Annual ryegrass is
problematic weed in Australia
because of its distribution.
It basically infests
most of the paddocks
and the cost of controlling
it and also its
great ability to evolve
resistance to the herbicides that
are used for its control.
Most of my research focus
as part of the AHRI team,
is to understand
and quantify
the risk of resistance to
commonly used herbicide
with the special attention to
newly developed
herbicide.
And if you look at the highly
resistant population, then yeah,
this is again maybe
confirming what you would expect,
that there is quite a bit of
trifluralin resistance, high level
in South Australia and in Victoria,
while there is much less in WA.
So today at the forum
I spoke about
the new work that I have done,
new research
looking at national
scale and the level of herbicide
resistance in ryegrass.
Herbicides that are used to control
ryegrass are very expensive
and therefore, when
a grower uses a particular
herbicide tool,
needs to have full confidence
that the herbicide would work
and so some of the work
that I've done trying to
test a very
large range of herbicide
option gives exactly
that information to the to
the grower.
We found great
evidence that using
a herbicide mixture of a
pre-immergent or a post-emergent
herbicide gives great,
great efficacy and helps
to minimise the risk of
resistance.
Growers are encouraged
to use a particular
herbicide strictly following
the herbicide label
that will help them
to get the maximum efficacy
out of each specific herbicide,
to get the best crop safety
and to minimise herbicide
degradation, as well as
having great efficacy on the
target weed that they are trying to
control.
Testing for herbicide resistance
is a great step
towards having
good knowledge about
what can be achieved
with a specific herbicide in
a field situation.
It's a good way of understanding
whether the target weed,
ryegrass, radish or
any other problematic weed,
has evolved resistance
to a particular herbicide.
And so herbicide resistance testing
is a good step to have
greater confidence of
cost-effective use of the herbicide
technology.
When it comes to herbicide
choice and use, don't
cut the right, try
to use the herbicide strictly
following the label.
And of course we encourage
herbicide resistance testing
and also following the
guidelines of the 'Big 6'
that have been developed by
the team of WeedSmart to
help with mitigating resistance
and also having effective
weed control.