OAK LAKE, Man. – With a giant bump and lurch, John Johnston and his truck bounce over some obstacle hidden under the thick, lazily waving brome grass of the ditch.
“WHOAH!!!!!!!!!” he exclaims, as his coffee sloshes around in a cup that truly does have a spillproof lid.
“I think every mole in Western Canada moved onto this patch of road,” he says to his passenger as an explanation for the bumpy conditions.
Most people wouldn’t want to start their workday at 6 a.m. bouncing along ditches, peering for invasive weeds, controlling spray equipment and carefully monitoring the wind, but that’s the happiest time in a weed supervisor’s worklife.
Read Also
Vegetable oil stocks are expected to tighten this year
Global vegetable oil stocks are forecast to tighten in the 2025-26 crop year, this should bode well for canola demand.
On a sunny late-June morning,
Johnston has to confront yet again one of the frustrations of the chopped-up life of a “weed supe.” By 7:45 a.m. the wind has picked up and Johnston can no longer safely spray, so he grudgingly moves on to one of his many Plan B’s.
“We expected to spend the day here, but now the wind’s up,” said Johnston, as he headed back to the municipal shop in Oak Lake, where his district’s weed control operations are based today.
“What we do changes hourly.”
The happy hunting time is the early morning, before the winds build. If it rains, he has to stop spraying. If it gets too hot, he has to stop spraying. His job fits into little pockets of time when everything is right to pounce on the weeds.
Johnston and the weed supervisors and their assistants in Manitoba’s 34 weed districts are the front line in the war against invasive weeds.
Johnston decides to check out some wild leafy spurge patches to see whether biocontrol methods are working. Later he will seek out small weed infestations and do pinpoint spraying.
In his part of southwestern Manitoba, Johnston is grappling with leafy spurge, a pretty, hardy and destructive weed. Weed supes elsewhere fight the local scourges, from Canada thistle to kochia.
In Manitoba’s Interlake area the weed supe is fighting red bartsia, a weed that, like many of the local farmers, was imported from Scandinavia.
Weed supes in other parts of western Manitoba have to fight scentless chamomile, which they blame on Saskatchewan weed parents.
For Johnston, leafy spurge is far and away the leading cause of grief to local producers, and he has spent his career fighting it.
Leafy spurge grows where good hay grows, but cattle hate it. The spurge is difficult or impossible to digest. As it spreads, it takes over hayland and pasture.
And it isn’t happy to share land with other broadleaves and grasses. It is allelopathic, which means it poisons the soil around it so that in the centre of leafy spurge patches, nothing else will grow.
“There’s a patch over there,” says Johnston as he drives back down the Trans-Canada Highway toward Oak Lake, spotting the telltale yellow flourish of a thick and flowering patch of leafy spurge.
This morning’s spraying took place along the central ditch of the highway between the eastward and westward lanes. Many local farmers had complained about the huge swaths of leafy spurge growing there and Johnston had called the Manitoba Highways department to complain.
Since they weren’t able to spray it themselves, they hired Johnston’s weed district to do the work.
The district also does custom spray work for the railways, pipeline companies and for local farmers and landowners.
In areas with many cottages or acreages, weed supervisors often have to invoke their powers under the noxious weeds act to clean up rogue patches, but this area is mainly agricultural and most of Johnston’s work is welcomed and requested.
Although he has fought leafy spurge for years, Johnston does not expect to defeat it. He knows the tough weed is a perennial problem that farmers will always have to fight.
But he doesn’t despair because he knows that if leafy spurge can be knocked down to being simply a nuisance, farmers will be able to live with it.
Spraying works quite well. In one ditch that Johnston has been spraying for years, it takes him a few moments to find a single leafy spurge plant.
“This place used to be covered with the stuff,” he said with grim pride.
But not everywhere can be sprayed, and Johnston and his colleagues have been introducing spurge-eating bugs in an attempt to reach inaccessible reservoirs of the weed, and to weaken its outbreaks in ditches and pastures.
To check on the bugs’ progress, Johnston drives to the centre of a rough and hilly area of wooded sand hills, where leafy spurge has run wild.
He’s looking for tiny brown beetles that were imported and released to eat the weed. After looking at only a couple of leafy spurge plants, he finds some.
He’s also happily surprised to find a few horn-headed, red-faced caterpillars that are stripping leafy spurge stalks of all their leaves.
This species of caterpillar was released dozens of kilometres away, but has caught up to the weeds here.
“Sometimes things work out,” he notes about these mobile spurge-mowers.
It’s the same with his job. Ditch-spraying had to be abandoned after little more than an hour this morning, but there are other things a weed supe can do, and a visit to the heart of leafy spurgedom shows that a little bit of this and a little bit of that can win battles in the endless war.
“I’m pretty pleased,” he said, before driving back to the spraying equip-
ment in Oak Lake to rearm.
