He tells them two things:

• don’t hold your breath and
• you’ll need to work with what you have.

WHY IT MATTERS: Wild oats is a tough weed to control, with no one herbicide capable of tackling the Prairie pest.

“Do not expect any quick help on that front with wild oats,” said Micklich, precision ag specialist and owner of Progrow Agriculture in Vegreville, Alta., in a presentation at Agronomy Update 2026.

“It is an extremely complicated plant,” he said.

“It’s actually hexaploid, so it has six different sets of chromosomes. What that means is it’s extremely unpredictable on … how each chemical interacts with each other in the target sites. So it’s just an extremely hard plant to map out.”

But don’t despair. Cultural control practices — such as increasing seeding rates and adding an early-maturing crop to rotation — can go a long way towards removing these pesky oats from your field, he said.

“There is no shortage of options to be used in the fight against wild oats.”

However, producers may need to reconsider any “this is what I’ve always done” attitudes they may be harbouring, advised Micklich.

“We need to move to ‘what do I need to do? And how can I manage this?’ We need to be more long-term focused.”

READ MORE: Farm gets aggressive on wall-to-wall resistant wild oats

Herbicide-resistant wild oat (HRWO) is of “special concern” according to Alberta Grains. And for good reason: according to the most recent herbicide resistance survey, resistance is building and building fast.

The survey results reveal that 69 per cent of Alberta fields sampled for resistance in wild oat contain HRWOs.

Of that percentage, 62 per cent of fields are resistant to Group 1 herbicides, 34 per cent to Group 2 herbicides and 27 per cent are resistant to both.

Those numbers are growing. The producer organization points to “drastic increases” in HWRO in Alberta since a Western Canada-wide survey in 2000.

Make the switch to TKW

There are several tasks producers should perform prior, during and after the crop season when dealing with HRWO. Micklich pointed to examples such as scouting for post-spray efficacy, identifying cross-resistance, seed sampling and reaching out to dealers for resistance testing if necessary.

One of the most important things producers can do to fight HRWO is increase seeding rates. However, some may have to make an adjustment in how they measure seed.

For producers who haven’t made the switch from bushels or pounds per acre to 1,000 kernel weight (TKW, sometimes known as total seed weight or TSW), or the weight of 1,000 seeds, this will be the time to do so.

In 2019, Harry Brook, agrologist with Alberta Agriculture, told Alberta Farmer Express why TKW is a more precise gauge of seed size measurement.

“Where there is significant variation in seed size between one variety and another, bushels per acre is a poor seeding tool to use,” he said.

“With peas, for example, there can be as much as 75 per cent seed size variation. That can have a big impact on plants per square foot.”

Added Micklich, “when you’re just doing a two bushel an acre measurement, that’s a volumetric measurement. It’s just not that accurate anymore.”

“What we want to do is use 1,000 kernel weight and calculate it off of what your target plant per square foot is, because if you just use bushels off of seed weight, your rate will sway. It can sway up to 20, 30 per cent just based off of seed weight if you’re just doing 120 pounds an acre and that’s it.”

Add early maturing crops to rotation

Adding early maturing crops such as peas and winter wheat to a rotation is likely the most important tool growers can use prevent reoccurring wild oat growth, said Micklich. The idea is to kick wild oats out of the seed bank before they’re physically mature, decreasing their survivability drastically.

“So if we can knock it off the plant in mid-August where it’s not quite mature … you reduce the survivability of that seed over winter.”

Taking preventative measures against wild oats early – particularly with late-harvested crops like wheat and canola — makes sense because there aren’t many control options once the oats establish.

“That (wild oat) seed will reach maturity before we get to it and (the seeds) will drop. So you’re just replenishing that seed bank. I wouldn’t say you’re starting from square one, but you’re just not eliminating that seed,” noted Miklich.

“A lot of times in east-central Alberta, by the time we harvest canola, it’s getting close to freezing. Most guys aren’t going to be doing a post-harvest spray. So you just get yourself in a weird spot where there’s nothing you can do to try and reduce that seed bank until the spring.”

