07/10/08 Flaming Weeds

Flaming Weeds. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Controlling weeds is one of the most frustrating parts of agriculture and when you are in the organic business, it gets really complicated. Weeding by hand, organic herbicides or tillage are labor demanding and costly. Mark Leitman with the Propane Education & Research Council says a lot of research is being done on the use of propane. LEITMAN: Through the grant that we applied for this spring, we're taking what we learned in the Nebraska field trials and we're going to take a commercially available flame weed control unit and we're going to put it out on some farms and we're going to test that effectiveness of that cropping system and we're going to try to document the conservation benefits of that in terms of the reductions in pesticide usage and obviously the reductions in tillage. Many producers have moved away from tillage due to soil erosion and reductions in soil moisture content. Leitman says there are easily positive benefits of propane over other methods. LEITMAN: Obviously if you compare it to hand weeding you're simply just improving the speed and efficiency and reducing the cost versus hand labor over what you're able to do in that type of a labor intensive practice. If you are looking at conventional cultivator type weed cultivation where you actually till the weeds out, it's a lot cheaper to go through a field with a flame weed control unit in terms of the horsepower to move that unit. At this point there is not a lot of information on what the total costs or effectiveness will be using the flame weed control method. LEITMAN: We know it takes roughly 5 gallons of propane per acre depending on the weed type you have it can take a little bit more than that to control the weed species. It just depends on the cropping system. That's really what we are learning more and more about. Flame weed control works very well on broadleaf weeds and with the ability to direct the flames where needed Leitman says the effectiveness is very good. He also says that clean-burning propane has a smaller carbon footprint than most other fuel choices and is nontoxic, which means there is no pollution risk in the case of a spill or leak. One concern for producers is cost. LEITMAN: Obviously all energy costs are up and that's just a reality of what we are dealing with today for a lot of reasons but the good news about propane is it's becoming a little but better value right now compared to petroleum based products in particular. And that's because propane is actually produced from natural gas first and from petroleum second. So to the extent that our propane comes from petroleum the cost affects us but it also comes from natural gas and that cost has been a little bit more stable. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.