 Welcome to our animal science and forage webinar series. My name is David Russell. And today I'm excited to share with you some thoughts about managing weeds in our spring pastures and hay fields. What I'd like to cover is a little bit about integrated pest management, what that means, where we are right now and our spring transition period across forward systems. Talk through some control options. What we're dealing with right now at this time regarding weed pressures and some resources that I use quite a bit regarding weed ID and management. So what do you think of when you hear the words weed control? What comes to mind? It's probably chemical control. What herbicide do I need to use to control this particular weed? Right? Well, I'd like to let you know that there's a little bit more to weed control than just herbicide options. We have what we call an integrated pest management approach. Basically, this is just a multifaceted management approach to pest. In our case, weeds. It's an ecosystem-based strategy that focuses on long-term prevention of pests or their damage through a combination of techniques such as biological habitat manipulation, modification of practices. And I'd like to cover four today. The first of which is preventative. Preventative measures is exactly what it says. We're preventing weeds from establishing in a particular crop to begin with. The use of certified weed-free seed, cleaning farm equipment are just a few examples. Here, just a couple of pictures portraying that. Cleaning off equipment after you get out of a field before you move on to the next field, making sure that any particular weed seed is not traveling to a new spot where it's not yet been introduced. You see the back of the mowers here, cleaning off grass clippings. Those are easy catches for weed seed. The second is cultural practices. This is basically techniques that involve maintaining field conditions such that weeds are less likely to establish in the first place. All right, here are just a couple of examples portraying that. Look at the picture on the left and how close to the ground that forage has been grazed, all right? We don't have a really good healthy forage stand to combat weed pressure. Any questions that I get? That's kind of my first question to the producer is I like to ask what condition is the forage stand in to begin with? Because before I can recommend any kind of herbicide for a particular weed species, I wanna make sure that that healthy forage stand is our first line of defense to begin with because we can apply herbicide to control a particular weed in a lot of cases, but if we don't have a good forage cover to cover those gaps to prevent future emergence of weed species, then we're really not doing a whole lot of good in the long run, all right? So managing our cattle, livestock, our mowing heights, our mowing frequencies, practicing a good fertilization program, taking soil samples, all of the above are cultural control methods to combat weed pressures. Third, mechanical control. These are basically physical techniques to destroy weeds or decrease weed seed germination such as tillage, mowing, hand pulling, et cetera. All right, I don't know many of us who are forage or livestock producers who don't enjoy getting on a tractor and bush hogging and making a really weedy field go to a clean slate really quick, all right? There's some level of satisfaction to this and there's a place for mechanical control measures but understand that this comes with a cost as does most anything else. So this year, Department of Transportation estimated mowing costs between $35 and $55 per acre if done in-house and if they contracted these mowings out, it still fell within that same ballpark figure. So just keep that in mind. Per acre, on a per acre basis, you're spending about $41 per acre just to run a clipper across a weedy field, all right? And how many times are you gonna have to do that per growing season under ideal situations, all right? At least two during a summer if you've got a really weedy field, all right? So understand that that comes at a cost. That also may remove approximately 75 to 400 pounds of desirable forage, all right? So you're not just selectively removing that weed species. You're also getting rid of a lot of good forage during that same time. So I'm not saying that mechanical mowing or other tillage practices doesn't have a fit because it does just understand in a bigger picture that it comes and then there's the obvious chemical control measures. If you are considering chemical control practices, there are a few key points that I'd like to drive home, all right? There are certain requirements such as proper weed identification, all right? I can't prescribe a particular herbicide to you in a given situation if weed number one don't know what the weed species is, all right? There's several resources out there that I touch on toward the end that are helpful for me anyway to identify a given weed species. Then there's proper herbicide selection, all right? We can select a given herbicide for a particular weed species but understand that there are certain herbicides that are detrimental to a desirable forage species. So it may control a particular weed but we need to know what the desirable forage is so that we can select that proper herbicide as well. And then equipment calibration, all right? There are a lot of our products available now especially the dry flowables that are dispersed and broadcast over a given acre in minute amounts. So for example, pastora, we're recommending rates between one half to 1.3 ounces per acre, all right? So that's not a whole lot of material. And so if you get that rate off or if you're not properly calibrated and you're putting out too much or too little, you're gonna have to make another pass to hit the misses or in some situations you might be doubling that application and you could cause some damage to your desirable forages. So keep that in mind. And we're talking about forage systems. There are several across the state that we're dealing with and it's not just one desirable forage. And it's not all grasses. We do have tall fescue, especially in the northern half of the state. The hay grass and Bermuda throughout are perennial grasses. Many of our grazing pastures are just mixed grass pastures, you know, a mixture of these species. And then we've got our desirable legumes such as alfalfa as a soil crop or we've got legumes that are interceded with the end. That kind of makes it a little more difficult, especially when we're using chemical control options to control certain