Difficult Year For Weed Control

Sep 07, 2021

2021 was a difficult year for weed control.

Kim Brown-Livingston is the province's weed specialist.

"We were so very dry at the beginning. We didn't have a lot of weeds come up and then after that we got little flushes of rain and so some of the weeds were coming but it was really difficult for guys to spray...Then we had a terrible time in spray season. We did not have a lot a good days for spraying. We either had high winds or we had a lot of temperature extremes."

She reminds farmers to be on the lookout for waterhemp.

"We are finding pockets of it and it is a Tier 1 noxious weed. It must be destroyed, we can't let it go to seed. It has to be destroyed, there's no exception to that. These are terrible weeds. Tier 1 weeds are very competitive weeds that can cause an awful lot of economic loss and especially something like a waterhemp if it gets into our crop land and really limits growing crops like soybeans and corn and sunflowers, because a lot of our herbicide options are limited in those crops."

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Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.