Lisa Behnken, Ryan Miller, Fritz Breitenbach, and Jeffrey Gunsolus The planting season is slowly underway and plans may be in place, but they may need to be adjusted if you haven’t matched the right herbicide to the weeds you have or if the weather makes it impossible to get all your preemergence herbicides on. First, you need to know which weeds are in your fields and whether they are resistant to certain herbicides or not. Then you should make sure you have chosen the right herbicide(s) to do the best job on those weeds. Understanding the effective sites of action (SOA) of herbicides is an important part of this process. In other words, which weeds will they control? Unfortunately, the glyphosate era of weed control made chemical weed control too easy, as glyphosate provided effective broad spectrum control of many weeds in many different crops. Overreliance on glyphosate brought herbicide resistance and the “easy” era came to an end. During this less complicated era, it wa...