weeds. Not all of those are gonna be desirable to any given grass or broadleaf forage out there. So we need to know the situation. All right, so where are we right now? Mid-May, might as well say the latter half of May, it's been raining all winter. We've set record rainfall amounts this winter. We're currently already over half of our annual rainfall for the year just between the 1st of January and now mid-March. And so we're really wet and we've not been able to get equipment in the field and our fields are looking like this right now. It's covered up with buttercup and it's still just too wet to get out and do anything about it. We've got other herbaceous broadleafs like curly dock emerging out there right now. Little barley is one of many annual cool season grass species that are showing up right now as the soil temperatures increase. Along with little barley, we've got other annual grass species like volunteer annual ryegrass, our brome species, Carolina foxtails, creeping bentgrass. There are several annual grasses out there that are really kinda tough to deal with. We've got several options for taking broadleafs out of a given grass species but it's really difficult sometimes to take grass weeds out of grass systems. We've got our mix of geraniums and hen bits and chickweed, dandelions, and then the obvious thistle, especially the southern half of the state right now many of our thistle species are beginning to bulk and start putting up blooms. Understand that we have perennial and annual species but these plants like thistle are a biennial species. So it will start at year one with a rosette and then in year two it will send up a bolt and send up a flower head and start releasing seeds. So with any of these herbaceous broadleafs they germinate in the fall. So we may be seeing them out there right now especially weeds like the yellow top or the buttercup but understand that we can tackle a lot of these especially the broadleafs in the fall because they're germinating as the soil temperatures begin to cool in the November, December timeframe. So if you can get out in that timeframe before it starts our raining season then you can first of all use lower rates of herbicide because the weeds are small and actively growing. And then for example, cheekweed germinates around 54 degrees hen bit germinates around that 59 degrees obviously with soil moisture. So we're talking about that November timeframe on average across the state and herbicides like 2,4-D or weedmaster or Grazon-next can go a long way when those broadleaf weeds begin to emerge and we can hit them whenever they're young and actively growing while we can still get in the field before the field conditions really start to decline. Now I understand that there are several issues why we can't control our weeds. A survey out of Kentucky several years ago surveyed forage and livestock producers and their number one reason for not controlling weeds is they don't wanna kill their clover. Others are herbicides are too expensive. Their cattle or livestock eat the weeds so why control them? And there's valid points to each of these but let's touch on the clover. So right now most fields that aren't controlled with any measure, let's say for example, we've got fields of buttercup but we've got clover in there too. So what do we do about fields of buttercup and hen bit, cheekweeds and the dandelions and the thistles? I don't wanna control, I don't wanna kill my clover. A lot of our fields have volunteered, established white clover but we've also got our annual species like the Persian clover, the crimson clover, the hot clover that we know are beneficial to both our soil and our livestock. I'd like to tell you a little bit about a study and show some preliminary results from a study we did several years ago where we looked at typical herbicide applications in the spring, targeting these bullseys and broadleaf weeds and then we also came back in the summer during that June timeframe and used herbicides like weedmaster and grazon next to control some of our more tough summer weeds like dogfinal and horse nettle. So what we have here are all the treatments across the bottom and the percent change. You see that line zero there toward the middle. Everything above that line is an increase over the span of about a year that we measured this, actually 400 something days and we saw an increase from the beginning of this study to the end of this study. We saw an increase in clover densities with all the treatments. The only decline in clover populations that we saw were in the plots where we did nothing at all. And I think a few things are going on here. Number one, this was established white clover. So the Dutch clover, the Ladino type clovers out there that are volunteered in your pasture, they can tolerate a lot of our oxen herbicides. And so the March application was made when that clover was in the middle of its growth stage. So it still had April, May and probably parts of June to recover. And then when we made that June application, either the clover had declined enough and wasn't actively growing, or we had enough seed in the soil seed bank to recover that following year from the herbicide applications. And where we have the decline on the untreated check, we probably just had too much broadleaf. Weed pressure that overtook the desirable clover species. So I show you this just to say that there are some options out there to control our cool season broadleaf weeds without killing our clover. The 2,4-D, for example, established white clover will tolerate up to one and a half pints of just 2,4-D amine pretty readily. Here's just another picture of our grades on next application. For example, 1.25 pints supplied the first weekend in July and this is 42 weeks later. We've got our established white clover along with our Persian and hot clover recovering. And we've got many other species that recover a year later. What about this question? What do you think is easier? Killing a plant before it ever comes up and becomes a problem or trying to kill a plant once it's growing and building its defense mechanisms, all right? It's almost always easier to kill a weed, any given weed species, especially annuals when they are young and actively growing or before they begin to emerge to begin with. So annuals are best controlled in the fall. So our little barley, annual ryegrass, a lot of our pre-emergence applications, if they can go out in the fall before these weeds begin to emerge, we get a lot longer activity out of these products like prowl whenever it's a good timely application because especially when