The Harrington Seed Destructor (HSD) is on the verge of taking the step that most grain growers would like to see. The majority of Australian grain growers who have seen the HSD are very positive about the concept of destroying weed seeds as they exit the harvester. It seems crazy that we would spread the weed seeds back over the field (so we have something to spray next year!). However, many growers have commented that they are reluctant to tow such a machine behind their harvester. Agricultural engineers from the University of South Australia in collaboration with AHRI, are taking…

Imagine if some technology came along that made glyphosate kill glyphosate resistant weeds. If this did happen, what would we do with this technology? BioDirectTM (aka RNAi) is a new concept from Monsanto that could do just that. It could be the next big thing for the herbicide industry. The ‘i’ in RNAi stands for ‘interference’. RNA is essentially a small piece of genetic code that all living things use to carry out a specific function within a cell, including coding enzymes that plants need to survive. One way of killing the plant is to spray a herbicide that stops…