Herbicides Are An Important Tool For Sustainable Agriculture

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Many recent agricultural innovations are seeking to help farmers reduce the need for inputs like herbicides. Some are even looking to more nature-based solutions, like Kevin Wolz who runs agroforestry company Canopy FM. But he says it’s still important that farmers keep these tools in their proverbial toolbox.

Wolz… “With the climate weary that is coming down the pike, we cannot afford to tie her hands behind our back and take a bunch of tools out of our toolbox to make this transition a reality and herbicide is one of those tools. Now when we use herbicide we're not blindly spraying you know the entire farm; it looks very different from in a kind of a row crop context, and so herbicide use in establishing trees or transitioning to agroforestry is more about very targeted applications in those first three to five years usually just in the strips right next to the row of trees, and often times by using very targeted herbicide applications your overall carbon story on the farm is actually better because you don’t have to go out there every five seconds and do all the smart mechanical interventions, spend all this labor getting out there, and combating weeds in that way. And we tend to see much higher survival as a result of it.”

That’s Canopy Farm Management CEO, Kevin Wolz.