News

Herbicide drift worse on rice this year

An extension rice specialist says herbicide drift has likely affected some of the rice as the crop headed this season.

“It’s always been an issue, for several years anyway, but we definitely hit a particularly bad period.”

Jarrod Hardke with the University of Arkansas tells Brownfield it’s likely due to a combination of spraying conditions and planting variability.

“We have a lot of rice that went in really early and then, there were extreme delays to planting beans,” he says. “We were seeing some clean up herbicide applications in some beans, if we had it our way, would have been done a long time ago. Instead, it got into late reproductive rice that’s super sensitive.”

He says drift becomes an issue when rice and soybean fields are close together.

“Liberty or glufosinate isn’t really much of an issue unless it’s a direct hit and where it will burn the rice up. But the glyphosate, which is systemic, is a whole other issue. Low levels of glyphosate will really mess up reproductive stage rice and cause yield reduction.”

Hardke says an immediate yield impact is hard to determine, but yield loss is expected at harvest for some of the crop in Arkansas. There’s also concern about drift on heading rice in the Missouri Bootheel.