Herbicide-Resistant Weeds in Wheat Farming

Herbicide-resistant weeds pose a significant problem that many wheat farmers must continually combat. Herbicide resistance happens when weeds are treated repeatedly with a herbicide that kills the plant in the same way (same action site or herbicide group). This allows the unwanted weeds to adapt, survive, and reproduce, causing a spread of resistant weeds. Once the resistant plants have spread enough, the herbicide that the farmer was using will no longer effectively control the weed issue in their field, so they are faced with the task of finding another solution to treat weeds.

Herbicides are split into groups based on how they kill a plant and their site of action. This is important because there are various types of resistance, like cross-resistance, where different herbicides have differing chemical families but share the same site of action, or multiple resistance, where weeds are resistant to herbicides with different sites of action. You can imagine how difficult this can be for a wheat farmer to navigate.

Weeds are already a huge inconvenience for farmers, so weeds that are commonly herbicide-resistant, like Downy Brome (Cheatgrass), Italian Ryegrass, Kochia, Russian Thistle, and Prickly Lettuce, can cause even more issues. These stubborn plants can drastically reduce yields by competing for resources like water, light, and nutrients. If farmers leave these weeds untreated, they can become unmanageable, and the wheat won’t have as much room or nutrients to flourish. With the wheat prices being as low as they are right now, farmers can’t afford to have weeds impacting the amount of money they could get.

These weeds can also drastically increase production costs for wheat farmers. Farmers are having to buy more and different chemicals, in addition to what they already use, which is expensive. On top of buying more chemicals, they have to make extra passes on their fields to re-cover the weeds, wasting away even more money and time. Additionally, if the weeds are so stubborn that they become dense in these wheat fields, they can cause problems come harvest, by potentially clogging machinery, and infiltrating the grain, causing dockage due to weed seeds. While this might not seem like a huge deal on paper, I have seen how these issues have personally affected my family. Sadly, this is a common problem that farmers have to deal with on top of all of the other factors that go into farming wheat.

With the ways of treating herbicide-resistant weeds being so complex and expensive, wheat farmers are doing many different things to try and stay in control of this problem. One strategy farmers are using is pre-emergence herbicide, so the weeds never come up in the first place, leaving more area for the wheat crop to thrive. Some farmers rotate varieties of crops to help build weed resistance. Different smart sprayers allow farmers, like my dad, to put very expensive herbicides on the weeds that they couldn’t normally justify if they were broadcast spraying, especially with the current state of the farm economy.

Overall, herbicide-resistant weeds are a difficult and very irritating hurdle that wheat farmers often face. Hopefully, with advancements in technology and farm machinery, farmers will be able to find more cost and time-saving solutions to this growing problem. With the economy being how it is right now, farmers will need to utilize tools that will help them stay productive and efficient, not spend copious amounts of time and energy on unwanted weeds.

2026 Scholarship Essay: Addison Smith