# Seed Selection And Dicamba.



## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

From DTN.

Regards, Mike

https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/news/crops/article/2017/08/17/dicamba-trait-complicates-seed


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## 2ndWindfarm (Nov 11, 2014)

Ouch.. Dicamba is my go-to for broadleaf control in my hay and pastures. Good thing the neighbors don't raise beans!

Gettin' sued would be just as bad as watchin' your beans curl up!


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## endrow (Dec 15, 2011)

2ndWindfarm said:


> Ouch.. Dicamba is my go-to for broadleaf control in my hay and pastures. Good thing the neighbors don't raise beans!
> Gettin' sued would be just as bad as watchin' your beans curl up!


 your neighbors do not raise beans but you said you do have neighbors . Couple years ago not far from here guy made his 10 acres of grass hay first cutting on the 1st of June and by the third week of June the field was full of milkweed and buttercups. So he applied 1 quart per acre 2-4dlv4. He was a quarter of mile from a Housing Development and the stuff moved off Target and killed flowers and the leaves on the fruit trees and vegetable gardens. ... that was a wake-up call for me I have been more careful since then.


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## PaMike (Dec 7, 2013)

Surprised anyone in the housing development was wise enough to even know about drift..


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## endrow (Dec 15, 2011)

PaMike said:


> Surprised anyone in the housing development was wise enough to even know about drift..


 you're right PA Mike I bet the average person would not have known but in this development a couple people have a private service hired to take care of their lawn and maintain some of their trees and things like that so they called him and raised Hill figuring he did something wrong. So the lawn care guy had to cover his tush and find somebody to blame it on.


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## PaMike (Dec 7, 2013)

I gotta neighbor that decided to have a garden on his side of the fence but on our property. Our fence is 2-3 ft off the line...When I went by with the spray I tried not to do much damage, but that pretty tough. Guy hasnt said anything to me but I am pretty sure most of his tomatoes didnt amount to anything..

Hes the same guy that throws watermelon leftovers into my hay field, so I dont have too much compassion...


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## endrow (Dec 15, 2011)

PaMike said:


> I gotta neighbor that decided to have a garden on his side of the fence but on our property. Our fence is 2-3 ft off the line...When I went by with the spray I tried not to do much damage, but that pretty tough. Guy hasnt said anything to me but I am pretty sure most of his tomatoes didnt amount to anything..
> 
> Hes the same guy that throws watermelon leftovers into my hay field, so I dont have too much compassion...


I know this is the daily PITA here as more than a couple fields border houses and people plant nice things right on the line. You spray property line 6mph or so and if you skip 5 " looks like heck weeds growing along property line if you get 4" on there side you are in big trouble .


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

When I was a kid in the 70's, the county sprayed 2,4 D on the bridge abutments and around the guardrails and sign posts and culverts under the road and stuff like that... now, 2,4 D does BAD THINGS to cotton... like dicamba in beans... only 2,4 D makes the usual "maple leaf" shaped leaf of cotton grow "fingers" from the points of the leaves, so it looks more like okra leaves... and of course the top of the stem twists around and curls up and it generally knocks the living crap out of it, and it doesn't make anything... He would get SO mad he just about opened up on some county guys with a rifle one time because they were spraying 2,4 D on the road at the end of one of his rent farms... Grandpa calmed him down... Thing was, in the heat and our typical southerly wind direction, within a couple days you could tell to the FOOT where the 2,4 D drifted across the cotton field, because you had a big ol' pie-shaped slice of the field where the vapors just nuked the cotton all the way across the field, with the tip of it pointing right back at the bridge abutments or road sign or culvert or whatever that they'd sprayed... Sumbitches never made good on ANY of it, either, because "it was perfectly legal" back then...

Fast forward to today... 2,4 D and dicamba are both "state limited use pesticides" and you can't spray ANYTHING containing 2,4 D or dicamba after January... cotton goes in the ground here about the end of March. Beans are about the same. Even Weedmaster is verboten here... even in January you have to have a "permit" from the state to make an application. Total PITA, as cotton acreage here is dwindling and pasture and grains are big here now... and it's gonna get even more pasture and grain as the effects of cotton no longer being a Farm Program crop really start being felt... You have to get a form from the extension agent and mail it in and they issue you a "permit" to spray pasture. Heck of it is, what do you need to spray in JANUARY??

