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Thumb of Michigan | Our "home" farm was cleared in the mid to late 1850's. By my ancestors. They had weeds to battle. So did every generation after that, me included. Every generation, including me, tried tillage to control weeds. I have no idea what description the other generations used for control- I wanted eradication of weeds as well. And, that was before glyphosate became cheap.
So, first thing I had to do was come to terms with the fact that tillage wasn't effective at eradicating weeds. Adding chems helped of course, and if everything worked OK, we could get a growing season out of the whole program. Nothing eradicated, though.
As no till methods became more refined, that became attractive to us. We could get seed planted in a timely fashion, weed control was an issue. So was recreational rotational tillage. One needed to get better, one needed to go away. "Here", the ones I know that are positive that no till means either no yield and/or too many weed issues are doing some rotational tillage. That doesn't work. I doubt it works in many places, but I'm close to 100% sure here. Been there, done that.
The other great way to get poor weed control is not rotate crops. Either cash crops, or if thats not possible, add some diversity with cover crops. Lots of reasons why that is that have been discussed many times in the past, no reason to go through that again.
Ultimately, we had a pretty major shift in weeds. Nothing that couldn't be controlled or even eradicated, it took different practices is all. Fall herbicide applications help immensely. Some new chemistry was invaluable to us.
But back to the OP question: yep, residuals are a huge help. No till is a huge help. Rotations and over crops are really big. too. | |
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Residual herbicide to reduce seed bank
