- Author: Brent A Holtz
- Author: Mick Canevari
- Posted by: Gale Perez
In June we visited a first-leaf almond orchard that had started the season growing normally, but as the root system expanded, the trees’ growth became rapidly stunted (Fig. 1). The newly expanding shoot tips showed ‘little leaf’ symptoms (Fig. 2) characteristic of glyphosate injury, with an incredible proliferation of shoots (Fig. 3) growing from the same point on the scaffolds.
After investigating crop rotations, we learned that the trees showing symptoms had followed alfalfa newly planted the previous year that had been removed after only one year. Trees from the same nursery and farmed by the same grower were planted on the other half of the ranch in ground following three years of alfalfa...
- Author: Gale Perez
Reminder
Here are 2 events you don’t want to miss.
Centennial Celebration and Rice Field Day Program
Rice Experiment Station, Biggs, CA
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
- Posted by: The Weed's Network
- Re-posted by: Gale Perez
Abstract: Cheatgrass and its cousin, red brome, are exotic annual grasses that have invaded and altered ecosystem dynamics in more than 41 million acres of desert shrublands between the Rockies and the Cascade-Sierra chain. A fungus naturally associated with these Bromus species has been found lethal to the plants' soil-banked dormant seeds. Supported by the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP), researchers Susan Meyer, Phil Allen, and Julie Beckstead cultured this fungus, Pyrenophora semeniperda, in the laboratory and developed an experimental field application that, in some trials, killed all the dormant soil-banked Bromus seeds, leaving none to germinate the following year. The team's work opens the way to a commercial...
- Author: Brad Hanson
I recently ran across a report published by Crop Life International (a federation of plant science industry companies) on the cost of getting a "biotech" crop variety to market. I've attached the "fact sheet" to the bottom of this post and you can access the whole 24 page report at this link: http://www.croplife.org/PhillipsMcDougallStudy
Technological advances in our understanding and ability to manipulate crop plant genetics (through either GM or non-GM tactics) have had a profound impact on agricultural productivity and adaptibility to new and changing environments. While the study didn't distinguish among traits specifically related to...
- Author: Richard Smith
- Posted by: Gale Perez
The development of improved cultivation technology for row crop production has been an active area of research, and has made significant progress in recent years. Currently, standard cultivation removes weeds from the majority of the bed using sweeps, knives, coulters and blades. Typically a 4-inch wide band is left around the seedline. Weeds in the uncultivated band are typically removed by hand, and the density of weeds that occur there, determines how laborious and costly subsequent hand weeding will be.
There is technology to remove weeds from the seedline and it generally falls into two categories: 1) blind cultivation and 2) computer assisted cultivators. Implements used for blind cultivation are not guided by a...
