Farming in The Wind

Several areas of the country are experiencing extremely windy conditions during this planning season. Aaron Hager, University of Illinois Extension Specialist in the weed sciences department, warns the ag industry that the public is watching, and we need to be mindful of that.

"The challenge of that is we understand that the retail sector, a lot of commercial applicators are under a lot of pressure from their customers to make these applications, but there's very, very little positive outcome to spraying herbicide in 30-mile-an-hour winds. There's a whole lot of negative outcomes."

And Hager says the last thing farmers want is laws and legislation that would prohibit the use of applications such as pesticides when farmers need them,

managing weeds without some of these tools and some of these these products that are being targeted for basically outright bans. And so it really, in my humble opinion, is worth the time for applicators, whether they be private applicators, commercial applicators, you know, to sit down with the customers and give them the explanation of why it's not advisable to be spring. We know everybody's on a time crunch. We understand that, but if we continue to make these applications on these very windy conditions, our public is watching us. They're watching what we do with these applications."

Not to mention a monetary side, as inputs are expensive and spraying in high wind is like watching Money blow away. I.