Grassweed control campaign succeeds

                                                       
Bayer CropScience has issued a massive ‘thank you’ to UK growers at the end of one of the most successful grassweed control campaigns on record.

Chris Cooksley, Bayer’s herbicide campaign manager, has praised growers for their diligence and encouraged them to ‘remember what you did this year and keep doing it!’.

 “Last autumn saw the perfect combination of weather and application opportunities, and growers and their agronomists chose to match that with outstanding cultural control and appropriate chemical choices,” he says.

“Their attention to detail is matched with a better understanding of the need to maximise pre-emergence weed control: flufenacetbased products (such as Liberator), mixed with other residual active substances, help reduce the reliance on follow-up sprays of Atlantis WG and concentrate the herbicide at the point where grass-weeds are highly vulnerable.”

Striking Back Against Back-Grass

It’s agronomists like Philip Spencer, of Fieldfare Agriculture in Essex, who Mr Cooksley is singling out for praise. Walking more than 16,000 acres, Mr Spencer is acutely aware of resistant black-grass - 75% of his 20 farms harbour resistant populations.

“Stale seedbeds, delayed drilling, pre-em stacking and autumn Atlantis WG applications have been my tools this year,” says Philip.

“With them, we’ve moved from 60% control to more than 90%. Weather helped - there was moisture for the stale seedbeds, and moist soil for the stacked pre-ems. “I’ve changed my opinion on Atlantis WG. When it was first released, I used it from mid-March to mid-April, but by this time the black-grass is too large and soil conditions are too wet or too dry.

“The first year I switched yielded an immense difference in control. It’s been hard to convince all my customers that Atlantis WG works best in autumn. But it’s a percentages game and the chances of having perfect conditions in spring are much lower than in autumn.

“I now use these cleaner fields to back up Bayer’s trials data to convince other clients to spray in autumn.”