Tell you a funny story I heard at a meeting one time years ago, from an extension agent. I was picking up some CEU's and attended a meeting, and they were presenting info on drift and all that crap, and during the meal or intermission or whatever the agent was telling about years before when he was a field scout for the state and just out of college or whatever, and they had some outbreak of pink bollworms or something, so the gubmint flipped out and they called in like every cropdusting plane they could get their hands on from ANYWHERE and just nuked all the cotton in the entire three-county area or something to eliminate it...

SO, after a few days, he started getting calls from farmers who had "damaged cotton" and was sent out to scout fields, and knew INSTANTLY that it was 2,4 D damage... the "finger leaves" and curling stem top was a dead giveaway... Thing was, it wasn't SEVERE, just a LITTLE elongation in the leaves and the top of the plants were curling around like pole bean runners, but not wilting and dying... Didn't take long to put 2 and 2 together... Turns out some of the planes they brought in were from West Texas, where they were MAINLY spraying brush and weed killer on rangeland, mostly, you guessed it, 2,4 D. Seems those guys didn't flush their tanks and booms too well-- probably just ran some water through it and called it good, but those planes probably had years worth of caked-on, stuck-on residue in the tanks, pumps, valves, and boom that a flush or two didn't get rid of. Their buttholes puckered up real good expecting a ton of lawsuits over it before it was done, gubmint included, since they ordered the spraying.

Well, as it turned out, the affected cotton snapped out of it within a few days-- rains and hot weather got it growing and it took off like a shot, bloomed and fruited and loaded up like gangbusters, and made some of the best cotton the county had ever seen! So, no lawsuits... the extension agent said that evidently, the 2,4 D was on at *JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT* to act in the plant like a growth stimulant, NOT a pesticide... he said that *IF* a guy could figure out *JUST EXACTLY* how many drops of 2,4 D to add to a tank of spray going on a cotton field to replicate the effect, it could really boost yields... BUT, add even *ONE DROP* TOO MUCH, and you'd nuke the entire field... so it wasn't worth the risk trying to figure it out to make use of the idea...

Later! OL J R


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

I remember the year that they approved "Command" (clomazone) herbicide in cotton... we'd switched to all grain sorghum by then, but since they talked about it at the meetings, and figured that perhaps one day I *might* plant another cotton crop, I paid attention to it. Like 2,4 D and dicamba, the active ingredient is quite prone to drift and volatization... even though it was applied pre-plant incorporated and in the cooler/wetter part of the year. (The hotter it is, the more volatization and drift risk you get with ANY drift-prone or volatization-prone chemical, which is why the idea of "drop dead dates" for stopping applications of dicamba on beans is probably a very good idea). Anyway, it was supposed to be the cat's pajamas for some of the local weed problems we face, and a lot of guys were excited about it. BUT, there were specific label restrictions on spraying-- low drift nozzles required, NO spraying in winds over 10 mph, etc.

Well, it was early March and I was out planting a field of grain sorghum that butts up against the neighbors place to the east. I was running flat out trying to get the sorghum seed in the ground, planting about as fast as I could go, because we had some cold fronts and inevitable rain storms moving in that night, and it was already starting to blow... the neighbor's rent-a-farmer was out there blowing and a going with his big Deere tractor with saddle tanks, dragging a hipper and drag harrows behind him working cotton ground, obviously spraying something despite the fact that it was starting to blow like heck...

Well, a couple weeks pass and the grain sorghum has come up and is about 3 inches tall, and some weeds are popping up so I take the Lilliston rolling cultivator to the field and start cultivating. I get to that field, and start on the west side moving east, and the further I go, the crappier the milo looks... It goes from green and healthy to a pale green to a greenish-yellow to a sickly yellow to yellow-brownish, and I'm just perplexed as heck as I'm cultivating my way further and further eastward across the field toward the neighbors... then suddenly I start seeing sorghum plants BLEACHED WHITE and it dawns on me, and I know EXACTLY what happened-- there is only ONE chemical in use (then) in these parts that affected plants by bleaching them WHITE-- Command... Once I know what to look for, sure enough, I can see where it drifted across the field from the neighbor, that spraying he was doing the day I was planting in that howling northeast wind was Command... Once I knew what to look for, I even found bleached out patches going through the canopies of the trees along the field borders and turning rows-- I remember the extension agent talking about drift of clomazone and how they'd managed to NUKE some local gardener's tomatoes with the vapor drift, since tomatoes are PARTICULARLY susceptible, even a mile away from their test farm-- he remembered it well because they were all BLEACHED WHITE from the clomazone... When I finished cultivating, and was driving back to the house, I found where the vapor had drifted clean across my farm, across the highway, bleached spots in trees on the OTHER SIDE of the highway, and drifted across another farm on the other side...

