About Your Fields April 16, 2018
In This Issue
1. Dicamba Revisited
2. Field Views
3. What's Next
Dicamba Revisited
A couple of months ago we published an article about dicamba, and we feel that this is a subject of such importance that we would look at it again. As many of you if not all of you know the introduction year for dicamba traited soybeans did not go as smoothly as many had hoped. At a meeting in December that I attended a meeting in which Mr. Doug Owens who is in charge of the enforcement division of the Illinois Department of Ag stated that at that time his office had more complaints dealing with just dicamba than they had in total the year before. You could say to yourself, "What is everyone worried about, it is only the first year, we can learn how to handle this chemical safely." The problem with this line of thinking is that we don't have time to "figure out " or "learn" how to safely use dicamba. At the end of 2018 the 2 year registration of the three dicamba products will expire. A couple of articles that I have read have stated that even if the registration is extended, it won't be past the year 2021. When you break it all down we need to be able to show as an industry that we can do this safely without causing excessive damage. To help facilitate this a series of new rules and guidelines was established by each state. The key part of these new rules is that anyone applying dicamba products to soybeans in 2018 must be certified. The way to get certified is to attend a free class put on by a certified trainer. Akron held one of these classes on January 18th, and IFCA has held numerous training classes throughout the winter. The last class was held on March 28th and in a press release the Department of Ag has said over 11,000 applicators have been certified. If you were not able to attend a class you can still get certified online. If you click on this link IFCA Dicamba Training Website you will be directed to the webpage with links to the training modules. Also if you have taken a class and have not received your certificate you can look here for help. If you need a refresher on what some of the guidelines are to safely handle these products here is an article from Ag Professional magazine that talks about dicamba application in 2018 8 Things to Know About Dicamba Application in 2018, pay close attention to #6 as it is a list of good things to think about when making any chemical application. When thinking about what we are facing I can't help but ask what would we have to do in order to make 2018 a successful year for dicamba, the best article that I have read defining success was posted by Dr. Aaron Hager from the University of Illinois Dicamba: What is Success or Failure in 2018?. One of the key items that you need to do in order to make 2018 a success is keeping accurate records we will post a link to a copy of the proper form on our website that you can print off as needed. If you have any questions about dicamba don't hesitate to give one of the agronomists at Akron a call, we would be happy to answer them.
Field Views
Going forward whenever we have observations of what is going on out in the fields of our trade area this is where we will be publishing them. This past week we started to see a little action happening out in the fields with annhydrous starting up again and even a little spraying starting to happen. We finally started to see some warmer temperatures that started to dry the soils out. But unfortunately we were stopped in our tracks come Friday due to some rain which lasted most of the weekend with accumulations of a half an inch or better for most or our area. And in keeping with our current cycle we had snow on Sunday, just think only 4 more weeks until we have our 7 Sundays after Easter. I don't think the temperature will allow us to keep having snow, but you never know what will happen. One nice thing about snow is that it takes 10 inches of snow to make 1 inch of rain. So I guess if it is going to precipitate all day I would rather have snow than a steady rain, as long as it warms up during the week to dry us out. We will see how this week progresses for field work.
What's Next?
Last week we talked about a started additive called Invigorate that we tested last year and saw positive results both in furrow and through the Y-Drop system. I thought this week we would take a quick look at products that we are testing in 2018 with starter fertilizer. First off is a new version of an old classic Avail, manufactured by Verdesian. Avail has been around for many years as a product to enhance the availability of phosphorus fertilizer to the plants. The problem with this product for our area is that if your pH was below 7.3 and above 6.0 it was not as effective. The reason for this was that there was not enough sites available for the P molecule to bind to for protection. The new formulation has more sites available and will work in the pH range that we find in most of our fields . The next product I will discuss is also from Verdesian called Takeoff. This is a biological product that we have tested in foliar applications in a product called Symbol Advance. Takeoff is just the biological portion of this product separated from the nutritional part. Our last product that I will discuss is Receptor from Helena. This product is a Plant Growth Regulator (PGR) which goes in furrow and will help the plant deal with stress.