Herbicide layering now a must-do

With so much herbicide resistance already a part of wild oats, producers don’t have much choice but to layer herbicides to control the weed, said Miklich.

“This is mandatory — you’re just getting ahead of it by initiating this.

“The concept of it is we’re trying to use different groups or modes of action sequentially throughout the growing season.

“The basis of it is you do a fall apply in say Group 15; a pre-burn, say, in a Group 2 or Group 15, and then an in-crop, say, in a Group 1 … Whatever group you would have the most efficacy with.”

Minimize tillage

There are several reasons to minimize tillage, but in the case of wild oats a big one is preventing the incorporation of wild oat seed underground where it can remain dormant for years, in the process increasing their life spans.

“When guys are high-speed discing their wild oat patches. that is one of the worst things we can do for it because you are burying that seed and it will sit in dormancy.”

What growers need to do, offered Micklich, is induce germination of the wild oats.

“So say, in a pea crop, if you’ve had that stubble sitting for a month in the sun, a lot of those wild oats will be germinated. Either the frost will get it or it will give us a point of attack to eliminate those seeds: a germinated seed that you can kill or do something with is one less seed in that seed bank.”

The post Think beyond the herbicide jug when dealing with wild oats appeared first on Grainews.

But what if you could add a new tool to your weed control toolbox to share the load and help reduce input costs?

One Saskatchewan farmer has taken this approach by using the Seed Terminator. The mechanical device destroys weed seeds and makes them unviable before they exit a combine’s spreader at harvest.

The Seed Terminator broke ground in Australia years ago, but it’s gaining some interest with farmers in Western Canada.

“We’ve been using it for what, six years or more,” said Josh Lade, who farms north of Saskatoon.

“We don’t have any issues with it, other than a little bit extra power required because we are running a multi-stage hammer mill and a little extra fuel.”

In an article on this site last year, Lade noted that the Seed Terminator has reduced spray costs on his farm. For example, he now has to spray canola only once — albeit at a higher rate —– rather than twice to keep weeds at bay.

Lade also noted that he’s seen bumps in cereal crop yields due to spraying less herbicide.

“We’re not often spraying for wild oats or grasses in our cereal crops, for example … because it can be quite expensive and it can also have quite a metabolizing effect since you’re trying to kill a grass weed in a grass crop,” said Lade.

While the idea of cost savings is likely to perk up the ears of most farmers — Lade estimates savings of about $20 per acre — for him, it isn’t just about the money.

Outside of the cost factor, it’s a reliance on a single-barrel approach to weed control that helped motivate him to use the Seed Terminator.

“I really now feel I take for granted the ability for us to use certain herbicides on our Canadian farm,” said Lade.

Lade’s comment stemmed from visiting a farm in Germany while attending last fall’s Agritechnica farm equipment show.

Herbicide legislation in Europe is especially onerous due to environmental and sustainability concerns.

The situation facing European farmers when it comes to weed control made him reflect on farming in Canada.

“We’re only certain policies away from maybe not being able to use some chemicals, and that’s exactly what has happened here in Europe,” said Lade.

“So I think we need to be looking at other sources of weed control tactics while we still have a lot of easy options.”

– With files from Mark Halsall

The post A Prairie farmer’s praises of mechanical weed control, at Agritechnica appeared first on Grainews.

The partnership pairs Geco’s predictive mapping tools with Gowan’s line of soil-applied herbicides in a collaboration aimed at helping farms take a more deliberate, patch-based approach to weed control over multiple seasons.

Why it matters: Seeing weed pressure ahead of emergence can make herbicide decisions more targeted and cost-effective.

Geco’s announcement includes two offerings tied to the partnership. The company is launching a new three-season predictive-mapping subscription, and growers who sign up through a Gowan representative will receive one additional field map at no extra cost.

“Our technology enables the question: If you could know where your most problematic patches are and where they are spreading to, what could you do differently? That’s what our technology makes possible,” said Greg Stewart, CEO of Geco.

