The weather over the last 10 days has been ideal for planting cotton and soybean.  In many cases cotton and soybean have emerged in 5 days after planting.  Unfortunately the consistent strong wind has made it very difficult to spray burndowns and pre emerge herbicides.

As a result many have been planting as rapidly as possible and not spraying.  These fields of cotton and some soybeans now have good established stands with no pre applied herbicide.

Pigweed are also emerging in great numbers in some of these fields.  I have had quite a few reports of Palmer in these fields and I do not doubt it.  In our emergence studies here where we monitor Palmer emergence in tilled and no-till environments we have averaged almost 1400 Palmer/sq yard emerging over the last two weeks.  This pigweed cannot be seen from the truck and are even hard to see standing in the field as they have just emerged.

We are now set up to have a lot of cotton and considerable soybean acreage that will have the crop and Palmer amaranth all becoming established at the same time.   In these fields we are now at crunch time!  If the soybeans are RR they will have to be sprayed within 7 days of emergence to have a reasonable chance of controlling the Palmer.

In a few soybean fields I have been in the Palmer amaranth is already over an 1” tall.  With the warm temperatures and rain we had over the weekend expect that Palmer to be too large for FlexStar, Cobra or Blazer to control in about 24 hours. In our cotton and LL soybeans you have a little wider window but earlier is always preferable to later.

Hopefully after this front passes through tonight the wind will lay to where we can safely spray.  If not we may very well have to destroy the RR soybean stand and replant.