Keep Residuals in Mind

The rains are finally backing off, and it looks like we’ve got about a 10-day window to make some real progress in the field. That kind of stretch always creates a temptation to cut corners and just “get by” on the front end, especially on soybean herbicide programs. The problem is that weeds don’t care about your schedule, and once they’re up, you’re already behind.

This is where residual herbicides still earn their keep. It is easy to look at burn-down only as a cheaper option late in the season, but the math usually doesn’t hold up once you factor in a second pass for escapes and new flushes. The cheapest weed to control is still the one that never emerges. Products like Outlook herbicide, Zidua herbicide, and Dual Magnum generally run in that $10 to $12 per acre range, and they are doing exactly what you want them to do: buying you clean time early so you are not chasing weeds later with an extra trip across the field.

On the corn side, I’ve also been getting more questions about supplemental nitrogen, especially where people are concerned about losses after a wet spring. That is a fair concern, but it is worth being careful and not guessing blindly. We are getting into the window where tissue sampling starts to actually tell us something useful about what the crop is doing and what it still needs. If you want to pull samples and get a clearer read on your fields, now is a good time to start that process rather than reacting late when options are more limited.