Nipplewort Control in Winter Wheat

Jun 23, 2021

First off, Nipplewort is not an overly common weed species. Finding fields with uniform and relatively dense stands of this weed has proven challenging, and therefore difficult to do replicated herbicide trials. For the farmers that have it though, it does negatively affect crop production, especially in winter cereals where it typically germinates in the fall and becomes quite large by the time postemergence herbicides are applied in the spring. Secondly, nipplewort is tolerant to a lot of herbicides. Therefore, you need to screen a lot of herbicides and tank-mixes in order to find promising treatments that you would want to test under field conditions.

Dr. François Tardif, Peter Smith (University of Guelph) and I started this process in 2002 and we certainly were able to identify herbicides that didn’t work, but thankfully we found a handful of products that gave us reason for optimism, we just needed to tweak some treatments and look at them under more field sites. Finally during the 2020 field season, we have more confidence that one tank-mix in particular, Lontrel XC + Refine SG + non-ionic surfactant, gives us the best opportunity to control nipplewort. We also discovered that some of the newer herbicides that weren’t available back in 2002, aren’t particularly effective.

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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.