By Eric Jones and Philip Rozeboom et.al
As the 2025 harvest season comes to an end, now is the time to start preparing your weed management plan for next year. While purchasing herbicides, crop seed, and other inputs take priority after harvest, consider asking yourself the following questions to better prepare for managing weeds next season.
Questions to Consider
How was my weed management plan this year?
Reflect on how weed management was across the farm during 2026. What worked well? What did not work so well? Consider factors that influenced weed management such as herbicide selection/rate, weed species, crop rotation and soil type. While weather likely played a role in weed management, controlling the weather is out of our hands. Considering these factors can help shape our weed management plans for 2026. Even if weed management was successful, continuously changing tactics can reduce weed adaptation to those tactics. Another consideration for weed management is to create plans for individual fields. Each field likely has unique soil types, landscape features, and weed species; tailoring your management plan to the unique characteristics of the field will likely be more effective in both management and costs. One crop variety is rarely planted across the entire farm, but specific varieties are planted to the characteristics of the field; why should weed management be any different?
Where were the weedy fields?
There were many fields in 2025 that were drowned out due to rain. These areas are usually inhabited by weeds and therefore should be a focus for management in 2026. Fields that were infested with later emerging weeds or did not receive timely herbicide application(s) should be recorded as places were management intensity should likely increase. Other historically weedy field(s) should also be regularly scouted to ensure tactics are being conducted timely.
What weed species were present?
Since 2025 was a wet season, more weeds that prefer wet conditions (i.e., barnyardgrass and smartweed) produced a lot of seeds and were present at the beginning of the 2025 season. The growing season was also wet and may have more weeds that preferred wet conditions producing seed to persist into 2026. Knowing what weed species were present in fields will help with purchasing the correct herbicide (pre- and postemergence). Again, weed management should be treated on a field-to-field basis as herbicides can be effective on some weed species and not others. Consult the most-recent South Dakota Pest Management Guides for a comprehensive list of herbicides labeled and species controlled.
Source : sdstate.edu