Wheat Herbicide Guidelines

By Brian Hefty

How late in the season can you spray herbicides in wheat? The first thing I am always concerned with in fields is yield. If you don’t control weeds early in the season, you’ve given up yield – sometimes a good chunk of yield. If it’s too wet to spray with a ground rig, call in a plane. If you can’t get over your acres timely, hire another person for your farm and/or get an additional sprayer. Just think what late spraying does to 1000 acres, for example. If you give up 5 bushels times $6, that’s $30,000. That pays for a big portion of an employee’s wages for the year or buys you a pull-type sprayer in one year.

Depending on where you are at in the country and whether you have winter or spring wheat, it may already be too late to get your wheat sprayed “early” in its growth. Now it’s time for plan B. If you’re already nearing flag leaf and you don’t have your weeds killed, you probably won’t help yield anymore by spraying. About all you’ll do is keep some of those weeds from going to seed and make harvesting a little easier. Another option you can always wait for later is a pre-harvest burndown with something like Roundup about a week before combining.

If you want to spray now, here is a chart showing how late in the season various products can be used. I caution you, though – product labels can change, so please check the label on any product you use before applying it, regardless of what our chart says below.