How predictive mapping works

While blanket applications and spot sprayers respond to weeds already visible in-season, predictive mapping works ahead of emergence by using multi-year imagery to identify the areas most likely to develop patches. That allows farms to be proactive with treatments, rather than reacting after they’ve already gained ground.

A grower wanting a map begins by sharing a field boundary with Geco, often through a platform like John Deere Operations Center. If they don’t have a boundary available, Geco can make one for them. From there, Geco pulls every usable satellite image of that field from the last five growing seasons and runs them through tools designed to distinguish crop from weeds across the full season.

That multi-year history is what drives the prediction. Stewart said the key isn’t ultra-high-resolution imagery as much as having dozens of images per season and several years of history to reveal how weed patches shift over time.

The history shows where weeds tend to emerge early or flush late, and where patches persist. The resulting prescription can be exported straight into a sprayer, granular applicator, drill or variable-rate seeding tool.

“We look at a field, understand where weeds have been and where they’re going, and from there the farm decides what to do,” he said.

Geco has calibrated its system by comparing predictions against drone imagery, spot-sprayer data and human scouting across many fields.

Because the algorithms used to make these calibrations and predictions are proprietary, Stewart was tight-lipped about their inner workings. But while they play a big role in the process, he says the real challenge is fitting the technology into a farmer’s season.

“It’s not usually the math that breaks these technologies,” he said. “It’s how well you solve a real-world problem.”

That means making sure the system fits farm reality. It must mesh with timing at the end of the season and fold naturally into a grower’s weed-control plan. Those practical points tend to matter more than the complexity of the algorithm.

That’s also where partnerships come in. Predictive maps don’t work in isolation; they need to line up with the herbicides and practices growers are already using in the field.

Many early adopters were already using chemistries such as ethalfluralin and triallate (the active ingredients in Gowan’s Edge and Avadex) on their worst kochia and wild-oat patches. Those products are expensive to blanket across entire fields, and predictive maps help target them only where they’re most likely to deliver a return. So, the collaboration made sense for both companies.

But herbicides are only one part of the equation, said Stewart. Once the map is made, growers still need a plan for how to use it: which products to place where, when to increase seeding rates and how to tackle the “problem-child” areas that keep showing up year after year.

“It’s the agronomist and the farmer who put together that strategy,” he said.

How agronomists use the technology

One of those agronomists is Rob Warkentin of Davidson, Sask., who has helped several farms work predictive maps into their weed-control plans.

For Warkentin, predictive mapping works best on fields with well-defined patches like those same “problem-child” zones mentioned by Stewart. Once he receives a map, he reviews it with the grower to confirm the predicted zones match field history and scouting. He then adjusts rates, creates the prescription file and loads it into the sprayer or applicator.

There are still some practical limits — the kind Stewart refers to when he talks about real-world barriers. For example, some older spreaders can’t run prescription maps. Fortunately there is an easy workaround: growers can load the files into Google Maps. However, Warkentin says timing is a more stubborn problem for farmers.

“The best time to look at these maps is after harvest, but that’s also the busiest time of year,” he said. “By the time fall work is done, there’s very little time left to get maps made up and implemented.”

For farms using higher-value soil-applied products, the economics work well. Targeting only the worst 20 or 30 per cent of the field makes premium herbicides more economical and reduces total chemical use. Farms using lower-cost products may see less financial benefit, since the price of generating a prescription can outweigh the savings from variable-rate application.

However, Stewart noted that most growers use the maps to intensify control in the toughest patches — not necessarily to cut total inputs.

Either way, Warkentin says growers who used the maps were pleased with the results.

“The system isn’t perfect, and producers know there will be a few small misses,” he said. “But overall the people who’ve used it have been happy with the results.”

The science behind patch prediction

Stewart says much of Geco’s system grew out of earlier work in greenhouse pest modelling and even pandemic-spread research. The ebb and flow of insects in a greenhouse, or disease outbreaks during a pandemic, mirror how weed patches behave across a field, and understanding those patterns is key to making predictions.

