Optimizing Cover Crop Desiccation | XtremeAg

29 Mar 252m 44s

Jacob Appleberry from Live Oak Ag discusses the approach to desiccating cover crops as cotton planting season nears. He explains the timing differences in terminating cover crops across various fields to determine the best strategy. Jacob highlights the importance of selecting effective herbicide combinations to ensure thorough control of grasses and broadleaf species. Additionally, he emphasizes the critical role of water quality in herbicide efficacy. He advises farmers to check for pH balance, heavy metals, and chlorine content to avoid reduced effectiveness or loss of biological products. Ensuring proper water treatment can significantly impact the performance of herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides.

00:00:00 Hey guys, Jacob, apple Berry here with Live Oak Ag. We're out in the cover crop field again today. It's, uh, getting close to cotton planting time, 00:00:08 getting a little bit warmer. Uh, got a few beans in the ground, probably gonna see them in a couple days. 00:00:13 Uh, we're gonna talk about desiccating. The, the cover crop. We didn't get the size we wanted. 00:00:18 Uh, we let this and carry a little bit farther than we did the other two fields. Just trying to get as much size on it as we could. 00:00:24 Kind of gather some information, see which way we liked it better, uh, if we needed to kill it like we did a week or two ago on one field, 00:00:30 or if we killed it a month ago on another field. Just again, trying to gather data, trying to figure out what fits the situation the best, what fits mat 00:00:37 and lane's operation the best. We're gonna desiccate this with some locatable herbicides. Personally, I like Roundup and Liberty. 00:00:44 Everybody's kind of different. They just gotta figure out what they wanna do, what fits in the best, what fits their operation the best. 00:00:50 They may wanna use other chemistries. That's understandable. You just gotta make sure that you get something 00:00:55 that kills all the way down to the root for both grasses and broad leaves. And that's kinda the reason for mixing 00:01:00 those two chemistries together. When you put them together, they're usually pretty hot. They usually take care of a lot of things. 00:01:05 Uh, obviously run a, a full rate, depending on the size. We're gonna run a full rate on this just 00:01:09 to make sure we get it killed and get it to deteriorating. We got about three weeks 00:01:14 or so, full cotton plant, like I mentioned earlier. The thing I wanna talk about as much as anything when it comes to desiccating 00:01:21 or spraying herbicides or fungicides, insecticides or biology or ides, is checking your water and making sure that you've got a good 00:01:33 clean water that your, your pH is right. Uh, you don't have any heavy metals. If you've got a, if you're running municipal water, 00:01:41 you're running some type of de chlorinator to get rid of that chlorine. So you improve the efficacy of your herbicides, 00:01:48 your insecticides, uh, your fungicides and your ides. Some amides and some herbicides. You know, they don't work very well 00:01:56 with a, with a certain pH. You know, they gotta have a, a, just a fine pH to make them do what they need to do. 00:02:02 So check your water. That's a pretty low-end thing to do, just to make sure that you're not losing some of your efficacy 00:02:09 of your different pesticides to pull water or something in the water that doesn't work well with, uh, what you have now. 00:02:19 If you're putting out biology and you put something in there and the water immediately kills your biology, you know, 00:02:25 what kind of money have you wasted? So pay attention to your water, get you a pH meter, you know, check it, get it treated, 00:02:32 check it again, make sure it's working. There's several out there we can talk to you about if we need to. 68 00:02:37.575 --> 00:02:39.595