Lodging can be a serious challenge for wheat growers, because it can negatively affect yield as well as harvest efficiency and profitability.
Several tools and strategies are available to help you keep wheat crops from falling, including plant growth regulators (PGRs).
By influencing hormone activity within a plant, PGRs can produce shorter crops with thicker stems that reduce lodging while maintaining or even increasing yield.
Identify the challenge
A new generation of PGRs arrived in Western Canada a few years ago with Engage Agro’s Manipulator®, which contains the active ingredient chlormequat chloride.
Its use is expected to grow, now that the EPA in the United States has established a maximum residue limit (MRL) for the product’s use in wheat.
Before investing in a PGR, you should first have a conversation with your agronomist about why lodging has been an issue on your farm. If agronomic practices, such as variety selection and seeding or crop nutrition rates, are optimized, a PGR might enable you to continue pushing yield boundaries.
Make the right choices
With Manipulator, the best results can be expected for high-input wheat growers who apply the product at the five- to six-leaf stage. The product can be applied at other crop stages, including herbicide or flag leaf timing, although you’re less likely to see a yield benefit. If you can’t apply at the earlier timing, flag leaf is preferred because of the efficiency gain with fungicide timing.
Extensive trial work has also shown that crop variety matters. To select the best-performing cultivar for your region, download the PGR Crop Staging Guide app or consult your local Co-op Grow Team agronomist.
By pairing the right variety with the right tools and agronomic practices, we can continue taking crop production to new heights.