Help Customers Plan Next Year’s Corn Herbicide Program
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As the winter months begin, now is the perfect time for you to help customers finalize their corn herbicide programs for the upcoming growing season. However, you might find it’s sometimes difficult to help farmers fully appreciate the importance of using a complete weed control program approach.
To make those conversations easier, we’ve laid out four key benefits of a program approach. Share these with your customers when discussing corn herbicides for next year.
- A clean slate for planting. “Starting with a clean field at planting is extremely important for a successful growing season,” says Jason Gibson, market development specialist, Corteva Agriscience. “Using tillage and/or a burndown application enables the preemergence herbicide to be uniformly distributed on the soil for greater effectiveness throughout the rest of the growing season.”
- Greater application flexibility. A program approach becomes especially important when weather impacts key spraying windows or the activation of residual herbicides. If Plan A doesn’t work out, you can shift the application timing or the tank mix to account for unfavorable weather conditions. View our corn application flexibility guide to learn more.
- Less risk of developing weed resistance. Without a program approach in place, fields are more likely to see weed escapes and require a second postemergence application — increasing the risk of weed resistance developing.
“It’s important to remind customers that most of the documented weed resistance in cornfields is from post-applied herbicides,” Gibson says. “By using multiple effective modes of action in each application, customers are getting better weed control and managing weed resistance for the current growing season and into the next.” - Less risk of developing weed resistance. Without a program approach in place, fields are more likely to see weed escapes and require a second postemergence application — increasing the risk of weed resistance developing.
“It’s important to remind customers that most of the documented weed resistance in cornfields is from post-applied herbicides,” Gibson says. “By using multiple effective modes of action in each application, customers are getting better weed control and managing weed resistance for the current growing season and into the next.” - Higher yield potential. Weeds can start reducing corn yield if they’re present as early as the V2 growing stage — and the risk to yield potential grows exponentially from there. In fact, waterhemp can reduce corn yield by anywhere from 5% to 20% depending on weed density. If your customers are growing 200-bushel-per-acre corn and you have a waterhemp problem, that could mean 10 to 40 fewer bushels per acre.1
Using a program will help control weeds when they’re small — and the residual activity will help keep new weeds from emerging throughout the growing season.
Reach out to your local Corteva Agriscience representative with any questions regarding herbicide options for your customers’ cornfields, and visit PowerOverWeeds.com to learn more about the powerful corn herbicides we offer.
1Hartzler, B. 2023. Influence of corn on waterhemp growth. https://crops.extension.iastate.edu/encyclopedia/influence-corn-waterhemp-growth