 Well, good afternoon. First of all, two good pieces of news. I'm the last speaker and I don't see Dr. Beasley. My old colleague is here. He'll tell you I'm usually finished well ahead of my time so I appreciate you sticking around to listen to what I might have to say. I have it on good authority that after the Georgia Auburn football game this year coach Malzahn called Brenda Ortiz and said put the guy on from Georgia last. So I think that's how that happened. But I'm going to spend a few minutes with you. Hopefully updating. I know you haven't had a weed scientist full time in a while at Auburn. So I'm going to update you on some things that we're seeing over at Georgia. I spend from March to October. I probably spend almost every day out in the field either rating plots or spraying plots or going to look at problems. So I want to present some of the things that we basically my talk every year is based on what I've seen the past year and how we might be able to change or prevent some of those things that went on last year. Get my glasses on here. All right. First thing if you don't take away anything from today, this would be the this would be the one thing to remember. And if we talk about pigweed or whatever species of weed we might be, we have got to start clean the number one problem that I typically go see when I go look at a specific problem, especially as it relates to a herbicide failure will be that we did not do an adequate job of controlling the weeds either before planting or or at planting at the time of planting. And if we don't do a good job there, we will not do a good job the rest of the season. So if you whatever it takes, whether it's herbicides, tillage, cover crops, whatever it might be, we have got to start clean. And if you get to the field and you've got pigweed like this, you're going to have to park to park the planter and spray park the sprayer and go get some other piece of equipment to help you deal with this problem. So that's probably the most important thing. And the number one problem we typically see not only in corn fields, but in any row crop. And by the way, I am not going to cover wheat. That's not one of my responsibilities at Georgia. So if you have a burning question and we come see me afterwards and I'll make sure that you get in touch with my colleague, I'll give you his home phone number and he'd be glad to talk to you. I would too, right John? All right. So here's just another example. This came, this was an interesting, this is actually one of our big corn growers. He called me on a Saturday morning at seven o'clock in the morning and said, I got a big problem. I sprayed this, I sprayed warren herbicide and I'm not controlling my pigweed. And I said, well, calm down. Let's talk about what you did. And in this case, you can see we went down to look at the field. This happened to be on soybeans, but you can see those plants were rather large, right? And so there's no way that a residual herbicide would have controlled those plants. They were already developed. He did not do an adequate job of controlling those plants at the time of planting. And then he had to deal with that problem most of the year. All right. Here's another, I know my colleague is in here, Austin, but this is a little quiz for you that go look at fields. If you look at these pictures, one of these is a strong arm and one of those is an nematode problem. And hopefully you would agree with me they both look a lot alike. One of the things that I do every spring, if you think about when we plant corn in the spring in the southeast, we do plant early, but generally it's not very favorable a lot of times. It's cold and wet and we have all these different kind of problems. So one of the things people call me about all the time is they have strong arm carryover from their peanut in the field corn. And I would argue that we don't see that particularly under irrigation. Well, if you're wondering, the one on the left is strong arm, the one on the right is sting nematode. That sting nematode came from one of my field plots this year. But the point I want to make is if you're a grower or you're a consultant and you're going to look at a crop early in the spring, don't always assume that that problem is going to be herbicides because I've been doing extension work for almost 22 or 23 years now. And most of the time it's not a herbicide. It's some other problem. And so herbicides can cause injury. But in a lot of cases, it's some other other thing going on. Here's another problem that we have in Georgia, especially as we grow a lot of cotton in Georgia, you all have a lot of cotton. Typically, we'll have cotton fields next to corn fields. Typically, we're going to plant cotton a little bit later. So when we're getting ready to plant cotton, we're putting out a burn down. We got corn nearby. We get drift problems. In this case, there's valor drift. And so that's been a question we've had to deal with. How does corn respond to drift? And so one of the things I did last year was I actually sprayed some corn with various rates of valor to see how the corn would respond. And I don't I don't like to show a lot of data anymore in my talks. I'd