The continued prevalence of herbicide resistant weeds pose a significant threat to the future availability of many of the industry’s most important crop protection technologies, making the need to take a proactive approach to weed resistance more important than ever. David Tanner, Liberty Product Manager at Bayer, spoke during the 2016 Bayer AgVocacy Forum earlier this month about the current challenges presented with weed resistance and ways that growers can work to combat them.
“75% of the soybean acres received one mode of action 10 years ago, and now we’re at over 100 million acres in the U.S. with glyphosate-resistant weeds,” he said in an interview during the Forum. “In 2016, an additional 15 million acres were reported to have glyphosate-resistant weeds, so the increase in resistance continues, and I think it stems from the premise that growers are looking for a simple and easy solution.”
Liberty has no known resistance in broad acre crops, and Tanner stressed the importance of keeping it that way.
“If you’re not controlling your weeds you’re not going to get that optimal yield that the seed genetics can perform, and we know that if we get resistance and we’re not able to control those weeds, that’s going to impact us in the future,” he said.
As part of the ongoing commitment to prevent Liberty resistance, Bayer has put together the STOP Weeds with Liberty Guidelines to help growers ensure that they continue to practice good stewardship with the herbicide.
Catch my full interview with David here:
Interview with David Tanner, Bayer