Farm Progress America, April 9, 2025

Mike Pearson takes a look at what weed management may look like in 2025 with the absence of Dicamba.

At the Louisiana Agriculture Technical and Management Conference, Raney Rapp, Senior Writer for Delta Farm Press, had the chance to hear about over the applications for dicamba and how there won't be any this year. This is causing a shift in weed management for soybean and cotton growers nationwide.

Now, Dicamba has been a big tool in the weed management tolerant cotton and soybean varieties.

In recent years, a good deal of those crops relied on Dicamba for weed control.

By 2024, approximately 65 million acres of Dicamba resistant crops were planted with half being treated with Dicamba.

The use of Dicamba has had controversy mostly because of it's tendency to drift and cause unintended damage on neighboring crops.

In 2021, the EPA received 3500 complaints indicating more than 1 million acres of non-Dicamba soybeans were impacted.

This resulted in a court ruling last year that vacated the registrations of over the top Dicamba products effectively making the sale and use of Dicamba-- illegal this year.

At the conference, experts reiterated how important the use of integrated weed management strategies are to crops. These include starting out with a clean field, utilizing residual herbicides and ensuring timely post emergence applications. Also, growers were warned not to use any left over Dicamba for over the top use in the fields.

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Farm Progress America is a daily look at key issues in agriculture. It is produced and presented by Mike Pearson, farm broadcaster and host of This Week in Agribusiness .