rather tell you what I think. But in this particular case, the only rate that really caused the problem was the full rate. So that tells me that if I go look at a field of corn that's damaged potentially by valor, unless you took a direct hit, it's probably not going to be a major issue. Alright, so let's talk a little bit more about control programs and some things that consider. First, again, if you're a grower here or consultant, I want to remind you that we probably need to start paying a little closer attention to the hybrid management guides that are published by the big companies, especially pioneer and decal. If you're weren't aware, you forgot, they do both companies screen their hybrids for tolerances to certain herbicides. And occasionally we get caught. We fall asleep. The hybrids are always changing. And so it's hard to keep up. I don't I don't keep up with them like I should. I'd keep these guides in my truck. So when I'm driving down the road, if somebody calls and says, Hey, what do you know about Pioneer 2023? Is it susceptible to any herbicides? I can pull out these charts and I can make a better decision. But we need to pay closer attention as we keep changing hybrids as hybrids get better and we go to new ones. Let's make sure that there's not any problems with those hybrids before we make an application of herbicide, not after. And then we find out at some point, though, that hybrid was a little bit more sensitive to say, metolic or some other herbicide. And those are readily available. You can get those from off the web right now or from your seed salesman. All right, as far as the control programs that we're currently using in our state and I'm going to assume that some level is going on here in Alabama, you can basically boil it down to five things. Of course, we're using a lot of roundup, obviously on roundup ready corn, but we're seeing other things being used things like steadfast Q or Liberty or Caprino from Bear or Halux GT from Singenta. And these are about most growers are going to be probably using one of these. And generally, what we have seen in our research is that I find no major differences in any of the programs that we evaluate. There may be some slight differences here and there, but generally not enough for me to get up here in front of you and say, Hey, this, this program is always better than that program because that's not going to happen. And rarely do we see yield differences between these programs and a slight difference in weed control rarely results in a big difference in yield. So you may be using one of these and I'll just share with you again, I prefer to show you how things are working. These are next series of slides will be some pictures from the field from some of our field research programs that demonstrate the effectiveness of the various programs. Again, depending upon your needs, your rotations, those kind of things, we can talk a little bit more specific. But again, just trying to give you a highlight of the things that are working for us and the programs that we would be recommending to, in general, most situations. You know, and you can see in this slide, we just, this is Roundup Ready Corn, various treatments are roundup, very effective, really no difference in control. The difference between the middle slide and the one on the end is the middle slide is an all post program where the one on the right would be the one that I would recommend in most situations would be an atrazine followed by a roundup and atrazine if you were using Roundup Ready Corn and most growers are. And then we most or many, I don't want to say most, many of the hybrids, especially those that come from pioneer have multiple resistance. You have glyphosate as well as Liberty or Glufosinate. And that gives us another option to choose if we need to depending upon the weed species there that are there. And this is just an example of a Liberty based program. Again, not a whole lot of pigweed in this particular test, a lot of grass, a little bit of pigweed, but it did a good job. Alright, and then occasionally and maybe more so now than in the past few years we start getting calls about, hey, I don't want to use Roundup. Maybe I don't want to use Liberty. What can I do with some other chemistries? And if you've been a corn grower, you've been around corn before Roundup Ready. We had numerous products that we would use. And one of the ones that we're using a fair amount in Georgia is Steadfast Q, which is basically an upgrade of the old accent or a retool of the old basis gold, if you will. And so that can be used in those situations where we don't want to use or a grower chooses not to use glyphosate or Glufosinate. Alright, so one of the issues that has come up in the last couple of years, again, if you think back before Roundup Ready, one of the biggest concerns that we had, as I mentioned earlier, was hybrid tolerance to herbicides. And if you think back a few years ago, before Roundup, we were using a lot of accent, for example, and we knew that there were some hybrid issues around the use of that. And then in the last several years, we've seen a change in the formulations of some of those older