Ga. cotton farmers face a formidable pigweed foe

Tag : in cotton

IDEAL, Ga. - It is only a few months into the cotton growingseason, but already the budding rows of cotton are dwarfed bytowering weeds that starve them of sunlight, nutrients, and water.
This pesky pigweed species, called palmer amaranth, has long beenheld in check by powerful herbicides.
But three years ago, scientists discovered a far from idealdevelopment in this central Georgia farming hamlet: the firstspecies that is resistant to all but the most aggressive chemicaltreatments.
Now, this powerful new breed has spread to farms throughout theSoutheast and is threatening to move farther west, baffling farmersand bringing comparisons to that deadliest scourge of cotton.
"We've mowed down many thousands of acres of cotton," said StanleyCulpepper, a University of Georgia weed specialist, as he plucked aparticularly tall weed. "Since the boll weevil, there's been nopest as challenging as this one - without a doubt."
In Georgia alone, researchers expect to find it in about 40counties this year. It has steadily spread throughout theSoutheast, afflicting farms in the Carolinas, Tennessee, andArkansas. With each farm it devastates, it has brought comparisonsto the boll weevil, the beetle that lays eggs in the plant's bolland ruins them.
"You tend to exaggerate whatever is hot at the moment," said AlanYork, a weed science specialist at North Carolina State University."But having said that, this is a bear. It's resistant. It's veryprolific. It grows very fast. It's very competitive - and it'srelatively hard to control to start with."
Farmers have indeed found a formidable foe in the palmer amaranth,which crowds out cotton plants with stalks that can grow eight feettall. For one thing, the plant is productive. Each female producesas many as 500,000 seedlings, meaning just one plant can birth anentire field.
Unlike other pests, pigweed can continue to grow an inch a day evenwithout water, making it particularly adept during the epic droughtgripping the region. It also thrives in hot weather, continuing togrow when temperatures top 90 degrees and other plants shut down.
"It's happy as it can be when other crops are suffering," Yorksaid. "It simply outcompetes other weeds."
Most of the pigweed plants were held at bay by cheap herbicidesdeployed by farmers from Virginia to California. But only the mostaggressive and expensive chemical treatments have worked againstthe resistant variety, and even those hardly manage to containthem.
Even handpicking is not foolproof. The weed has the mind-bogglingtendency to grow back if the top is chopped off or if any point ofthe root is touching the ground.
"An old Mennonite farmer told me there's always going to be thornsand thistles," said Gordon Sutton, 74, who owns the Ideal farmwhere the new breed was first discovered. "You control one thing,and another crops up. Crabgrass was our biggest nemesis for years.And now it's pigweed."
There are no estimates yet on the scourge's economic impact, butscientists estimate untold thousands of acres of cotton - worthmillions of dollars - have been plowed under.
And York said it could cost $20 an acre to fend off much of theplant, costing the industry millions more.