For weed scientist Charles Geddes of AAFC Lethbridge, predictive mapping fits within a broader integrated weed management approach. He sees it helping growers make more deliberate decisions about where to invest their time, herbicides or cultural practices.

“I see this as another tool in the toolbox farmers have at their disposal,” he said.

Weed pressure is becoming harder to manage due to expanding herbicide resistance and weather variability that affects herbicide performance. Geddes says predictive mapping can help farmers plan where residual herbicides or added competition may provide the biggest returns. Using herbicides that stack multiple modes of action can be costly, especially on dryland farms, and applying them across full fields isn’t always justifiable.

“Predictive mapping lets farmers target herbicides or other practices where they’ll have the greatest impact,” Geddes said. “That can go a long way toward managing both costs and resistance.”

He also notes the technology adds some complexity. Prescription mapping requires growers to manage another layer of planning at a time of year when workloads are already heavy. That may limit adoption for some operations. But he expects interest to grow as farms gain experience and as more tools in crop production move toward AI-driven decision support.

Looking ahead

To date, Geco has evaluated more than 300 Prairie fields, building a clearer picture of how weed patches behave from year to year. The company has also been running pilot projects in the U.S., Australia, Europe and South America to discover how transferable the approach may be. But Stewart says the long-term focus remains firmly on Western Canada, where the vast majority of its customers currently reside.

That Prairie focus shapes where the technology goes next. Stewart says the company is now putting more emphasis on building partnerships with local retailers, agronomists and farmers to support longer-term, multi-season weed strategies. The Gowan partnership is just one example.

“We’re starting to partner with other retailers and independent agronomists across the region,” he said. “We’re really developing those relationships as much as we can these days.”

CORRECTION, Jan. 2, 2026: On page 5 in the Dec. 31, 2025 print edition, the final eight words of this article were accidentally chopped out at the end. We regret the error.

The post Geco, Gowan team up on predictive weed control using multi-year imagery appeared first on Grainews.

A big culprit was a sprayer model Dion bought on the promise of exceptional weed control with only 2.75 gallons per acre of water and 75 per cent of the recommended herbicide rate. Horse feathers.

“I realized years later that it was a sales pitch, and it was the beginning of my problems with wild oats,” says Dion, who farms with his son, Tarren, near Donnelly, Alta., in the Peace River region.

The same herbicide groups applied “over and over again” also contributed, he says, and so did a change in their crop rotation. The Dions used to produce alfalfa for the export processor at Falher. The perennial crop stayed in production for three or four years, providing exceptional weed competition. Then the processor closed, and alfalfa went out of the rotation. The rotation is now primarily canola and wheat, with some peas.

Dion then strung together another short list of competition killers that allowed the resistant population to explode. Peas drowned out during a couple of wet years, and wild oats filled all those empty spaces. Same thing with seeder misses. He also recalls the times the sprayer was “not purged properly” and applied only water for several acres.

All these activities, stretched over 20 years, produced a massive seed bank of wild oats with resistance to a long list of herbicides.

Test results

Calvin Yoder, a specialist with the local research organization SARDA and Peace Region Forage Seed Association, collected wild oat seeds on that field in 2022 and 2023. He sent them to a lab for herbicide-resistance testing.

“Never make assumptions,” Yoder says. “Lab testing is crucial for developing a long-term plan in terms of future crops and herbicide options.”

The tests revealed a field of super-powered wild oats.

