TEAM Against Weeds

TEAM Against Weeds. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

It takes a team effort to successfully battle invasive noxious weeds in Oregon. That's the message for this year's Invasive Weed Awareness Week as proclaimed by Governor Kulongoski. Oregon Invasive Weed Awareness Week is May 17-22. Together Everyone Achieves More or TEAM is the theme for this year's Weed Awareness Week. That awareness has grown over the years as more partners join the effort to fight invasive plant species.

BUTLER:  Noxious weeds do not respect ownership boundaries or natural resource boundaries. To be effective, we all need to work together.

Tim Butler is supervisor of the Oregon Department of Agriculture's Noxious Weed Program. Conservatively, annual damage caused by noxious weeds in Oregon exceeds 100 million dollars. Early detection and rapid response is the most effective strategy to keep introductions from establishing. But that will always take funding- a challenging issue during tough economic times.

BUTLER: It's kind of the old adage of pay me now or pay me later. We don't want to be in a situation of looking back ten years from now and saying, I wish we would've got on top of this problem because now it's costing the state millions and possibly billions of dollars in the long run.

To get the best bang for the buck, cooperative management between state, federal, and county entities along with private landowners has been a winning formula in eradicating new weed species or controlling those that have established. Weed Awareness Week pays tribute to that team effort. Butler says to successfully control invasive weeds in Oregon, it takes the cooperation of everyone.

BUTLER: If you let one infestation go without being treated, it continues to be a seed source to spread to other areas.

Butler says outreach and education play a big role in weed control. There has been a continued effort to get the word out to the public about being partners in fighting weeds.

BUTLER: The importance of maintaining these efforts of us all working together to be effective in preventing, up front, invasion of noxious weeds and controlling the infestations that we currently have.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.