Dr. Bob Scott - Extension Weed Specialist

[Title Slide - Comparing Liberty Link and Round-Up Ready Soybeans, Dr. Bob Scott, Extension Weed Specialist, Number 11 - August 17, 2009, Your Arkansas Soybean Podcast, University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, Arkansas Soybean Promotion Board]

[Dr. Bob Scott standing in a soybean field.] This was the first year for some new soybean technology, it was introduced this year on a limited basis. That's Liberty Link soybeans and Ignite herbicide. We've been looking at Ignite on Liberty Link beans, this makes our third year now over at Newport and we're very comfortable using this program to kill just about any and all weeds you have in a field. We're pretty comfortable recommending Ignite in Liberty Link beans. Residuals look very good in a Liberty Link system, especially a grass residual, it can be a little bit weaker on grass and I think if you look at the Liberty side versus the Round-Up side right now you'll see a little more grass in the Liberty side.

A little history of this, both sides got Prefix applied pre. Its rained a ton, all that Prefix is probably gone but it did control a few flushes of grass. We got some grass up, we came back over it, late because it was wet. The Ignite probably didn't do quite as good of a job as the Round-Up did and then we ain't been able to get back in to spray the second shot, it's coming today. So, you know, this is an example of, you know, how this new technology, you know, is not just gonna be cookie cutter easy to use. We're gonna have to be timely with applications and things can still go wrong.

The purpose of this test is to compare three Liberty Link systems. We've got a four eight, a four nine, and a five one compared to some very common Round-Up Ready varieties that you should know. And we're putting Liberty on the Liberty side and Round-Up on the Round-Up side and the purpose here is to just do a systems comparison of the some of the best varieties available over here and the best ones over here just to see what the yield comes out at the end of the year.

And so you know, we had a little bit of grass pressure here, we try to take that into consideration when we talk about the results but we've got a couple others of these scattered around the state and I'm cooperating with Jeremy on them, so that we can generate a little more yield data on some of these Liberty Link varieties. But again, you know, if you're thinking about rotating to some Liberty Link chemistry next year it does do a very good job on Palmer Amaranth. You can put together weed control programs for it. You need to be very timely with that first application on pigweed.

Just like with Flexstar and Blazer, one to two inch pigweed, it's gonna be ten to fourteen days after you plant, that field needs to be sprayed.

It looks good with a tank mix of Dual. If there's nothing up, you can put some Dual with it. And just like Sequence in Round-Up Ready beans or Dualmetolachlor or Metolachlorglyphosate that's one of the tank mixes we recommend, it's already in the MP44. And if you just getting eat up with Pigweed and other resistant weeds and it's time for a change we do have a new option now, it's the first time we've really been able to say that we do have an alternative to Round-Up, you know, that will let you more or less keep farming the way you've been farming. Okay.

One final point on the technology that you see out here, we did have soybeans planted in these two rows right here, we had a pass of Liberty Link here and a pass of Round-Up here. What do ya'll think happened? We overlapped. When we sprayed the Round-Up side we sprayed all the way to here, when we sprayed the Liberty Link we sprayed all the way to here. And we did it on purpose just to illustrate to ya'll that they do not have the stacked trait yet. So we not going to be able to drift Liberty on the Round-Up beans or Round-Up on the Liberty beans.

But I'll just wrap up by saying that that technology is coming. Ya'll hang on. For four or five years now we've been talking about soybeans and it's been Round-Up, Round-Up, what to put with Round-Up, what to rotate to, what to burn down with and be in Round-Up. And things are changing out there in soybean land.

We've got Dicamba tolerant Round-Up beans that are being looked at, we've got two four D tolerant beans, we got HPPD tolerant beans, which is a group of chemistry we don't use a lot of here in the south, PPO tolerant beans, we got the Liberty beans, the Round-Up beans. I'm leaving something out, GAT, we got GAT coming, higher levels of tolerance to ALS chemistry and Round-Up. And then on down the road we've got the stacked traits like GlyTol is the only one I can think of right now that has a name. And that's gonna be Ignite and Round-Up stacked together.

So a lot of good opportunities coming to mispray, no, a lot of good opportunities coming to rotate chemistry within the same field but it is gonna be challenging for us as we get in there.