 So my talk is going to be very different than the previous one. If you are not directly involved in crop management and you don't do too much fieldwork after on your farm, this talk may not be of your interest because I was talking about a lot of technical stuff in the talk. So weed is something that we all have a little bit in our home, yard, garden, farm. You know, some people manage better, some people don't. This also depends on how much time and the money you actually spend on it. For most of the people, I should say for the majority of people, whenever they have weeds come up or any type of insects or disease come up on their crops, typically the first thing they think about is spraying pesticides. I don't blame them. That is the most effective way and quickest way to get rid of some of this stuff. Today I'm going to talk about potentially reducing some of the herbicide volume that you spray because they're short and they're expensive these days and also increasing the sustainability with cover crop because if you have cover crop in this field and you use the cover crop to cover the ground naturally, a lot of those cover crop can actually surprise, suppress quite a bit of weeds for you. For example, you can utilize multiple strategies. Natural cover crop would be the best because it's going to be the cheapest way for you to grow your own straw residue instead of paying people to get pine bark, needles, or fabrics like those. Those weed tarps or weed fabrics are actually quite effective if you want to use them. They typically last a few years, but still you have to buy them and they don't last forever. It's good and bad at the same time, but all these are considered to be physical weed control. You're basically including a barrier over the soil or the top of your field to prevent weeds from emerging. This strategy has been used on multiple types of crops, including row crops, vegetables, fruit trees and you can see all the pine barks covering around the blueberries and then you get Bermuda grass occupying the rest of the area. This is actually a very good strategy because you're not going to have much weeds from anywhere from coming up, so this picture looks pretty good. You know, fabrics, that's something that you can always use when you have perennial crops, seems to work better on perennial crops than any crops. Alright, so talk about cover crop a little bit more. That's going to be the main focus of the talk. So we run lots of cover crop study every year. Most of these are in the row crops. I've done some work with vegetables a couple years ago as well. So for this trial, everything was clean. We'll terminate the cover crop. Just see if we all right. There's no nothing else. And then if you have a lot of weeds in the field, particularly the broadleaf weeds, they will penetrate through your cover crop residue and then they will explore any holes that you have in those cover crop and establish themselves. So it didn't take long but two weeks later you can see this thing showing up in your cover crop area. However, that is still a lot better than if you don't cover the ground at all. Because if you don't, this is how much weeds you can have in a bare ground area, you know. So cover versus no cover, there's a quite a bit of difference. On some of the small seed weeds like pigweed or pomegranate or grasses, you can get over 60% even 90% natural suppression because of cover. All right. So some people ask me before, does cover crop residue work on all weeds species? The answer is definitely no. So in this test, we plant four different weed species in soil flats. Each soil flat was filled by organic soil. So we plant morning glory, sickle pot, pigweed and crabgrass in all those flats. We either we don't cover them at all or we cover them with different amounts of civil rye green straw and we harvest it from the field. You can see from morning glory whether you cover 2,500 pound or 10,000 pound, it does not make much difference. Morning glory will have a way to penetrate through the cover one way or the other because the seed size is pretty big. It has a lot of pushing power. For sickle pot, we see a little bit reduction in germination but still not too much because the seed is fairly large, close to soybean seed size. For pigweed, it is more effective when you have more residue covering the ground because the seeds are very small and they don't push very hard or they cannot push very hard during the germination process. Crabgrass is similar to pigweed. Looking at some data, the four colors of bars represents for weed species. For crabgrass and palmar, you can see how the germination decreased as the civil rye biomass increased on soil flats. However, for morning glory and the sickle pot, those germination rates stayed flat for most of the time. They did not respond to cover part residue very well. So this is a picture I found on the internet. I don't know who took the picture but it looks pretty good and I kind of curious how the gas civil rye established so thick around the plastic. That was a couple of years ago so we started to do some of our own trial, try to figure out the best way to establish civil rye in between the plastic beds. Our initial attempt was to rototill a strip in between a cover crop in early February and then this is how after we strip till the cover crop area and then we formed the bed in those bare strips. The issue is the strip till was wider, way wider than the bed and then this creates a bare ground gap right next to the plastic bed. That is not good. You can see the two strips bare ground that we also rototilled on each side of the plastic bed. All these bare ground strips created a lot of weeds down the road and they get really weedy, you know, see that two strips right there. That's basically where I didn't have the cover crop. It was all occupied by crabgrass and not such. So to improve the way we do things we'll adopt a different strategy the following year. So this time we established the plastic beds in the fall in October. We did it early and then instead of playing with the rototiller and the grain drill we didn't even use a grain drill this time. So after we formed the bed and you know it was all just a bare dirt you know fresh teal dirt and then we spread very heavy rates of cereal rye seeds over the top of the whole section on top of all the beds and then we basically just rely on the rain to wash all the cereal rye seeds into the roll middle because they don't stay on top of the plastic. The rain eventually