Kochia Management - Part Two

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

Markets go through up cycles and down cycles, but one major farm problem that never seems to get easier is weed management. Yesterday we reported on how some no-till farmers are having to consider going back to tillage to control herbicide-resistant weeds. Kochia is one of the most problematic of those weeds and Dr. Charles Geddes on the Growing Pulse Crops podcast said the foundation of an integrated approach to controlling kochia is to make the crop as competitive as possible.

Geddes… “ Promoting a competitive crop can go a really long way to helping to manage this particular species. So we've done research looking at reducing row spacing, increasing crop seeding rates throughout crop rotations. So what we found is that kochia really responds to that competitive crop, and the way that it responds is it reduces the number of seeds that it produces. So for a plant that can produce up to a hundred thousand seeds when it's not competing with other species, it can really reduce that seed production quite quickly. And really, because it's a short seed bank, that can go a long way to helping to reduce the number of seeds that go into the seed bank and then the densities that are emerging in the subsequent year.”

Geddes and colleagues showed in a study that narrowing spacing and increasing seeding rates of a crop like lentils can reduce the kochia biomass by nearly 80%.