By Darren Hefty

By the time you read this article, Status may already be sold out for the year.  If you haven’t gotten your Status purchased already, you should be looking for alternatives to meet your weed control needs unless you already have your product of choice sitting at home in your shed.  Brian and I will be discussing this topic in more detail at our winter workshops and will also answer your specific weed control and tankmixing questions, so be sure to attend.

Here are the most popular options if you want Status but can’t get it or feel it’s too expensive.

  1. Generic dicamba – Banvel, Clarity, and the plethora of generic dicambas available will be the first choice of many farmers to replace Status.  Keep in mind that you are giving up the safener, isoxadifen, that is in Status.  You’re also giving up the second active ingredient, diflufenzapyr.  That said, dicamba is still awfully good at controlling a wide range of broadleaf weeds.  All the dicambas are taking a pretty healthy price increase this year as supply on them may be tight, as well.  One of the most popular recommendations this year will be adding a low rate of dicamba to one of the HPPD family of herbicides listed next.
  2. HPPD’s – Whether it’s Callisto, Laudis, Impact, or Armezon, all the HPPD’s work fairly similarly.  Impact has a $3 to $3.50 per acre rebate with Monsanto’s Roundup products.  Laudis boasts having the same corn safener, isoxadifen, that Status has.  Therefore by mixing a generic dicamba with Laudis you safen the dicamba similarly to how you would with Status.  The HPPD’s are the most popular choice to replace Status and dicamba.  They will struggle on perennial weeds like thistles and also vine-type weeds like wild buckwheat.  Big advantages over Status are that the HPPD’s have much lower volatility, can be sprayed later in the season safely, and that they are at least 30% less expensive.
  3. Buctril – Highly effective on lambsquarters, cocklebur, sunflower, and many other broadleaf weeds, Buctril can be a great helper for Roundup or a standalone weed killer.  The weaknesses are notable, however, including that Buctril has little to no soil residual and is not the best on the pigweed family of weeds.
  4. Atrazine – If atrazine fits in your crop rotation, it’s a really nice helper product for weed control in corn.  0.25 to 0.5 pounds of atrazine is a nice addition to the above mentioned corn broadleaf herbicides to add weed killing power through contact and residual activity.  We greatly prefer seeing atrazine used post rather than pre-emerge for environmental reasons.  Adding punch to your post-emerge program is a big plus, too.
  5. Hornet – Before Roundup Ready corn this was a big product in the industry.  Hornet is a combination of Stinger and Python.  Stinger is excellent on Canada thistle.  Python is excellent on velvetleaf.  They both work on a host of other broadleaf weeds.  The downfall is that Hornet is not great on pigweed.
  6. Laddok – The safest product to corn, Laddok, is a combination of Basagran and atrazine.  Basagran is another product like Buctril that has contact activity only.  It needs to be warm and humid for this product to work its best.

Even though Status may be sold out in your area soon, if it isn’t already, you can save some money and still get excellent weed control with any of the alternatives listed above.