Kochia in a canola field.  Photo: File

Crop-killing weeds advance across US farmland as chemicals lose effectiveness

Losing battle with weeds adds pressures to farmers already stressed by inflation, extreme weather

Reading Time: 4 minutes Crop-killing weeds such as kochia are advancing across the U.S. northern plains and Midwest, in the latest sign that weeds are developing resistance to chemicals faster than companies including Bayer BAYGn.DE and Corteva CTVA.N can develop new ones to fight them.

Kochia is a particular problem for lentils, as there are no post-emergent options for control.

Winter wheat is a kochia killer

Its head start in the spring gives it an advantage over the troublesome weed

Reading Time: 3 minutes As a yield-limiting weed, kochia has a lot going for it. A single plant can spread tens of thousands of seeds over a wide area after it dries out and starts travelling like a tumbleweed. All kochia across the Prairies is considered resistant to ALS inhibitors (Group 2), but kochia can also be resistant to […] Read more


These thriving kochia plants are probably resistant to more than one herbicide mode of action.

Using a multi-prong strategy against herbicide resistant weeds

There are more pre-seed control options available to suppress herbicide-resistance, but use cultural management as well

Reading Time: 4 minutes More than half of western Canadian fields under annual crop production contain at least one herbicide-resistant biotype, according to surveys from 2014 to 2017. In Alberta, roughly 60 per cent of fields surveyed have resistant weeds; in Saskatchewan that figure is 57 per cent and in Manitoba it’s 68 per cent. “The surveys have been […] Read more

VIDEO: “Old soil-applied” solutions for herbicide resistance weeds

VIDEO: “Old soil-applied” solutions for herbicide resistance weeds

Crop Diagnostic School: Know your target weed issues before choosing a herbicide

Reading Time: < 1 minute To help keep herbicide-resistant weeds at bay, some older soil-applied products are rejoining the fight. At the 2015 Crop Diagnostic School, Jeanette Gaultier, pesticide use specialist with Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, talks about which herbicide-resistant weeds producers should watch for and what they need to consider before choosing a herbicide for their situation.


hand-picking weeds in Arkansas

Herbicide-resistant weeds are our biggest threat

There’s no reason why the West must become an Arkansas-style nightmare because of weed resistance, but we may be heading there anyway

Reading Time: 7 minutes Neil Harker calls herbicide-resistant weeds the biggest threat to sustainable crop production in Western Canada. “We’ve been the grim reaper talking about this for ages, but this is a watershed moment,” says the research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Lacombe, Alta. “There are places in North America going back to the plow and […] Read more

Redroot pigweed

New era, new tools

Selection pressure and an ever-increasing list of glyphosate-resistant weeds mean we’re in a new era. Herbicide researchers are reacting by tapping the biomedical world for new tools for a new challenge

Reading Time: 6 minutes When most people think of 1973, they think of world changing events such as the Arab oil embargo and the end of the Vietnam War. What they don’t think of is the introduction of a world-beating pesticide that not only changed the way that farmers would come to think about weeds, but also fundamentally altered […] Read more