Faced with another year of potentially high input costs and stagnant prices, no-tillers will be hunting for ways to maximize yields and their return on investment with the crop protection tools they use. 

To stretch soybean yields, many no-tillers are planting soybeans earlier. But this increases the risk of early-season stressors chipping away at plant performance due to working in cooler and possibly wetter soils.

And with herbicide resistance in waterhemp and Palmer amaranth continuing to cause problems, weed control for row crops is becoming more complicated for row crops.

Jeremy Hawkins, southern regional sales manager for Helm Crop Solutions, says crucial weed-fighting chemistries are disappearing from the toolbox due to poor stewardship.  

“The most important application is one that we’ve gotten away from as an industry,” Hawkins told No-Till Farmer during an interview at Commodity Classic. “When I first started in this business, we would always put some kind of residual and burndown behind the planter. And with the advent of Roundup Ready crops, a lot of growers got away from that. I think we are going to have to get back to that,” Hawkins said. 

Syngenta agronomist Kevin Scholl said during a recent interview at Commodity Classic that in…