Results from 2022:

• 97 per cent of sampled wild oats were resistant to Group 1-fop chemistries (e.g. actives in Puma Advance and Assure II)

• 72 per cent were resistant to Group 1 pinoxaden (e.g. active ingredient in Axial)

• 70 per cent were resistant to Group 1 tralkoxydim (e.g. Achieve L)

• 37 per cent were resistant to Group 1 clethodim (e.g. Centurion)

• 98 per cent were resistant to Group 2 flucarbazone (e.g. Everest)

Results from 2023:

• 100 per cent of sampled wild oats were resistant to Group 1-fop chemistries

• 76 per cent were resistant to pinoxaden

• 28 per cent were resistant to clethodim

• 86 per cent were resistant to flucarbazone

• 87 per cent were resistant to Group 2 thiencarbazone (e.g. Velocity)

• 86 per cent were resistant to Group 2 pyroxsulam (e.g. Simplicity)

Many key tools were now off the table, but at least the Dions knew what they were up against.

Like a strict fitness routine

So where does a farmer begin to exorcise those demons?

Dion now invests serious time and money in herbicide-resistant weed management, using expert help from SARDA staff as well as Kristina Polziehn, owner of Axiom Agronomy. She is the weed management equivalent of a fitness instructor.

“If you want results, make a plan and set goals,” Polziehn says. “It can take seven to 10 years to fix these fields. You can have great results after a couple of years, but you have to stay on top of it.”

A field can quickly backslide if you give weeds any shot to set seed in big numbers.

Fall herbicide is a good proactive step, Polziehn says, and it requires a firm commitment to next year’s rotation. Fall herbicide choices have to mesh with the following crop. Canola seedlings, for example, tolerate only a specific few herbicides applied in the fall.

If the Dions decide on wheat for next year, Polziehn would recommend a fall application of Focus, a herbicide that includes Group 15 pyroxasulfone and Group 14 carfentrazone-ethyl.

“The Group 15 product at the 136-millilitres-per-acre rate has good residual on their soil type for wild oat in the spring,” Polziehn says. The Dions have not used these actives on that field, she adds.

If the Dions decide on faba beans or peas, crops they grow less often due to markets (faba beans) and aphanomyces (peas), they could use Edge in the fall.

In the spring, just before seeding, Dion has also tried Avadex.

“It works, but not always 100 per cent,” he says. “It works best with blackened soil, little to no straw and half an inch of rain right after application.”

To improve results, he harrows in the fall and again in the spring before applying Avadex.

Use canola HR systems to their full advantage

With Liberty Link canola, Polziehn encourages farmers to make their second pass with higher rates of Liberty and full rates of clethodim. The second application is often a challenge, she says, when spraying season is long and farmers are tired and burned out.

“Some clients always budget for a second pass to ensure weed seed production is managed, despite no yield advantage,” Polziehn says.

When growers use TruFlex, Polziehn encourages them to take full advantage of the multiple application option. She says the TruFlex system is great for herbicide-resistant wild oat management.

The Dions grew TruFlex canola on the 600-acre field in 2025. They sprayed it four times and it was “super clean,” Dion says, “but Tarren was getting sick of spraying that field.”

Is it possible to select for glyphosate-resistant wild oats? “Yeah, probably,” Dion says. “But I’m not worried about it at this time.”

Yoder adds a few specific tips for TruFlex: Use the 333 ml rate over multiple applications, and use higher water volumes — like 10 gallons per acre — when the canola is to starting to canopy.

Bayer advises that applications should be 10 days apart; the total rate for the year cannot exceed 1.33 litres per acre total; and do not apply beyond first flower. The company adds that the 333 ml rate is appropriate for wild oats, but perhaps not all weeds. Know the weed spectrum and apply appropriate rates for those weeds. Finally, Bayer notes that canola cultivars with stacked Liberty Link and TruFlex offer added opportunity to rotate herbicides.

“Multiple applications might be expensive in the short term but will pay dividends in the long term,” Yoder says. “TruFlex canola provides the best opportunity to start managing fields with high levels of herbicide-resistant wild oats, so take advantage of the opportunity.”

Part of the problem in 2025 was a dry start that slowed canola crop establishment in the field. Canola emerged in patches, with some three to four weeks later than the first emerged plants.

“The wild oats kept filling in those open spaces with new flushes,” says Dion.

