ST JEAN BAPTISTE, Man. — There’s a lesson from Sesame Street that every farmer needs to remember:
“One of these things is not like the other,” Dennis Lange, a Manitoba Agriculture crop adviser in the soybean-heavy Red River Valley, said while showing photographs of three pulse crops.
“Make sure you know what you have next door (when you’re spraying)” because not all soybeans are the same, and not all bean-like plants are soybeans.
Lange said many farmers in eastern Manitoba assume every crop that looks like soybeans is Roundup Ready, but that’s not always true.
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“I’ve had a few instances where growers just made the assumption that the field next to them is soybeans, and it turns out its dry beans.”
It can be bad news for the neighbour if the farmer has been spraying Roundup and there’s drift.
The situation will become more complicated with the arrival of Xtend soybeans, which combine glyphosate and dicamba. Not all soybeans are Roundup Ready, and many won’t be dicamba-tolerant.
“If you’re going to be growing this kind of soybean and using that chemistry, you have to be aware of what’s next door,” said Lange.
Farmers have always been warned to be careful when spraying, but today’s farms are huge and are often spread out in parcels where the neighbors aren’t well known. Farming is also often more intensive than in the past.
“You have fields all over the place and at that time of year, you’re trying to get a lot done and maybe you’re spraying at night” said Lange.
That makes it very easy to make a mistake when eyeballing a neighbor’s crop, “especially from 80 feet away in the tractor cab.”
ed.white@producer.com
