Look! It’s moving. It’s alive. It’s alive… or is it?
With herbicides there are several active ingredients to choose from, each offers a range of attributes such as reliability, efficiency and persistence depending on individual plant species.
Each mode of action has a different tell-tale sign of activity on each species but all require that sufficient is absorbed by the individual plant to receive a lethal dose.
The smaller the plant, at the time the herbicide is available for uptake, the less the challenge for the herbicide itself. Just one of the basic ideas behind the use of “pre-emergence” herbicides.
This autumn I have employed the use of tri-allate, flufenacet, pendimethalin, diflufenican and prosulfocarb. These chemicals represent a range of modes of action.
When used together active ingredients may be either complimentary or antagonistic in their activity to one another. The highest level of control consistently seen (in the field) from one active applied alone could be considered at 80%.
On the original Tri-allate “label”, control of black grass was stated at 43% when used alone.
Therefore, if your herbicide programme is going to result in less than 43% control Tri-allate is a good bet for inclusion. If on the other hand your control is better than this then the addition of Tri-allate to a black grass control programme (or stack) can on average elevate the control achieved by the partner products by an additional 10%.
In these photographs it is possible to see the effect of “the stack” on black grass control. We have plants of different sizes exhibiting a range of symptoms relating to the applied active ingredients.