STRATEGY A featured segment designed to share business- critical information to seed-selling professionals. Visit SeedWorld.com to download this department and other tools. Fighting the Resistance Experts weigh in on best practices and the future of herbicide use. Joe Funk and Marc Zienkiewicz Daniel Waldstein BASF Technical Marketing Manager Waldstein manages field research on nine different corn and soybean herbicides. He also provides technical oversight for the product managers and serves as a resource for marketing, research and development, regulatory and field sales teams. 60 / SEEDWORLD.COM FEBRUARY 2018 IT’S BEEN NEARLY 80 years since the discovery of 2,4-D — the first modern herbicide. It became commercially avail- able in 1946, and a revolution in agriculture began. What also began along with it was the problem of herbicide-resistant weeds. Fast-forward to today, and growers are looking for solu- tions in the battle to fight and manage this problem. In order to be successful in that battle, everyone involved needs to understand that resistance is a problem brought about by humans, say experts. “Weed resistance is a form of evolution, and it’s induced by our management practices, or lack thereof. Same thing with disease in people — dis- ease is a function of evolu- tion and how we manage our lives,” says Bryan Young, weed science professor at Purdue University. “Weed resistance to her- bicides is a function of how plants evolve in response to our management of them, and most of that management has become increasingly reliant on the use of herbicides.” Developing resistance is something weeds are very good at. It’s a survival mechanism, and according to Young, weeds evolve in response to many things — not just herbicides. “You can potentially have evolution of weeds that are less impacted by tillage. Eventually, some species just germinate right away after you till up the last one, and we do already have weeds like that.” In essence, weed resist- ance is a result of humans inadvertently selecting for weeds that already have developed a resistance gene to a particular herbicide. Weed resistance begins when weed populations have a very low level of genetic resistance to herbicides. Depending on the weed population, well below one in a million plants, maybe even one in a billion plants, have this genetic resist- ance to chemical herbicides. Over time, if one herbicide chemistry is used continu- ously, the resistant plant will survive and increase the per- centage of resistance genes in the overall population, says BASF technical marketing manager Daniel Waldstein. Waldstein notes that herbi- cide-resistant weeds were first Bryan Young Professor, Weed Science Purdue University Young’s research focuses on developing effective management strategies in agronomic crops, herbicide application technologies for optimization and stewardship of herbicide use. His goal is to bridge the basic and applied aspects of weed management research to assist in delivering more effective weed management recommendations to crop producers and land managers.