we're dealing with grass species, we're limited on what post-emergence options that we can use. So if you've got your pastures right now or hay fields that are overrun with annual grass species, there are other options out there. Do we bale it? Do we graze it? All right, cut it for baleage or haylage because there are a lot of options out, there are a lot of herbicides out there, just like roundup applications over the top of annual ryegrass that I really wouldn't recommend at this point because Bermuda grass is beginning to green up and we really don't wanna injure our summer grasses that are starting to emerge. So I know it's been difficult, especially this winter, getting equipment in the field, but that's a risk that is real right now when we're trying to get rid of a lot of these, especially these annual grass weeds species. You have bullrush, there's a lot of low lying wet areas right now and bullrush is beginning to show up. All right, one quart per acre of 240 amini or ester during this February or even March timeframe is really good and effective to control these bullrush species, but keep in mind, if you get rid of that bullrush and that low lying area, what's gonna take its place? Is it a situation to where you're gonna have livestock in that low lying area, or is it better just to leave it alone? You'll have to kind of figure out those management goals. Speaking on the annual grass control, here's a study that we did a couple of years ago where we looked at comparisons of gramoxone versus roundup targeting annual ryegrass. All right, this was 14 days after treatment at the vegetative stage. You can see we're getting some pretty good control from both the gramoxone and the roundup. Look at that compared to a later application when the ryegrass is nearing the boot stage or starting to have seeds emerge. All right, you still get pretty good control with both these treatments, but look at the amount of thatch that you have from these dead plant carcasses. All right, what that's gonna do is keep the soil cooler longer because sunlight can't reach the soil surface. And that's gonna be a competition factor for the emerging summer grasses like Bahaya and Bermuda that you may have. So that's gonna impede that emergence and probably delay your first cutting if it's a hayfield, not to mention you might risk damaging the Bermuda grass or the Bahaya grass that may already be emerged. For example, this is an application of roundup applied mid-March. And you can see the strips at the top in the middle of this plot where it looks like we've got pretty good grass coverage. But what we have here is where the Bermuda grass was more significantly damaged from this roundup application and foxtail is now encroaching. And what do we do about foxtail once Bermuda grass and Bahaya and other forward species are up? I don't really have a solid answer about the foxtail we've been working on that for several years. Trying to look at timely applications of several different herbicides and we still don't have a solid answer. But I put this up here just to show you that there's a risk involved with applications after emergence of our summer grasses like Bermuda grass. I will say that there are products coming hopefully later this year that will allow us pre-emergent treatment in the fall before weeds like annual ryegrass and in the spring at this time before ryegrass or excuse me, before summer annual grasses begin to emerge like our foxtails that have been really good in experimental trials the last few years. This is in Daza Flam. It is going to be registered under the trade name in the Southeast as Resalon. And what you see here is the integrated management approach that we mentioned to begin with. All right, we've got a timely application of herbicide on this Bermuda grass that is controlling the foxtail. But I guarantee you we wouldn't have as good of control here if it weren't for a good healthy forage stand. So be able to look out for Resalon later this year to be registered. Another issue we've dealt with this herbicide and many other pre-emergence is the amount of thatch layer or crop residue from the previous year. All right, we might make a timely application of a pre-emergence herbicide and really get good rainfall incorporation. But if that seed germinates in the thatch layer or the residue above the herbicide, it's not going to do much good. So that's when a practice such as burning that thatch off before a herbicide application would be really beneficial. Here we have an example of little barley that has grown and actually did produce a seed head without much of a root system at all. So what we had here was little barley growing through the winter. We had so much moisture a couple of years ago that it did well just in that crop residue layer above the herbicide. We've had a relatively mild winter and I know three or four years ago we had foxtail germinating March one. So be on the lookout for this problematic species across pasture is probably all right. This is just a couple of shots of the endazoflam that I mentioned earlier that is to be registered by Bayer later this year. I hope that it will be registered by the fall and winter of 2020 because it's been a really good product for us before annual ryegrass begins to germinate this fall in the fall. So here's an example of some test strips that a producer put out. And this is about two months after application where Bermuda grass is beginning to green up in the spring. This was 13 months after that same application where volunteer annual ryegrass was controlled successfully and we've gotten a really good clean green up of Bermuda grass. So more tools in the toolbox coming in the future and I'd love to answer any questions on any of these or any other products coming from other companies this year but I'd like to leave you with some resources that I use. I know I get questions a lot about particular weed identification and these are just three books that I keep in my truck. Always forced plants of the Southeast, weeds of the South and weeds of southern turf grasses that help me identify problematic weed species that I may not already be familiar with. Any questions that I get from you as producers? A lot of times I'll use these very resources to help me answer your questions as well as southeasternfloor.com and online resource from the same author of weeds of the South. So I hope that's been helpful. I hope I've answered a lot of questions and again, if you've got any questions please feel free to reach out to me. I'd love to try to answer those and work with you in the future. Thank you.