On their 1400 acres in Tennessee, Will Hutchinson and his family grow corn, wheat, soy...and pigweed.
Pigweed, also known as Palmer amaranth, is one of the toughest weeds in this humid, sub-tropical arable area, growing to over six feet tall and carrying as many as one million seeds each. Just one or two rogue pigweeds can put a field out of production for two years while a farmer struggles to deal with the problem.
Will uses herbicides sparingly and strategically, to help control emerging pigweeds until his crops are big enough to form a canopy over them, and he knows he's lucky.
"West of us, the herbicides we've always used have stopped working", he reports. "The pigweeds have figured out how to adapt and it is near impossible to control them. We really need new options to help us when nothing else works."
Read more about the threat from pigweed on our blog link below.