washed off all the seeds into the roll middle and naturally established so the rye was able to naturally establish to ensure seed soil contact we actually use a tractor to run in between the beds a little bit you know to kind of run the seeds into the soil a little bit and then we also put down a good amount of fertilizer particularly nitrogen as in the beginning you know after we spread and also we fertilize the cereal rye before joining stage. So you can see in February I got some really thick rye and some other cover we have some other cover climbing this test as well they get real thick you know you still get wild mustard or wild reddish you know here and there you know in the roll middle but compared to the non-treaty check barragorn roll middle which is totally occupied by the weeds is a lot better to have your cover crop there and also before termination around the end of March we get pretty tall and really thick cover crop in the roll middle you cannot even walk through it we also had some treatment with our crimson clover to increase the nitrogen a little bit for the soil so if you want to mix some legume with your grain cereal grain cover crop you can do that as well so this is you know the two plots where you have some plots with full of cover crop and the legume versus full of wild reddish all kinds of winter weeds in the middle all right so that's the difference between the treatments before termination before transplanting so four weeks after transplanting the non-treated beds were full of weeds you know non-treated plots they were covered by weeds all kinds of different weeds this is where we terminated the winter weeds and lay down the chateau or your row crops called valor it's the same chemical this is where we burn down the winter weeds and lay down the chateau you can still kill all the weeds that that that exist in the in the area where you don't have to cover crop but it's going to take these amount of chemicals and potentially redid the application to do it and also when it gets to spraying chateau or most of the herbicides over the top of vegetable beds you don't want to do something that we did because when we spray chateau we drifted on the plastic and then after it rains they wash all the chateau into the blending hole this is why we didn't have much pepper or watermelon on these beds in the first place so this is something definitely causing concern if you have a big old self-propelled sprayer and you spray not only the royal middle but also spray over top of the tarp you got to have these amount of rainfall irrigation and plant back restriction all those all those good stuff before you can plant if you plant too soon before the herbicides are washed off from the plastic you're going to end up with some empty planting holes you know transplants are dead we also had a tree where we established the white clover it is a good strategy for perennial crop I think if you have white clover strips in between your blueberry your cherry trees or apple trees or you know peach trees you know I think that would be a good strategy you may still have to spray that strip you know right next to the crop you know or right around the trees because you don't want to have these type of perennial cover crop competing against your trees you might have to spray individual tree and kill a circle for a couple feet wide you know or radius something like that so in this test we basically throw in white clover as a interesting idea to play with establish yourself pretty well after one season after one winter and and then it was getting pretty thick in the summer this is a perennial crop it's a dutch white clover and you can spray to 40 on it to kill other broadleaf weeds but the problem is all these green cover whether these are green weeds or green cover crops they tend to draw insects and they also increase your disease pressure in the field so my phd student observed the significant more watermelon disease you know in the white clover plots that's something to think about when you use perennial cover crop in an annual production system all right for civil rye and crimson clover treatment we rolled it down green actually we didn't roll it we basically just use tractor to run run this thing down in the rolling middle and no herbicides will spray up to this point when the picture was taken all the weed suppression came naturally from the cover crop compared to the non-treaty check picture i showed this is how much we're suppressing you get naturally from the cover crop residue you know so far no chemical has been sprayed at at this point this is a civil rye and crimson clover rolled down green and after we rolled it down green we put a chateau over the top of the roll middle we probably killed a few transplants because the drift but still the weed control was pretty good compared to where we just rolled it green and didn't spray no pre you know pre is chateau in the roll middle all right this is a non-treaty check eight weeks after transplanting and then this is a chemical control background plots started with chateau four ounce and then post with sandia 0.75 ounce pepper seems to recover a little bit from this uh the chateau or battle drift but still we lost a lot of plants here but you can see the the roll middle stayed fairly clean eight weeks after planting all right this is a white clover plots looks like white clover did a good job holding most of the weeds back if a disease is a concern for the uh curcurbits for rye and crimson clover this is the plot we rolled down green didn't spray no pre no chateau and the only sandia to the roll middle all right it did okay job but but you can see a lot of morning glory over here in some of these plots because they didn't get no pre in the roll middle no chateau this is where we rolled down the civil rye and crimson clover green we spray chateau over the top and over the top of the roll middle over the roll middle and then did a post-immortal emergence of sandia in the roll middle when you spray two shots of chemicals in the roll middle and plus cover crop residue we start to get pretty clean even at a very weedy area now we have seen this effect in the past in roll crop many times as well so uh valer is the roll crop version of chateau you know so basically we sprayed same rate of valer on civil rye residue versus on barren ground conventional teal plots after we plant the peanut 68 days after planting we didn't spray any any herbicides after pre and then 68 days after planting i still had four