I made this word cloud in preparation for the class I’m teaching tomorrow. I thought it was pretty interesting, so I decided to post it here and share. In class, we’re going to discuss the effectiveness of various practices to manage herbicide resistant weeds. In preparation for tomorrow’s discussion, I asked my students to review 5 different herbicide industry websites to see what they were recommending to manage herbicide resistant weeds. This word cloud was created by taking recommendations from those sites, and pasting the main words into wordle.net.
I was a little surprised to see how prominent it was to recommend using residual herbicides. It seems to be more common than any other recommendation, including tank-mixes, using multiple herbicide modes of action, or any non-herbicide practice like tillage or crop rotation. This is most interesting because it wasn’t too long ago that many university weed scientists recommended minimizing the use of residual herbicides in order to reduce the risk of resistance. This is because herbicides that stay in the soil longer expose more weeds, thereby increasing the selection potential for the resistance trait. Perhaps in the future I’ll try to do something similar with university recommendations, to see how they compare.
Comments are closed.