Yellow rockets troubling farmers this year

Those lush, yellow flowers covering west-central Illinois farm fields may be pretty to look at, but they actually are weeds gone wild.

"It's definitely the year of the yellow rocket. That particular weed species is very prevalent this year," said Aaron Dufelmeier, director of University of Illinois Extension units in Cass, Morgan, Scott, Greene and Calhoun counties.

"In my new role as director from Cass to Calhoun counties, I get a lot more travel time, and there are some very pretty yellow fields that I have passed," Dufelmeier said.

Near Calhoun County, there are fields that appear to have been deliberately planted in yellow rockets, he said.

"It's that lush, that thick," Dufelmeier said. "It was so evenly distributed across the field that it almost appeared to a growing crop."

A snowy winter coupled with a rainy spring created the moist soil in which the weed thrives.

Typically, spraying a burndown herbicide before pre-plant tillage helps control the weed's growth, but "because of weather circumstances, it didn't get done as timely as you would hope," Dufelmeier said.

"We don't see that much of it - less than 5 percent or 10 percent - most years," said Jon Freeman, a farmer and owner of Freeman Seeds in Woodson. "This year, we're seeing probably 70 percent in the fields that didn't get tilled or sprayed with chemicals last fall."

On Thursday, Freeman was out spraying some of his fields. Most years, he has been able to spray the herbicide early enough to kill the weed.

"This year, there have been a lot of things working against us," Freeman said. "We just got done planting corn, and you can't spray when the wind is blowing."

Combine that with ideal climate and soil conditions prompting the weed's rapid growth, and the fields have become an overgrown yellow maze.

The top growth from the yellow rocket's large flowers cause the soil to take longer to dry out and to do tillage, Dufelmeier said.

There is a potential for yield loss because the foliage also serves as a host to insects "and a drawing card for them to come lay eggs," Dufelmeier said.

"If you've got a lot of tall weeds in the early spring, they attract cutworms," Freeman said. "The worms will stop on fields with a lot of vegetation."

Freeman isn't anticipating the large amount of weeds in his soybean fields causing that much of a setback.

"We're going to spray it, plant it and take it from there," he said.

Source: illinois.statenews.net