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| Ed, we have battled shattercane in some fields that we rented about 6-7 years ago as well as on another farm we rented previous to that. When we first rented these farms shattercane was so bad that in large parts of the field you couldn't see the corn the previous year. Most of the shattercane came down the river & farmewrs didn't bother to clean their equipment before moving to the next field.. Birds are also great at scattering the seeds. They eat the seeds then fly away & crap it out in another field.
We had good luck with Clearfield corn but the seed companies seem to be moving away from it. :~( Option does a real good job on it and of course gylsophate does a good job. Only problem is you may have to spray a patch several times in one crop year to get it under control.
Whenever we see a stalk we pull the whole plant & remove it from the field. Just cutting the head off doesn't do any good as I have seen cutoff plants put heads on. During harvest we carry a bucket in the combine & grain cart tractor & try to cut off all the heads we see. If we have a field that has quite a bit in it we will leave several clean acres to harvest after the rest of the field is harvested & then will blow the combine off with an air compressor or leaf blower, do the same for the cart as well.
We have pretty well got the problem whipped but it seems like there are always a few stalks come up somewhere every year.
Also have battled black nightshade a couple times. Not much fun trying to clean out a combine that is dripping from the mashed berries. berries are almost impossible to seperate from beans as they almost the same size. Best way we found to harvest them was either when the berries were still green or when they were frozen. Glad that we have only had a couple of bad outbreaks over the years. | |
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eastern black nightshade in conventional soys
