Herbicides and stubble – some wash off, some don’t

WeedSmart Podcast

If Yaseen Khalil’s recent research is anything to go by, trifluralin would make a wonderful dye and is just about as hard to wash off stubble as it is clothes. Yaseen is completing his PhD at UWA under Ken Flower and has done some fantastic research to help understand which herbicides wash off wheat residue with rainfall and which are more tightly bound.Your hosts Peter Newman and Jessica Strauss chat with both Yaseen and Ken to find out more about this research. Yaseen compared Sakura, Trifluralin and Aracde (prosulfocarb) herbicides by spraying them onto wheat stubble then trying a whole range of techniques to wash the herbicides off the residue with simulated rainfall. He found;•Sakura washes off easily, Arcade less so and trifluralin less so again.•5mm of rainfall was enough to wash all Sakura off residue and into the soil.•Herbicides sprayed onto wet stubble are more tightly bound than dry stubble.•Rainfall intensity had little effect.While this is good news for Sakura, this research also showed that rainfall, in general, does wash a range of the herbicides from stubble, just some more than others. Take a listen for the full story! Music: bensound.com

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