“I can’t keep dicamba in the field” has been a frequent comment I have heard from many frustrated folks who have followed the rules and tried their best not to drift on their neighbors. Quite a few good and conscientious farmers have thrown up their hands and gone back to Flexstar to try to control pigweed in soybean. Others have reported that they often have been successful not drifting onto non-target areas. However, judging by all the off-target dicamba injury, that seems to be more the exception than the rule.
So what are the reasons for all the drift? After visiting hundreds of dicamba-drifted Roundup Ready, Liberty Link and conventional soybean fields that easily have totaled over 30,000 acres, I can say with certainty that many of the reasons I have heard recently from upper management in Monsanto are NOT the cause of all these dicamba-injured broadleaf plants across west Tennessee.
I cannot imagine the hundreds of thousands of acres of non-dicamba tolerant (DT) soybeans in Tennessee that have shown dicamba injury could be due to contamination of Liberty jugs with dicamba, calcium deficiency, Dual Magnum burn, and/or surfactant burn. Nor do any of those reasons explain the dicamba injury I have seen in a vineyard, gardens, trees in parks and back yards – even my backyard.
We do not need speculative reasons to explain all the drift issues, as there are plenty of real reasons. Firstly, though it looks straight forward on paper, it is extremely hard to follow the label. The best example of this is that you cannot spray when the wind is above 10 mph or below 3 mph. Just that stipulation when you have crops to spray timely in three different counties makes the logistics a nightmare.
Read more of the News Story here.
This story was originally published by the Cotton Grower magazine.