By Darren Hefty

It sure seems too early to be talking about spraying wheat, yet here we are.  The months of April and May offer some big challenges to your wheat yields, and with every challenge comes the opportunity to manage your crop for even more success than the next guy down the road.  Here’s a game plan to protect your wheat.

  1. Weed Control  – Scout your fields early because weed pressure hurts yield typically more than any other pest.  If you have grassy weed escapes, control them first.  Axial may be the best on foxtails and wild oats, but there has been ACC-ase resistance showing up, so Everest 2.0 and GoldSky may be good options on your farm.  If you have lots of grass and lots of broadleaves, spraying your grass herbicide separate from your broadleaf product will give you the best results, probably in the range of 3% to 15% better control.  Tankmixing will decrease performance, but will obviously reduce your number of applications.  When looking for a good broadleaf herbicide, WideMatch is the number one seller and the best on thistles and kochia.  However, Huskie is better on most other weeds.  Either way, you may consider a tankmix partner like Affinity or Edition.  Affinity and Edition are broad-spectrum, inexpensive herbicides, and they’re safer to the crop than 2,4-D.
  2. Disease Control – It’s easy to see the return on investment with weed control because you spot a weed and then kill it.  With diseases like tan spot or stripe rust, once you see them you are often too late.  For fungicides like Headline, Evito, Quilt, or Stratego, you need to protect your crop before the disease manifests itself with visual symptoms on the leaves.  Also, fungicides predominantly just protect the leaves they are sprayed on, so untreated leaves are not protected, and as the plant grows it may become necessary to spray a fungicide again to protect the new growth.  That’s why spray coverage and spray timing are so critical when using a fungicide.  During your first pass across the field with herbicide, you are usually at a great time to apply a fungicide, too.
  3. Insect Control – Do you have aphids, grasshoppers, or other harmful bugs in your wheat?  This year, buy a sweep net and check your wheat fields throughout the season.  Before you spray for weeds or disease protection, check for bugs.  If you have quite a few, it only takes a $1.50 to $2 investment to wipe out all those insects with a pyrethroid like Silencer or Declare.  The keys are to have insecticide on hand just in case and to scout your fields before you spray.  Bugs do far more damage to wheat than many people assume.
  4. Improved Growth – Nutritional products (like TJ Micromix, BoMnZn, or others) and plant growth hormones (like MegaGro) or combinations of the above may be just what your crop needs.  The way we look at it on our farm, we always want to be trying some new things and learning.  We’ve had good results using the products listed above, and we’ll try a few new ones as well to keep our yields moving forward.  However, you need to be careful mixing fertilizer products together with fungicides or “hot” herbicides like Wolfpack or 2,4-D.

The first pass you make through your wheat this year sets the stage for the success of your crop.  Consider these four things before you head to the field and try a few new things on a field or two.