Polziehn hopes this aggressive approach with the TruFlex system in 2025 will reduce the Dions’ wild oat numbers and eliminate some of the biotypes with broad-spectrum resistance. She plans to test seed from random escapes. She captures samples with an insect sweep net when seeds are mature and just about to drop.

Polziehn recommends weed seed tests to identify the resistance biotypes in a field. She sends seed samples to the Ag-Quest lab in Manitoba (see sidebar.) Tests are specific to each herbicide active ingredient. At $135 per test, testing numerous active ingredients can add up, but an accurate picture of products that work will lead to improved weed control decisions.

Scout closely

While testing is an important step to know what products should work, growers also need to scout before spraying and again a few weeks afterward to see how the herbicides performed.

Performance is not always as obvious as you might think. One of Polziehn’s farmer clients applied Edge last fall to a field planned for pulses this year, yet the crop still had a lot of wild oats. Turns out these wild oats were all germinating from below the herbicide layer.

“These were very determined wild oats,” she says. The fact they germinated and the farmer sprayed them in-crop did take a step toward reducing the wild oat seed bank — an important step in the long-term management program.

Expand the circle with spot sprays

Farmers may be inclined to spot-manage a patch of herbicide-resistant weeds, especially when soil-incorporated herbicides are $30 per acre.

Polziehn has specific concerns and recommendations for spot applications: Plants often get missed if the target area is too small, and those few misses can refresh the seed bank and perpetuate the problem.

Instead, she makes the spray area much larger than the patch. If the patch is two acres, she will spray 15 to 20 acres around it, then scout after to see that everything was controlled.

Be determined

Once a population of herbicide-resistant weeds has taken over a field, farmers need a long-term plan and a gym-rat level of patience and determination.

Dion knows they’re in for the long haul. “The wild oat seed bank in that field is banked hard,” he says.

The post Farm gets aggressive on wall-to-wall resistant wild oats appeared first on Grainews.

Recently a report published by the Propane Education and Research Council (PERC) in the U.S. caught our attention. It featured a field implement designed to be pulled by a tractor and inject steam into the soil to kill weed seeds where they’re lying in wait — a method similar to practices such as anhydrous ammonia application.

The report cited results from a project undertaken by two U.S. universities that PERC funded. The implement used propane as an energy source.

“The banded applicator injects steam along the seed line before planting,” it reads. “Researchers say heating the soil to 150 to 160 F for 15 to 20 minutes controls more than 90 per cent of certain troublesome weeds.”

That apparently led to a significant reduction in labour costs in weed control in the test field growing vegetables.

Other research reports, however, have been skeptical of the value of using a mobile steam application to kill weed seeds in the soil. Also, the idea isn’t new.

“It’s been around for a while,” says University of Saskatchewan professor Steve Shirtliffe. “We’ve done a little bit of research (on it) with a company that was starting up.”

That research effort found getting the soil up to a high enough temperature to kill weed seeds proved very difficult with a mobile implement.

“Even with going very slow, the temperature did not even get close to what it would have to be to kill weed seeds,” Shirtliffe adds.

“Seeds are harder to kill than microbes in most cases. Seeds are resistant to heat, sometimes even very high temperatures. There are two things with thermal injury: how high are you getting the temperature, and what’s the duration of that? It’slike cooking something.”

And even if the necessary temperature can be achieved to accomplish that, the effect isn’t limited to weed seeds and unhelpful microorganisms.

“It’s basically a scorched-earth policy,” Shirtliffe says. “You’re essentially sterilizing the soil. All the macrofauna in the soil will be killed, unless they’re deeper down than the part you’re heating up.”

In the trials Shirtliffe was involved in, the energy costs were so high as to be impractical. “To reach a high temperature in something as dense as soil that is moist takes a lot of energy.”

But there is a more practical way to use steam to control weeds, he suggests — namely, waiting until they emerge and hitting them then with a different type of applicator.

Steam applied to young green weeds can be very effective at killing them, according to a 2017 paper published in the New Zealand Journal of Agricultural Research.

That study looked at using a mobile implement to apply steam to young green weeds.

