Southern NSW growers had access to a stellar line up of speakers at two days of major spring field days on October 7 and 8, held at Lockhart and Greenethorpe.
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Hosted by Delta Agribusiness in conjunction with WeedSmart, the seminars discussed weather, water and weeds, with the event MC’d by Delta senior farm consultant Tim Condon, from Harden.
A principal of Delta Ag and manager of the company’s advisory group Chris Duff, Young, said the focus of the day was to highlight the ability to have a big impact on next year’s weeds through this year’s harvest process, while having a long term strategy to keep the seed bank as low as possible.
“Harvesting provides the opportunity to capture and destroy weeds - particularly problematic ryegrass,” Mr Duff said.
“The practical options from the header are narrow windrows (for burning later), chaff carts, chaff decks and chaff lining.”
“All have similar impacts on reducing the weed seed bank and are practical options for any broadacre farmers.”
To kick off the day, Lisa Mayer of WeedSmart discussed the national project that is predominantly run from Western Australia, and the latest WeedSmart initiative, dubbed Diversity Era - an online 30 day course that starts in November.
The free four-part course includes “herbicide 101” and helps growers understand the science behind herbicide resistance, Ms Mayer said.
“We’re a unified voice for how to deal with herbicide resistance and weeds,” she said.
“We aim to disseminate the information in to a way that’s digestible [for farmers].”
Australian Herbicide Resistance Initiative’s Peter Newman also addressed the crowd and talked about the “war on weeds”.
For 15 years of his two decade career Mr Newman has been focusing on herbicide resistance.
“We have the long term view of having a low seed bank,” Mr Newman said.
WA growers Henry Barlow, who uses a chaff deck at harvest, and Ray Harrington, who invented the Harrington Seed Destructor, provided some insight in to different non herbicide options available to growers to keep the seed bank low and growing crops profitable.
Chris Bunny, an area manager for Growth Farms Australia based at Young, talked about narrow windrow burning and shared some of his experiences of turning around a problem farm with bad weed resistance issues and his suite of weed control techniques employed.
To register for the online course visit www.weedsmart.org.au/diversityera
