Australian golfer Adam Scott keeps his eye on the ball. His ability to concentrate and focus amongst the chaos of a major golf tournament is outstanding. We would all love to focus on one task and do it well, but the reality of life is that we are rarely afforded this luxury. For grain growers, managing resistant weeds is just another thing to fit into the complexity that is farming. Growers that afford themselves the time and motivation to focus on managing resistant weeds are having a win. They declare war on the weed seed bank and have a ‘take…

The best option to maximise the weed seed bank is to harvest high and spread all of the weed seeds evenly over the paddock. This will give you something to spray next year. If you, like most others, feel that this is a bad idea, it may be time to start narrow windrow burning. Narrow windrow burning is a good place to start to see if this harvest weed seed control caper is all it is cracked up to be. The first step is to spend some time familiarising yourself with a beer can. The internationally accepted harvest height when…

As Darkan farmer and inventor of the Harrington Seed Destructor, Ray Harrington, aptly says, “Harvest weed seed control is a pain in the ….” – but it is an imperative tool in continuous cropping systems”. “To win the war you must win the battles. Harvest weed seed control is an important battle. If you’re not implementing weed seed control at harvest, you’re out of the farming game”. It’s a tough message to hear, and it’s one that growers from Wagin, Lake Grace and Ravensthorpe in Western Australia heard at AHRI’s “More crop, less weeds – sustainably!” workshops last week. The…

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…