To stretch soybean yields, many no-tillers are now planting their 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 says. “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.”

Syngenta agronomist Kevin Scholl says that in his area of northern Illinois, waterhemp is driving herbicide decisions, as the voracious weed has become resistant to several modes of action. 

Having a burndown product in the mix for a pre-emergent herbicide application is crucial to knock weeds out and give soybean plants a clean shot at emerging and growing, Scholl says. 

In places where Palmer amaranth continues to emerge as a major problem, Syngenta’s management strategy is “kill the seed, not the weed” by using strong pre-emerge products to keep weed seed from germinating, he adds.

Eric Sherder, Corteva’s U.S. crop protection technical lead, agrees. 

“One of our strongest arsenals is our pre-emerge chemistry. That’s where we can get two, three modes of action. When we just go with a post-emergence product, that’s where we start having a lot of problems,” he says. 

“Then we’ve got to make a second application, and you've also started to lose yield potential because the weeds have been competing with that crop for that length of time.”

For more information on how to protect your crops using familiar and new strategies in herbicide and fungicide, read John Dobberstein’s article “Protecting Your No-Tilled Crops Early & Often” featured in the June 2026 issue of No-Till Farmer.