Benefits of a Burndown Ahead of Your Winter Wheat
Fall is one of the busiest times of year on an eastern Canadian grain farm. With everything competing for your attention, weed control ahead of seeding winter wheat can feel like a lower priority. However, late fall is a great time to scout for and manage perennials and winter annuals. Using BlackHawk herbicide with glyphosate as part of a pre-seed burndown is one of the most practical steps you can take to set your winter wheat up for a clean, competitive start.
Why Weeds Before Seeding Are a Bigger Problem Than They Look
Winter wheat is seeded when a lot of weeds are still actively growing. Dandelions, shepherd’s-purse, stinkweed, mustards and sow-thistle are all common at that time of year, and they don’t need much of a window to get established. If they’re present at seeding and left unaddressed, they go into winter with a head start for next spring. Come spring, these larger established weeds will be harder to manage with in-crop herbicides, especially during wetter years when in-crop herbicide applications are delayed.
Glyphosate alone has historically been the go-to option for a burndown ahead of winter wheat, but we now know the value of using herbicides or tank-mixes with more than one effective mode of action. Resistance in common ragweed, giant ragweed, Canada fleabane and pigweeds has made glyphosate-only programs increasingly unreliable across Eastern Canada. What worked five or ten years ago doesn’t necessarily cut it today.
What BlackHawk Brings to the Tank
BlackHawk is a great tank-mix partner with glyphosate, for a faster and more complete burndown of a number of perennial and winter annual broadleaf weeds ahead of seeding winter wheat. It provides activity on a number of challenging weeds such as Canada fleabane including glyphosate-resistant biotypes, common ragweed and giant ragweed including Group 2- and glyphosate-resistant biotypes and pigweeds including Group 2- and 5-resistant biotypes.
Fall Timing Works in Your Favor
Fall applications of BlackHawk can be made prior to seeding winter wheat or post-seeding prior to emergence. If for some reason growers need to pivot and re-seed in the spring, there are no spring plant back restrictions with fall applied BlackHawk.
Resistance Management Starts Before the Crop Does
Using multiple modes of action in your burndown isn’t just about getting better control this fall. It’s also about protecting what you’re putting in the ground. Using multiple effective modes of action at pre-seed timing should be common practice in eastern Canada.
By building resistance management into your pre-seed burndown with BlackHawk, you’re proactively slowing down the rate of resistance development . That has downstream benefits for your in-crop program too, because going into the crop with a cleaner field and a lower weed population means in-crop applications are dealing with fewer, smaller weeds. This helps make these products more effective and helps preserve valuable active ingredients that play a key role in many in-crop herbicides.
Give Your Winter Wheat a Head Start It Can Build On
Winter wheat that goes into clean fields starts spring in a much better position. Early competition is one of the main factors that drives yield loss in cereal crops, and some of that competition can be addressed before a single seed hits the soil.
Reach out to your local Nufarm representative to talk through your pre-seed burndown options ahead of winter wheat.
