2007 UW Pest Management Field Day Cancelled

Chris Boerboom, Ext. Weed Scientist

A UW Pest Management Field Day at the Arlington Ag Research Station will not be held in 2007 (typically held in late June or early July).  In previous years, this field day was the UW Weed Science Field Day. In addition, the herbicide demonstration plots, which were located on the north side of Badger Road as you entered the station from Hwy 51, will not be established this year either.  The reasons for these changes for 2007 are described below.

The Arlington Agricultural Research Station resides in an atrazine prohibition area.  In previous years, the weed science faculty have obtained a permit from the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) to use atrazine for research purposes on a limited number of acres at the station.  On average over the past 5 years, we have applied 3.3 lb ai of atrazine to individual plots that totaled 4.3 acres (or an average of 0.77 lb ai/a) within the approximately 50 acres of fields that the Agronomy weed science faculty use.  We only used atrazine in individual herbicide treatments and never used atrazine as a blanket treatment to a whole experiment.  Despite our limited atrazine use, we learned this year that atrazine and atrazine metabolites have continued to be detected in a nearby private well.  While we don’t know if this atrazine contamination is related to atrazine use in the Arlington prairie before the prohibition, our use, or other illegal recent atrazine use in this prohibition area, DATCP was concerned.  We met with DATCP to discuss options that would allow continued use of atrazine for research, but we felt the requirements, potential liability, and likely future outcome of the proposed options would result in no atrazine use at Arlington in the near future.

Therefore, the UW Agronomy Herbicide Evaluation Program will use 2007 as a transition year.  We hope to identify a location where we can conduct corn trials that require limited use of atrazine.  We likely will still conduct a few corn trials and all of our soybean trials at the Arlington Station in 2007.  Because most of our corn trials will be off station, we will not host the typical Pest Management Field Day.  Also, because several standard herbicide programs use atrazine and serve as benchmarks for the corn herbicide demonstration plots, we will not establish these plots this year.  As we transition the program, we may establish the demonstration plots again in the future depending on how the transition goes this year.