9 September 2024. Paul McIntosh, Pulse Australia and WeedSmart.
Another big week of field days for myself, organising and speaking at the two Queensland sites for the GRDC popular Harvester Set-Up workshops.
This year was no different to other years with the practical knowledge delivered by the independent expert harvester team, across all machinery colours.
What was a bit different this year is the possibility of losing through label legislation, a couple of our much relied on knock down herbicides from the Bipyridyls group with a Mode of action in the Group L.
Why is this potentially very significant? Our weed control zero or minimum till farming system could be at risk of returning to more mechanical weeding operations involving a lot more time and diesel on our farms.
Why harvesters could alter the playing field back to more desirable less tillage events in the future, is that headers could be used as weed seed collection devices during our normal harvesting operations.
Other southern and western states in Australia, already have huge herbicide resistant issues in their one crop per year farming system and invented different tactics for extra control on weed seeds with harvester attachments.
We really should be employing our Northern Region harvesters in extra weed seed control by attaching a weed seed impact mill or fitting chaff decks that funnel the weed seed and chaff fraction onto your wheel tracks. Other Harvest Weed Seed Control tactics are windrow burning, chaff carts or bale direct.
We have relied on our suite of knockdown herbicides for some decades now and we are fast approaching a new era, where if we want to retain the huge benefits of zero or minimum tillage, we need to adopt more methods of weed control and Harvest Weed Seed Control tactics is certainly well within our grasp and skill set.
That’s all folks,
Paul McIntosh (JP Qual)
Above: Harvester workshop crowd on the Darling Downs last week.