When a farmer with weeds in his fields wants to know if there’s an app for that, the answer is yes. It’s not an app to kill the weeds but an app to assist the farmer in weed management for his specific geography, crop and weed problem.
Monsanto’s Chris Reat, the Roundup Ready PLUS marketing manager, explains the app is just part of that weed management system.
“The Weed Manager Plus app (for Apple and Android) is a very nice resource and tool for folks to use. You can download and obviously it’s portable at that point so you can carry it to the field and look up specific weeds you’re having problems with. Identify those by what products are available in the Roundup Ready PLUS platform that may control them, and then what opportunities you would have for incentives and things like that to come back with.”
Reat says if it makes a recommendation you can save it within the app.
“So you can either take that to your retailer to talk about it more or you can physically take it to them or email it to them and say hey I need to address this problem. These are the products recommended to me, is that the right fit? You can actually functionally use that to make an order to address your weed concerns with your local retailer.”
Another tool is the website, https://www.roundupreadyplus.com/Pages/Home.aspx. The tools are important as resistant weeds make their way into Indiana.
“Our friends in the south and southeast over the last several years have really been challenged with weed management and it’s slowly been creeping our way, more westerly and more north every year. So we’ve seen it creep into the bottom end and central portion of Indiana and we realize it’s critical to be proactively addressing weed management concerns today and not waiting on future biotechnologies and future solutions. There are things that farmers should be doing today to help offset and mitigate some of their weed management issues.”
With the website and app you can learn more about Monsanto’s recommendations.