What we're learning from the dicamba dilemma

As expected, the launch of XtendiMax and Engenia came with a few headaches. We have been preparing for the introduction of the dicamba- tolerant trait for the past few years. Since I joined MFA almost six years ago, we have had numerous employee trainings, producer meetings and special applicator sessions. For a while, I didn’t know if we would ever see this technology reach the farm gate with all the additional requests made by numerous government agencies.

Little did I know that my first complaint call on dicamba would come in early May. I also didn’t think the complaint would be failure to control 3- to 4-inch waterhemp. Looking at this technology in trials, we had decent control when timely applications were made. While the early-emerged waterhemp was a problem, I was overly impressed with what was happening with our giant ragweed and marestail. Quite often, I would get a picture and a text that said, “Look at what it can do!” I would respond, “Roundup used to, too.”

What I noticed to be different about the waterhemp that had emerged in late April and early May was that these plants had already put on a seed head. This is not typical of waterhemp for that time of year. However, we have new technology with new adjuvant requirements we were trying to figure out on the fly. We quickly noticed some of the issues and made a labeled change to meet the requirements for both XtendiMax and Engenia applications. We needed to do a better job on coverage and penetration of the target species. That’s why we included Xpond and Impetro II in all of our applications for better weed control.

Early on we had a lot of successes. We had producers and applicators calling in and telling me how well this product was staying put. I also had a producer tell me that I had been wrong about this technology being risky. He had applied the product right next to his house and garden with no issues. Mind you, we are talking about early applications. Here’s where it gets tricky. Maybe we got a little too comfortable with the technology. Maybe the success stories caused some of the applicators to relax in strictly following the requirements.

Then it happened. We got our first off-target complaint early June, and once it started, it didn’t stop. We had call after call after call. We obviously had our fair share of tank contamination, typical physical drift, wrong field, wrong tip, wrong pressure, wrong boom height, etc. We see these issues with other crop protection technologies as well. We also saw a fair amount of damage from our Group 15 herbicides such as Dual, Warrant and Outlook.

Then we saw damage that appeared to be “unexplainable.” In these cases, we had followed the label, tips, boom height, speed, weather, tank mix partners and so on, but still had movement. I wish I had the answer today to tell you what happened, but I don’t. I had several applicators look at me and say, “Doc, I followed the label, and it still moved.” I think it is safe to say that there is still a lot we don’t know about the dicamba molecule.

Overall, from our custom application standpoint, we did a better job than I thought we were going to do. I was expecting to see more mistakes than were actually made. We didn’t just put this in the hands of a new applicator; we put it in the hands of our veteran employees. Some of these applicators have been spraying for more than 30 years. They took the challenge and were successful, in my opinion.

As we move into the next growing season, we have to learn from what went right and what went wrong. We need to get out of our silos and join together to figure out how we can make this work effectively and safely for all of agriculture. I will write about dicamba a couple more times before next spring and will be on the speaking trail talking about the pros and cons that we saw this season.