, above which dicamba cannot be applied.
Feelings about the use of dicamba in the state run hot and cold, with not a lot in between. Regan Wear, Agronomy Manager at CHS Inc., Shipman, IL, has a more balanced view on the contested chemistry.
“I think we definitely need to keep it in our arsenal of weed management strategies,” he asserts, adding that the number of complaints they received in 2019 was definitively lower than in 2018. Training and the willingness of neighbors to interact with one another about the weed technologies they’re using on their farms helped to mitigate problems.
Both Wear and Molnar, who does not use dicamba in his region due to the abundance of higher-value sensitive crops, emphasize using all the tools available, including a solid residual control program. “We want them to start clean and stay clean with residual products and not rely on post control entirely,” Molnar says.
One benefit of the challenging 2019 season was that a number of Luckey Farmers customers gave cover crops a try and found that soil tilth was improved. “They liked what they saw,” Molnar says. “We’re looking at ways to work with farmers to increase adoption of cover crops in 2020.”
On the chemistry side, retailers are employing all the existing tools to manage problem weeds that continue to plague the Midwest, including 2,4-D, glyphosate, and glufosinate tolerance in various combinations, as well as conventional crops. The options are giving farmers more options for managing weeds, but it’s on the retailer to manage the multiple and often incompatible cropping systems.
In Wisconsin, where smaller fields and high crop diversity are the norm, managing multiple soybean systems has proven extremely challenging. “By having Enlist, Xtend, Liberty, and Roundup in the mix, we’re not spraying soybeans, we’re spraying four different crops, says Brian Madigan, Agronomy Manager at Country Visions Cooperative in Chilton, WI. “That is a big concern for us — we used to spray corn, clean out the machine, and spray beans. Now we have to clean out a sprayer for individual bean varieties. It really cuts down on our ability to be efficient, and we struggle with adopting these technologies.”
Wear says that CHS will dedicate rigs to products and technologies to reduce the risk of making a mistake in season, which he admits will mean having rigs travel several miles past fields that employ incompatible seed technologies. “But it makes more sense for us than stopping and flushing continuously,” says Wear.
Taking a step back, Wear says that just writing orders in the first place takes three to four times longer than in the heyday of Roundup Ready. “We spend a lot of time with mapping, communicating between hub plants, and confirming technologies with customers and neighboring farmers.”
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