Well, I was pretty mad about it, but I didn't call TDA and raise a big stink. For one thing, the damage was done, and having the gubmint shoot the rental neighbor in the @ss for me wasn't going to do *ME* any good... it would just give the gubmint reason to make things harder on ALL us farmers, me included, even though I didn't use the stuff... got enough hoops to jump through as it is, without more gubmint interference. The crop was damaged and even if they fined the guy, I wouldn't get anything out of it myself, so why make trouble for him?? Besides, he didn't do it on PURPOSE, he just took a stupid chance and it backfired. Another thing was, I have to live here, and he's not going anywhere, and no sense making trouble or antagonizing someone for something that wasn't going to make any difference to how I came out in the end anyway. SO, I let it be. It snapped out of it after a couple rains in a week or two and did *alright*... wasn't a particularly good sorghum year anyway-- yields were down and we got a Gulf storm that leaned the crop over in a 45 mph wind right at booting time, and then it turned bone dry and the heads never really came out of the boot too well, and being down in the whorl when the rains returned with a vengeance meant we ended up with a lot of mold that year anyway, so it was one of those "breakeven" years at best anyway, nothing stellar. Would I have done better had it NOT gotten dinged by the friggin' Command??? Probably, but I couldn't prove it either way. Wasn't a HUGE difference in yield across the field or compared to other fields anyway...

I COULD have had him by the cojones if I'd really wanted to, but I didn't see the point. I'm sure he saw it over the fence and in the trees and probably butt-puckered a little-- he certainly didn't do anything quite that stupid again... or didn't take that long of a chance, anyway...

Anyway, this whole thing sounds like the "Big M" (Monsanto) found a terrific new trait and decided to capitalize on it-- EPA dragged its feet last year on the approvals for the chemical "Extendimax" with "Vapor-grip" technology (whatever the h3ll that is) and they already had a crap-ton of seed in the pipeline, so they sold it ANYWAY with the "disclaimer" to the farmers as a finger-wagging stern warning that "no chemical formulation of dicamba has been approved for sale by EPA to spray on said dicamba proof beans" and then sat back and sold them dicamba ANYWAY, because farmers were willing to "take a chance" and shoot it with unlabeled dicamba ANYWAY despite the warnings to try to get a handle on their weed problems... and in the process, raised clouds of dicamba vapors that drifted and nuked a lot of their neighbor's non-dicamba-tolerant beans in the process... creating a mess of litigation and at least one murder that was written about...

EPA got off their duffs and approved the "vapor-grip" formulations of dicamba for the "Extendimax" beans, and approved the labeled procedures to be followed for applications to prevent damage to neighboring fields from vapors volatizing and drifting in the wind from nuking neighboring crops... and now find that their procedures were not as well researched as they had thought... And evidently, the "vapor grip technology" isn't as "vapor-gripping" as the Big M had hoped for, and so despite 'on label' applications, the stuff is STILL nuking neighboring crops...

Sounds like they just need to pull the plug on the whole thing, like they did with that corn trait years ago that was SUPPOSED to be segregated and found it's way into shipments going to Europe, and ended up costing billions in lost sales when the Europeans found it in their grain and suspended grain shipments from the US... If not, they BETTER get their friggin' act together and start putting together a plan that REALLY works, and they need to pony up and pay the neighbors for damages from "on label" applications that ended up damaging neighboring crops anyway... "off label" applications are on the farmer doing it, but "on label" applications is a different animal entirely... Sounds like they need to do like the one extension guy is proposing-- using it as a preplant or pre-emerge treatment, and in cooler areas, maybe an early post-emerge treatment in approved beans, perhaps with sufficient setbacks to prevent drift on neighboring crops. In hotter, more volatizing prone weather, there should be "drop dead" temperatures or dates or bans on post-emerge treatments that could drift and nuke other crops...

Later! OL J R


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