By Darren Hefty
Resistance management is becoming a big deal on farms today. I was recently at a presentation where the speaker said no new chemical family has been discovered since 1983 when Ronald Reagan was president. That’s a long time! Since it takes 10 to 15 years to get a new chemical family to market once it is discovered (and it appears no ag chemical manufacturer has anything in the pipeline right now), it looks like it’s going to be a while before there are any truly new herbicides. To help you protect and preserve the herbicides and other crop protection products we have today, we’ve developed the free Ag PhD Modes of Action app for your tablet or smartphone.
The app allows you to pick the products you intend to use on the farm and put your total plan together. The mode of action of each product is displayed so you can check to make sure you are utilizing multiple modes of action. Here are a couple examples.
Corn:
I chose a very simple corn program. I picked Corvus as my pre-emerge herbicide and DiFlexx as my post-emerge treatment. Corvus has herbicides from Group 2 and Group 27. DiFlexx is from Group 4. That’s a total of three modes of action and no more than one from each group.
Soybeans:
Here I picked a more complicated program beginning with three pre’s. I chose Authority MTZ plus Prowl H2O. Then I picked Roundup, Flexstar, FirstRate, and Warrant post-emerge. In total, this program contains 6 different modes of action.
Once you pick a program, you can email it to yourself or your crop advisor and put it into action on your farm.
Other Free Apps
GDU Calculator – This year I plan to track my growing degree units for each field much closer than I have in the past. I used to try to do it all by hand, watching the weather and doing the calculations myself. It was way too time-consuming for me to actually get it done perfectly. Now you can use this app to track each of your fields in the upcoming growing season. Just input your field names, zip code, crop planted, and date planted and you’re ready to go.
Crop Nutrient Deficiencies – I’ve been working on fixing soil nutrient imbalances with farmers from all over the country and beyond. When I find something on their soil tests that’s dramatically short, I often direct them to the Crop Nutrient Deficiency app. “Hey, your manganese is critically low. Look on the app and see what a manganese deficiency looks like in your cotton or whatever crop was in the field this year.” There are pictures from many different crops showing deficiencies of virtually any nutrient you want to see. I highly recommend this app.
There are many more great agricultural apps that we’ve helped put together as well and they’re all free for you to download and use. Look for more information at www.agphd.com or on the app store for your Apple or Android device.