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Weed control a top priority for many Wisconsin farmers

Many Wisconsin farmers are focusing on weed control now that most planting and first-crop hay is finished.

John Eron raises corn and soybeans in central Wisconsin, and also does custom spraying and harvesting.  He was still spraying late Sunday night. “There was a little bit of corn to do. Now, everything is just big fields doing burndown.”

Eron says in recent years, the spraying windows have gotten tighter because more farmers are using bigger planters and finishing at about the same time. “And, they’ve got the high-speed units on them so you know, just looking at this year, we had several thousand acres of guys that I take care of that was all put in within the same several days.”

He says the tight windows mean more late nights trying to keep up with the crops. “LED lighting has been a big game changer and running what they call the blue liights on the spray nozzles, soi it just gives you the opportunity to be able to see your spray pattern at night and some really late hours.”

As for his own crops, Eron says he did a lot of pre-emerge in fields that were dry enough to enter, and it turned out to be very beneficial. “I threw a little bit of glyphosate in there just to clean up a couple of sod clumps. That was one of the better ideas we had this year to do a lot of pre-emerge. I know in some areas, it hasn’t worked so well, but we had just enough ground moisture.”

Eron says most of his spraying is taking place in the sandier ground east of the Wisconsin River, where a lot of potato and vegetable production takes place.  He says many fields west of the river with heavy ground are still too wet to enter, including some of his own.