Reading Time: 5 minutes In the mid 1990s a team of computer engineers came up with a new way to plug devices into computers and called it a USB port. It was different from the old ports so it wasn’t compatible with older peripherals and they became useless. Computer companies called this progress but many users called it a […] Read more
Stacked deck
Weeds have put millions of years of evolutionary experience to work against just a handful of weed killing chemicals. The results are predictable
Unsilent spring
The funny thing about farm chemicals is they’re a lot less scary when you learn a bit about them — and some of the cautionary tales from the past have actually shown us how to use them more safely and effectively
Reading Time: 5 minutes Back in the early ’80s, when I was a science student, I took a pollution geography course and wrote a term paper on pesticides. I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the book credited with birthing the modern environmental movement, and dug through the library for all available references. I wound up getting a pretty good […] Read more
We’ve come a long way
Weed control evolution has occurred incrementally over the years, but looking back at the sweep of history shows some very impressive gains
Reading Time: 5 minutes Some might remember the 1970s cigarette commercial featuring the slogan, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Well, as I think back to how we controlled pests in the early days of my career, no slogan could be more appropriate for our pesticide industry. I was recently reminiscing with my brother Bill, who has been in […] Read more
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
Harvesting on turf
Quebec farmers have solved the corn cover crop puzzle. They grow grass under the canopy
Reading Time: 4 minutes When Raymond Durivage drives his Lexion 585R combine into a cornfield, he knows he’s in for a smooth, worry-free ride. The two front tracks ensure excellent flotation. But that’s not all. The combine is also rolling on turf, with a thick green mattress of ryegrass between each corn row that provides for less compaction and […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
