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Midwest Mechanical Weed Control Field Day leans into equipment and management alternatives

Farmers are exploring ways to diversify weed control beyond herbicides as options decline.

Ag consultant Sam Oschwald Tilton with Glacial Drift tells Brownfield, “Herbicides are starting to give a lot of issues in the environment and regulators are cracking down on that.”

“We haven’t had new herbicides for many crops in many years. I think all this is going to make mechanical weed control more and more helpful,” he says.

For nearly a decade, he’s helped coordinate the Midwest Mechanical Weed Control Field Day to demonstrate alternative and developing technology.

“When you’re buying herbicides, you’re paying that bill every year,” he says. “When you buy a weeding tool, you’re paying that once for 10 or 20 years. It’s just another tool for farmers that I think helps them capture more value and often, not always, but often helps with profitability.”

Oschwald Tilton says camera guided cultivators are one example of equipment improving the speed and accuracy of weed management.

He says mixing tooling can also help farmers lower equipment costs, like installing just the camera hitch onto older cultivators for more precision.

Brownfield interviewed during the Midwest Mechanical Weed Control Field Day hosted at the Michigan State University Southwest Michigan Research and Extension Center in Benton Harbor on Wednesday.