materials, and they now include a crop safeener. And so the issue came, this came up two years ago in Georgia in a big way, where we had DuPont walking around saying that we could use Steadfast Q on any corn hybrid, and we had no data on the tolerance of hybrids, especially if they were susceptible. And so one of the things we did, again, I don't want to bore you with a lot of data, but we basically took two sensitive corn hybrids, in this case 6208 and 6469, which are both decalb hybrids, and they are rated by the company to be sensitive to those herbicides, and so we sprayed them with the one and two X-rate of some products, and we didn't see any problems with the exception of Caprino. So in the end, we feel confident that if a grower wants to use Steadfast Q on a hybrid, that they shouldn't have any problems. All right, now let's spend a few minutes talking about Atrazine. Atrazine was first registered in 1959, so it's been around for a long time. It remains the backbone of weed control in corn for two reasons. Number one, it's very cheap. There's no other product on the market generally that's going to be that cheap, and then number two, it's effective. You can see here in this particular picture, I don't advise you to spray pigweed that are four to nine inches tall. I would prefer that you spray them smaller than that, but in this case, I happen to apply two quarts of Atrazine, and you can see the kind of control we've got of Palmer M-Ranth, and we miss Texas millet, but that's not a surprise. And so we still rely a lot on Atrazine. There's no reason not to use Atrazine. In fact, I encourage all our growers to use Atrazine for many reasons. However, and I don't know if anybody started looking here, Andy, at this point, but you will have two new young weed scientists coming on board here in the next few months. Maybe something they would be interested in doing. We have discovered Atrazine resistance in Georgia. You can see here, I don't know how good it shows up in the back, but here's five pounds of Atrazine on that pigweed that failed to control it. So that's caused a little bit of heartburn. We originally were thinking that it was restricted to regions where primarily the corn was growing for dairy production, and there was a certain rotation that was being followed, but we have since found it in a couple of locations that are non-dairy. And here's where we're at right now. We have a few more samples growing in the greenhouse. We found Atrazine resistant Palmer in these three counties at this point in time. So we'll keep looking and see where it goes and go from there. So maybe I've scared you if we lose Atrazine that would be a problem. However, the good news is if we were to lose Atrazine today for whatever reason, I think we could still do a very reasonable job of controlling weeds in corn. The only downside is would be cost. All the newer products that are out there are going to cost significantly more money than a current Atrazine based program would be. And so that's the problem, especially now that we're talking about corn that's below five dollars or maybe lower. I haven't checked it today. And so that's going to be a problem cost-wise, but efficacy-wise. We can do a good job controlling most of the weed problems that we have without Atrazine if we had to. I would prefer to have it, but if we don't have it for whatever reason, we can still do it. In this case, there's just various treatments here. This is all Camprino based program with different prees out. In this case, another herbicide that's available to us now is an impact. Again, different prees followed by posts. And then another one is Callisto. And we're already using Callisto in Halux GT. So again, even though we might have Atrazine resistance, I'm not that worried about it other than from the economic side, which for growers is a big deal. All right, so another issue that's come up recently, and we're slightly different in Georgia than I think you are in Alabama. About 75 to 80 percent of our corn is irrigated. We have a fair population of growers that are trying to really push the yields above 250, and in some cases 300 or better. And so one of the questions that has come up during all this is that in that kind of environment, if you're trying to grow high yield corn, where you're trying to manage all your stresses, whether it's insects, disease, fertility, new moisture, whatever it might be, since you're managing all those, what effect does herbicides or what effect do herbicides have or not have in that environment? Because now if you think on a lower yield level where you're not managing stresses as well, all those are kind of mixed together, you really don't know for sure what's causing what in terms of potential yield losses. So I was actually challenged by one of our highest yield growers with this question, you know, are we causing, you know, if he's trying to make 300 plus bushel, if I spray a herbicide over the top, am I causing a yield penalty? And I told him, I said, well I haven't been growing 300, I have never been able to grow 300 bushel corn. I don't know, let me come down to your farm and we'll do it on your farm. And that's what we're doing