old plots four old peanut almost over left the canopy where i spray full risk of valer on civil rye residue versus where i spray on barren ground conventional teal plots this plot was full of full of sickle pod and pigweed so that's the combination effect of herbicide and a cover crop which always work very good all right in terms of other potential treatment if you do have a lot of nuts itch you know like what i have here in the non-treaty check one treatment that worked out pretty good as a residual was highest rate of chateau combined with high residue magnum this can only be sprayed in the roll middle but if you're able to manage your your nuts itch very aggressively for a few years you will reduce the overall pressure in the whole field you can see the clear cut line where we cut off our boom and and didn't spray beyond that point it's like almost straight line cut by a knife you know that's how good a chemical work in this case all right um so i'll show some more plot pictures from different herbicide treatment this is something some of the plot work we sprayed a couple years ago cleanest one is the aflige chateau there's no doubt as long as you don't drift onto the tomato i'm glad in that case we didn't drift on the on the bed on the tarp you know and the keel the transplants versus sandia peri trifle and peri or tricor peri for tomatoes and you can see a difference here for sure tricor which is mass rebusing it's also big soy bean herbicide did a fairly good but still chateau was hard to beat you know a lot of vegetable growers use trifle and and feral this type of yellow herbicides they still work but they don't work very well compared to some other chemistry in terms of weed suppression all right i'll also show some data real quick you know we have grass any grass carpet weed ragweed pigweed you know in this in this test this is this is where we spray the tomato roll middle chateau was very hard to beat almost giving us over 90 percent or 100 percent for all these weeds reflux is in the same chemistry has the same chemistry of chateau those are those work very similarly just not as hot as chateau but reflux roll middle did a pretty good as well this is a tricor you know it did good on pigweed and ragweed but not so good on carpet weed and any grasses all right for sandia trifle and dew you know they were just trading behind quite far compared to the top options in watermelon chateau was still the cleanest some other treatment like strategy or curbie you know or sandia we have a lot of grasses came up in those plots still looking at the same for weeds the treatment suppressed the treatment that suppressed those weeds the best was chateau reflux had a similar control but chateau was still the best you know for ragweed pigweed that's basically 100 percent control all right and then you know strategy sandia command dew magnum yeah variable results you're not going to be very pleased with some of this stuff used by themselves including trifle you know so that was the individual herbicides we also sprayed a few two-way mix when we just laid the bed and see how long they hold the weeds back trifle and we sandia didn't do a good job on the grasses although many grower believe yellow herbicides can hold better grasses that's not always true you know but you get this much of grasses they don't work very good this is chateau forest by itself you know roll middle was clean we got some big old crab grass came up from the old plastic from the holes on those plastic this is reflux with dew fairly clean the roll middle just a few sickle pond you know get hurt and still made through the ground strategy by itself at full rate not too terrible but you still got some grasses came up along sickle pond this is chateau trifle and sandia I believe if you take sandia out just do chateau with trifle and you're going to get very similar results as well this is reflux by itself because reflux is in the same chemistry either as a batter or chateau so chateau or reflux they should both look good chateau probably will last a little bit longer than reflux if you use a higher rate all right so talk about the equipment a little bit most of our growers are fairly small in specialty crops they don't have a whole lot of acreage many of those are for upig or support a farmer's market some of them may have a roll the roll side a vegetable stand you know just sell produce off the road so in that case most of the growers like to use smaller equipment you know they require a lot much lower initial investment they are easy to manure in small fields they are user friendly when you have to deal only with you know say 10 acres or 20 acres so you can afford to use some of this small stuff and still get a job done which is an advantage but you know you you just have to utilize some of these smaller tools to properly spray the roll middle you know to do a rototill or to cut the weeds with bush talk you know whether this is mechanical control or chemical control or cover crop combined with chemical control they all work some work better than the other but the key thing is to prevent a field being overrun by weeds and the weeds you know produce a lot of seeds because you just leave the fields they're sitting there for very long time in the summer didn't do anything until you're ready to plant a crop you know you can still clean up the weeds but the weed see the bank the amount of weed you see in the soil is very high so that's why the fallow management or weed management during the fallow period is very important you still have to bush hog that field consistently or repeatedly and prevent the weeds from overrun that field all right and also go back to this herbicide injury issue you know multiple herbicide including sandia reflux, stew, or chateau they all have the capability to injure your transplant if you spray them before your transplant and they got washed if and if they got washed into the planting hole you know that's this is sandia damage or squash you know reflux damage on uh on comparebis uh this is on candle lope uh and also I showed this picture before this is all our chateau damage on pepper and a melon you know pretty much kill all the peppers we transplant because of the spray drift you know probably drift a little bit when my student workers spray these so this is something that you all have to be careful when you spray in the room middle and also talk about the herbicide injury and the crop stress detection a little bit so these days we started to fly a lot of drones