It wasn't that many years ago we were "organic", but so were all of our neighbors. Our corn was very clean. Beans could be a struggle until you started putting the shoe leather in the fields. Volunteer corn was the main driver of "walking beans" with a hoe. But, you'd take out volunteer corn,  GRW, VVL, & some wild carrots as long as you were walking. GFT usually got eliminated by the 2nd or 3rd cultivator pass in beans. Sometimes the beans were almost canopied on 38" rows. You'd widen the sweeps away from rows & go like heck w/the cultivator.....like 4-5 mph!! Only problem at that speed is if you got really hot & blinked off a bit....there was a lot of damage done by the time you got things back on the rows.

But, the crops remained relatively clean, though not 100%, I'll admit...but often close.

Then came Ramrod (corn) & Amiben (beans) granular herbicides. Life became better. Often cut it down to 2 passes in the beans. I remember asking my Dad why they didn't invent something to kill the volunteer corn in the beans so we didn't have to walk them. The reply would get me barred from NAT. Then, our friend Jim Kinsella invented Poast & life was better again.

Maybe there was less weeds "back then", but I can't imagine why. We did our best to recycle them from the barn, thru the xxxxspreader, & back to the fields. I won't say everyone had clean fields, but most were.