When Weed Killers Miss Their Mark

The field appears as a checkerboard: thriving green crops beside squares of shriveling beige stalks.

This was not a farmer’s bad luck. Instead the field was intentionally sprayed with 13 different weed killers to show their effects on various crops as well as the consequences of herbicides that drift from their intended target, according to an article on The Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES) website.

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“Would a farmer do this to a field? Absolutely not,” said Harold Watters, an agronomy field specialist with OSU Extension, the outreach arm of CFAES.

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“The purpose is to share what can happen when things don’t go as planned.”

For farmers, weeds are more and more of a vexing problem as the herbicides that used to kill them no longer work. Just about every year at least one weed in Ohio is shown to survive a herbicide that used to destroy it, Watters said.

Read more at CFAES.OSU.edu.

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