I have three drones now I'm fixing again the fourth one spray drone, scouting drone they're all very capable of doing many different things there are new tools they enable us to scout the field much more precise this is a peanut field and you can see the good and not so good area in RGB and NDVI all right all these yellow spots were caused by water logging magnesium or calcium deficiency because calcium and magnesium are important for PETA the last summer was just super wet you can see at October the fourth before digging before a crop harvest there are still plenty spots in this field that peanut barely overlapped the ground and they become very yellow all right that's a prolonged stress water uh excessive water uh stress and also the nutrient deficiency you know but there are some good areas over here around the pivot also I talked about chateau water injury this field was also injured by water this whole section here was caused by water damage all right because when peanut was cracking the ground it rained and washed water into the crack this was caused by herbicide and then they stunted the peanut quite for quite a while almost for two months and then being a slowly grow out of this after a grower put a um a foliar fertilizer over the top so you can see the injury slowly recovered however where he had all this nutrient deficiency and water logging problem down here around the tarnaces that deficiency only progressed and getting even worse you know down here because the nutrient deficiency will not correct by itself all right but this this images or this analysis does give a grower a tool to precisely manage the field and correct some of those issues identified in the previous plot you know for example drainage issue the water logging issue nutrient deficiency ph problem disease or nematode problem you know for example because nematodes and ph you know sometimes you know that people have those problems they will not move in the field you can see the pattern fairly well all right this is a how a good field look like you know this whole field was like 40 some maker and then the whole field in dv is 0.87 it's a below the roof number very very high so at the end of the season this cotton field was able to yield almost three bail you know that's very hard to do almost a 1300 pounds all right so if your crop has good yield potential we can usually see it before the crop was even closed or being there before the crop was close to hardest this is a new tool that you will see in future all right this is our new sprayed roll it works for multiple crops including vegetable fruit trees row crops pasture and hayfuges basically wherever you need to spray it is controlled by gps actually it's controlled by rtk signal even more precise than gps so precision level between the passes is usually within two centimeters or within one inch and you can spray this for this model you can spray about 20 to 25 acre per hour and one controller is able to control three at the same time so efficiency can actually be multiplied by three it will spray over the top when the field is too wet your ground sprayer cannot get into it and also spray wear section wear shape fields narrow section where a big sprayer may not work well and also spray on terraces you know fields that are not level because whenever you spray on terrace one side of boom is scratching the dirt the other side of the boom is sticking into the air and cause a lot of drift and also when you turn on a round the terrace the inside the inside you know the boom on your left well i should say on my left but the inside the boom puts out more product than the outside of the boom because outside the boom travel faster around the circle so that usually translates into herbicide damage and also for specialty crops this will give you a totally new way a different way to spray fruit trees you know whatever type of fruit tree this is because you don't have to worry about all the drift created by air blaster you know uh although there are some newer drift reducing air blasters out there and this one will also spray a field of cucurbits whatever type it is after one i start to run because when we were running that uh vegetable trial have to spray fungicide every two weeks and every time when we spray the fungicide every two weeks we have to pull all the watermelon lines up pull the lines back up to the row because so we can walk in the row middle and spray it was a pain you know unless you have a big old sprayer that can cover a lot of rows at the same time but still it's going to run over have to run over in the middle somewhere somehow so you can only plant so many rows and then you have to leave one row out for the sprayer to ride on you know and that's if you have a big sprayer with 120 foot boom you know if you have to budget 400 000 ish to buy something like that so if that's a concern or that's a limitation these spray drones are much more affordable and they can spray over the top of the crop of africanity overlap for example cucurbits or corn whether this is sweet corn or field corn you know somehow like that you can spray over the top just fine um but for for ground sprayer you don't want to run over the crops so how does efficacy look like for those spray drones the answer is unknown we don't have enough data but based on some of the work that has been done elsewhere I know I stole this picture from Dr. Zing in a virginian attack you can see this is a gulfosinate liberty or rely efficacy you know liberty or rely herbicide he sprayed with 15 gallon per acre using a backpack didn't kill the thick grass and bottom was green you know this happened all the time for counter herbicide like gulfosinate and peripod you know like rommaxon where he sprayed with drone at a two and a four gallon break for the grass controls a lot better I believe this is because the drone has a downward pushing force pushing force called propeller wash and this propeller wash force opens up the thick grass lay them down so your spray droplets can penetrate to the bottom and kill even the bottom of the plant so if this effect can be replicated this year in our trial in Alabama we will feel a lot more comfortable to recommend growers spraying with a spray drone and we're trying to learn as much as we can from these new technologies so we can educate growers the best way to utilize these new technologies all right I appreciate for the time hopefully I stayed in my time slots to make the presentation I'll be told I can talk about 30 to 40 minutes