The soybean industry is helping farmers manage pesticide resistance to decrease crop loss and input costs.
The Take Action program from the soy checkoff partners with crop protection companies, commodity groups and university researchers to help farmers do just that. Dr. Bill Johnson of Purdue University says the program provides farmers the tools they need to battle yield-robbing pests.
“The Take Action program is a checkoff program from the soybean industry to offer tips to reduce the impact of resistant pest species like herbicide resistant weeds, resistant insects and resistant diseases. It’s really important to stay on top of pesticide resistance because moving into this next era of farming, we’re either dealing with resistance to one of the three main pests on our farm right now, or it’s in the area and we’ll have to manage it in the future. So, it is a long-term commitment moving forward.”
The Take Action program has resources available for farmers to manage resistance issues on their farm
“These specific pieces of information are developed with the idea to help growers manage current problems with these pests, but also to think about some of the future crop technology as well. One of the most popular things that we’ve developed is this herbicide classification chart, which helps growers keep track of the number of times that they use a specific herbicide in their rotation, even though the trade names can change. And this is really important for reducing selection pressure for herbicide resistant weeds.”
Johnson says you can find the resources and more online.
“You’ll go to the Iwilltakeaction.com website and scroll to the bottom of that website, you can subscribe to The Take Action newsletter which provides timely updates on all of these topics, but also allows you to access some of the other information like to Take Action app, which is available on Google Play, And the Apple store as well. And we also have a series of videos that we’ve done the last two winters and we’re going to do another set this winter that’s going to be housed on that website as well. So, if you subscribe to that newsletter, you’ll be emailed updates on new information as we added to the website.”