November 2022 - 5

K.U.L.T.-Kress LLC demonstrated its in-row weeding equipment technologies.
WEEDS
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
were demonstrated to show how the
machines should be mounted and
adjusted, to help growers visualize how
the implements could work on their
own farms to increase efficiency
and productivity.
Return performance
Bishop hosted the field day on his farm
in 2018. He told attendees that while his
operation grew 80 acres of vegetables a
year ago, this year that was reduced to
10 acres and will be completely phased
out next year
as PrairiErth
Farm becomes
solely a row crop
outlet, harvesting
primarily corn,
wheat and beans.
" There are
HANS BISHOP
three keys to
controlling weeds
mechanically, "
Bishop said. " Your
crops should
always try to be bigger than your weeds.
Ninety percent of the weeds are on the top
inch and a half of the soil. And, cultivate
as many rows as you plant. "
Bishop said that " a lot of the
effectiveness of the tools that you have are
going to be as good as what you've done
before you've drug the steel into the field
to try to cultivate. If you're planting one
row at a time with a planter and one row
zigs, and the other one zags, they're not
going to cultivate very well.
It's also important for growers to do
their homework and develop a crop plan.
Specifically, when growing vegetables,
" you want to try and stick to a crop plan,
refer to your records - whether that's
fertility, or what crops were in what fields
before. Even disease can affect weeds
because you have less canopy closure. If
you have black rot you're going to lose
canopy and there's going to be more
weeds coming up. "
Consider what weeds were in the
field before.
" If you had a cover crop that went to
seed, like buckwheat, you may not want
to plant something like carrots in there.
It's something that's going to be more
sensitive to weeds. "
Bishop said when he first started
mechanically cultivating, he didn't
recognize how tillage can help grow
weeds, as well.
" Deep tillage isn't bad. Maybe you're
doing some fall tillage deep ripping, and
you've had a foxtail problem in that field.
Deep ripping can help improve your
drainage which may make the conditions
less ideal for foxtail to grow in. "
No-tilling a cover crop after mowing it
can produce hidden benefits.
" Maybe over the winter there's going to
be predation of birds and mice, whatever's
out there that might feed on the seed of
the weeds over the winter. You're going to
lose some weeds that way. "
Foxtail seed is only viable for one or
two years, he noted.
" If it's going to be a fallow field, tillage is
good. Stale seed bedding is something I'm
a proponent of, particularly in vegetables,
and even in soybeans. "
Bishop advocates using the stale
seedbed technique based on the premise
that weeds that germinate and emerge
before the crop is planted are easier to
manage.
Set the stage for success
Detail matters at every step, Bishop
stressed.
For vegetables, Bishop seeks evenly
formed beds, with " the wheel tracks in the
same spot. All of the beds are probably the
same height, so it's going to be the same
for all of your tools on all of the beds. "
Soil health is vital. Proper soil
management will give plants, whether
they're transplanted or direct-seeded, a
jumpstart coming out of the ground.
" You're going to have more
predictability and uniformity. Everything
is going to close the canopy at the same
time, hopefully. Things are just going to
work better if you have more uniform
utility in the system.
" Things that you might not necessarily
think about, like cover crops, are going
to help your soil tilth and you have less
compaction. Your hills are going to drain
faster and you're going to be able to get
tools into the field at a more ideal and
predictable time. Your soil is going to
fracture at the same rate and you can
move the same rate of soil for each row
for your crop. "
Stout AgTech CEO Brent Shedd explains the features of the company's Stout Smart
Cultivator, a software-defined, tractor drawn implement that uses machine vision and
artificial intelligence to cultivate and weed fields using mechanical blades.
Sutton Ag Enterprises displayed a camera-steered cultivator from Steketee.
Bishop uses a rotavator to incorporate
cover crops because it effectively breaks
up all of the root balls.
" Then you can go and form a good
seed bed with either raised or flat beds.
Then you're not going to have root
balls of rye getting stuck on points of
cultivators and stuff like that when you
do a primary tillage pass with good
intention, " he said.
Bishop said flaming is another good
way of stale seed bedding " where you're
not even doing any tillage. It depends on
what kind of weeds you have a problem
with. Flaming is not necessarily a good
mode of attack against something like
foxtail or grass because the growing
point is below the soil.
" I'm just trying to bring up ideas that
really made our weed control systems
click as we graduated into different
stages of our vegetable farming career, "
he said. " Once we got better irrigation
we were able to force a flush to come up.
" We would do something like pull out
the big traveling gun and just irrigate
empty beds to get a many weeds to
come up as possible. Especially with
summer-planted carrots we'd have six
weeks where it wouldn't rain in the
summer. So, how are you going to get
weeds to come up if you don't have the
moisture? We'd pull the traveler out, get
the weeds to come up, do a stale seed
bed. It feels like you're wasting water
but the (weeds) are going to come up
when you plant your carrots and it's just
a disaster. " VGN
VGN | NOVEMBER 2022 | 5
November 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of November 2022
