This time of year, my email inbox and phone text messages are filled with ugly photos of fruit and vegetable crops affected by suspected herbicide exposure. Sometimes the symptomology points toward a clear cause and effect, but most of the time, the answer is not so clear-cut. Here are a couple of recent examples: Cupping[Read More…]
Herbicide Injury
Throughout the growing season, vegetable crop farmers often report suspected herbicide drift injury. Each type of herbicide results in specific types of injury. Knowing what to look for can help us narrow which herbicide or herbicide mode of action could be responsible. To document how watermelon and pumpkin respond to various herbicides, we sprayed a[Read More…]
Off-target herbicide movement, whether from on-farm or neighboring farms, is not a new problem. However, in recent years it has been on the top of more minds. Although many crops seem to recover from an off-target herbicide event, vegetative recovery does not always imply that all is well. To illustrate this point, let’s look at[Read More…]
The cool weather this spring means that many early-planted warm season crops have probably been stressed by cool temperatures more than usual. A number of herbicides labeled for vegetable crops include warnings not to use when the crop is or will be under stress. A stressed crop may not be able to detoxify the herbicide[Read More…]