right now. So the good news is, after a couple of years again, I don't want to bore you with a lot of data, but this is just a series of treatments that we put out in this particular field. Various treatments, you'll see there's no statistical difference there, so that's good news that in a high yield environment where we're controlling stresses, we're not seeing any problems with our typical treatments that we would apply. And we'll continue to do this work. You can see these yields are high and in fact in this in the field that this was in, that made that entire field made well over 300 bushels. The other thing we're looking at is timing and one of the reasons I've been doing this is again is to try to make sure we're doing a better job controlling weeds. We also looked at some timings, basically looking at roundup and atrazine spraying at different times and watching what happens. Again, no statistical difference here, but as we go later in the life cycle of the crop, it's more likely that we could have some potential problems. And I would argue that when we're talking about corn, we need to be done spraying herbicides in that v2 to say v5 stage. If we're going past that point, maybe something happened, the weather was bad, whatever it might be. But if we push that application timing into a period of growth when that corn is growing reproductive, we could potentially have some problems there. So I've been trying to encourage our guys to go earlier than later. You know, what's one of the things you hear all the time from a grower when you talk about weeds is I wanted to wait till everyone in the field comes up before I spray. Well, if you do that, you've done a lot of different things in terms of potential yield. So we're encouraging our people to be done by the v5 stage if we can. All right. Anybody, any fields like this in Alabama? I would argue people that ask me all the time, my colleague and I have sort of gotten known for for working on pigweed, I would I would argue that I can control pigweed with pivot, Andrew, almost all the time without any problem. I cannot control morning glory full season. As you can see here, this is from a growers field in Tatnall County, Georgia, which is in East Georgia. He did a lot of things that he was supposed to do, but yet he had a major problem with morning glory. And to me, this is our number one challenge, is how do we manage morning glory. We do not have a herbicide that we can put out in February and March that's going to last all the way till July and August when we're picking our corn. And that's the problem. We get the crop tries down, sunlight gets to the soil, we get reemergence of morning glory and if you are delayed in any reason, you wind up with fields like this at harvest time that cannot be managed very well. So if you're dealing with morning glory, what are some of the things that we can do? My first response would be even in it even if we have atrazine resistance in Palmer, we're still going to need it for morning glory because it's very effective on morning glory atrazine. So try to use as much atrazine as possible and legally, how can we do that? We can use the maximum amount of atrazine that can be used depends upon how you use it. We can use the most atrazine if we use a pre and post application. In this case a court pre followed by a court and a half post. Some of you might remember many moons ago we used to use over four pounds of atrazine on corn, but for environmental reasons those labels were changed and we can't use that much legally anymore. Other things that consider would be tank mixes with whatever you might be doing, things like 2-4-D or clarity or aim. I'm going to mention enlist corn in a minute which is 2-4-D enhanced tolerant corn. I'll mention more about that in a minute. Using liberty versus glyphosate for example, liberty is a much better product than glyphosate on morning glory. Split applications of round up using harvest aids like aim we have seen a significant amount of aim go out in our corn at harvest time for late season morning glory and then early harvest if you have the ability to dry the corn. A couple new things we'll go into just briefly in case you read them. I like to give a little update on some things that are going on. If you pick up a magazine you're likely to see a logo on one of these and it's kind of funny every time I talk to some of my grower friends you know they'll see these advertisements and they'll wonder why we're not recommending it or what's going on with this particular product and I can assure you and I know this will happen when your your new team of weed scientists gets on board at Auburn is that they will be evaluating these products and making decisions on whether they're going to be a fit for your state or not. In this case there'll be two products. They basically contain the same thing with a little bit of exception. FMC will be marketing a product called Anthem and then another product called Anthem ATZ whenever you see ATZ in the herbicide name that means that formulation has atrazine in it already. And basically this would be you these would be used however you might be using dual or a warn or other residual