What are farmers going to do when glyphosate and multiple herbicide resistant weeds begin appearing around Manitoba?
That’s a question that’s going to likely be answered in the next couple of years, because the plague of glyphosate tolerant weeds that has sickened fields across the U.S. South and Midwest has shambled like a zombie horde through Western Minnesota and eastern North Dakota and is clearly getting closer to central and southern Manitoba farm country.
Glyphosate resistant kochia is already a problem in southern Alberta and western Saskatchewan, and last year two fields in Manitoba were found with the same menace. It’s begun to appear. So what happens now? That’s a situation and question I pondered with weed specialist and glyphosate resistance specialist Jeff Stachler. He is a former North Dakota State University and Ohio weed specialist who now is establishing his own company to advise farmers and agronomists across the U.S. on how to deal with this engulfing issue.
Read Also
Proactive approach best bet with looming catastrophes
The Pan-Canadian Action Plan on African swine fever has been developed to avoid the worst case scenario — a total loss ofmarket access.
I met with him in Fargo on Saturday as he was coming in from a trip to Michigan to check out the resistant weed problem among sugar beets that has spread up there as it has around his town of Kindred, North Dakota. Above you’ll find a video piece on our meeting. (Look for stories about this in coming weeks in the paper version of The Western Producer. We have one story in the paper that comes out June 5. I’m in Minneapolis now, where I’ve been meeting with traders at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange and the Canadian consulate, and I’m leaving in a few minutes for Des Moines, Iowa, where the World Pork Expo is about to begin, so it might be a couple of weeks before I write all this up.)