herbicides. So we will add that into our recommendations this year. You can see in this particular slide we've got an anthem based program it's very effective. Is it any better than what we're already doing? I would say no. There's generally most of the new things that we're looking at are not significantly better. They may offer another mode of action or something like that but not a significant improvement in what we're currently doing. A couple other ones you're going to see in magazines I was looking at a few the other day and I saw advertisements for almost all of these. And again when growers see these they see the they see a farmer generally they'll see a grower standing in a field of corn that's clean in thinking that all their dreams will become true with these herbicides. And so there may or may not be an issue with them in the southeast. I'll give you an example if you look at Corvus and Balanceflex these are two products we will likely never recommended Georgia because our soils are too light for those herbicides. And I don't want to stick my neck out and have to go look at a lot of complaints where they have been. You got Dow Agro Science promoting a couple of pre-mixes like full-time and keystone necks. They are pre-mixes of Atrazine and another product called a C. Declore. Basically they're very similar to Bicep if you had been using Bicep in the past with a little bit of difference. And then Syngenta has a new product called Acuron it's actually a four-way mix of herbicides. And again looks good in our tests but it's not significantly better than what we're doing other than in the case of Acuron that's got a different mode of action in there that we're using right now a whole lot. All right. Now I want to mention just a couple more slides. There's a lot of buzz in the weed science community and the farming community about the release and you heard the guy from Monsanto talk about the Extend. If you weren't familiar with that he was talking about Dicamba, Dicamba resistant cotton and soybeans. But there's also two 4D resistant crops coming. Dow Agro Sciences will be marketing that package. And in fact that's the that's the only thing that's registered right now. None of the Dicamba technologies are registered today. However, the enlist herbicide corn and the enlist herbicide soybeans which are corn and soybeans with resistance to two 4D they are available or they will be available for the Midwest. They will not be available for the Southeast. Right now that those products are going to be launched in the Midwest for obvious reasons. That's where they grow all the beans and corn and at some point we will see this technology in the Southeast. But right for 2015 we're not going to see it. But in this case everyone talks about beans and cotton but there will be a corn available that has enhanced tolerance to two 4D. If you're growing corn you already know we can use two 4D on corn but we can't we're restricted in the amount that we can use and when we can apply it. This particular technology would enable us to use it have a lot more flexibility and when we could use it and that might help us with weeds like morning glory. So I want you to be on the lookout for it again. Don't go crazy thinking about it right now because it's not going to happen for us for at least another year maybe more than that. Again we don't grow a whole lot of corn in the Southeast so we don't rate very high in the grand scheme of things although it's important to all of us in the room. All right this would be my last slide again. I kind of like to show people things that happen to try to prevent them from happening again. Again this was the same grower he was having a bad day he called me about seven o'clock in the morning frantically describing his problem. In this case you can kind of see what happened. I don't know how it is in Alabama for sure but I'm sure most growers want to put everything in the spray tank that they can to try to avoid going over a field more than once. That's a very common question with not a lot of good answers to what would potentially happen. So in this case you can look at this tank mix and you can kind of see what happened and so again I want to caution you as you if you do tank mixes you need to be a little cautious and really in the end result in this one he failed to pre-slurry the dry in water before he mixed it in the tank and so when he put a large amount of dry into the tank he had this precipitate caused a major problem. In our recommendations this year and anywhere we've got dry we'll be highlighting pre-mix in water before mixing into the tank because that was a big problem with cleanup for sure. I'm going to stop there. I told you I promised you and hopefully you finished early I probably did I hope and then I would be glad to try to answer any questions again. If you have something specific about small grains talk to me afterwards I'll try to get you in touch with my colleague that handles the wheat in our state and he does quite a bit of research on resistant ryegrass so if you're having some trouble with ryegrass he might be able to help you. If not again I appreciate your time for sticking around. Okay thank you.