“At a tractor speed of three km/h, steam killed 100 per cent of 10-day-old mustard plants, sown as a surrogate weed,” the report says.

“Plants of all the other species were killed when the treatments were applied soon after emergence (cotyledon stage), but as the plants increased in size, they became more resistant to heat, either because the terminal or axillary meristems were protected by soil, or because meristems were protected by thickened stems and leaves as the plants aged.”

“If you think about it, would it be easier to kill a little green plant or heat up the ground enough to kill a weed seed that’s in the ground?” says Shirtliffe.

Using steam to kill young, growing weeds has so far proven to be the most practical and cost-efficient way to use that technology for most applications, he says, and research around steam use in weed control continues to be discussed in academic circles as chemical control continues to draw unfavourable press.

The post Using steam as a weed control alternative to chemicals appeared first on Grainews.

While imports of other companies’ off-patent brands of glyphosate may buffer the immediate shock, the long-term implications could reshape weed management across the Prairies.

Hugh Beckie, a former Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada weed scientist, explored this very scenario in 2019. At the time, he was based at the University of Western Australia, so his modelling focused on Australian farming systems. But while the crops may differ, both Australia and Canada depend heavily on glyphosate-based weed control, making many of his findings relevant here.

Beckie’s work laid out not just the impacts of losing glyphosate, but the sweeping, system-wide changes farmers would need to adopt in its absence.

To understand what that shift might look like on the ground, Glacier FarmMedia spoke with Kim Brown, provincial weed extension specialist with Manitoba Agriculture, about the tools, trade-offs and decisions farmers may face if glyphosate were to disappear from the weed control toolbox.

Brown says Canadian farmers have already been working to reduce their reliance on glyphosate due to the rise of herbicide-resistant weeds.

“We’ve already been going down that road where glyphosate for certain weeds just has not been working,” Brown says.

“We’ve had to find alternative methods for weed control.”

That said, a full loss of glyphosate would escalate the challenge considerably, especially given that weed pressure is a constant in Prairie fields.

“There are weed seeds in the soil. The weed seed bank is vast,” she says.

“Every single year there will be weeds.”

That tracks with what Troy LaForge, who farms in the brown soil zone near Cadillac, Sask., about 65 km south of Swift Current, predicted when we asked him to consider what his fields would look like if glyphosate were to someday disappear from the market.

“What we would probably see is a progression in winter annual and perennial weeds, and from that perspective, we may have to change up to some different oilseeds where we can use actives like clopyralid (the Group 4 active in products such as Lontrel and Curtail) and some of the graminicides (Groups 1 and 2) that are more effective on perennial grasses like quackgrass and foxtail barley,” he says.

“We’d have to change to some different crops, and I honestly don’t know what those would be at this moment, but we may have to change because we just don’t have means of keeping weeds under control otherwise.”

Southwestern Saskatchewan is not generous with the rainfall and not typically canola country, but if glyphosate were to go away, “it might mean that we’ve got to start growing canola more continuously to use a product like glufosinate (the Group 10 active in Liberty) for example.”

Brown concurs there are other herbicide options, even in glyphosate-tolerant systems, thanks to stacked traits — but those alternatives likely won’t cover the same broad weed spectrum that glyphosate does.

“We will have alternatives,” she said.

“But it’s going to get a lot more complicated, and it’s definitely going to get more expensive.”

READ ALSO: Glyphosate class action moves forward in Canada

Farmers may also need to revisit herbicide products they aren’t currently using and some they haven’t used in years. Brown said some older chemistries may play a bigger role again, particularly in rotation or in tank mixes.

However, product availability, crop safety and regional fit will be key considerations.

“To me, as a no-tiller, the No. 1 issue is going to be what we replace it with, and at this point, the actives that are registered are going to increase our costs significantly,” LaForge says.

“And it’s probably going to mean that we’ve got to bring back some active ingredients that we haven’t had for a while and just have higher levels of toxicity at the end of the day.”

Losing glyphosate would also push integrated weed management (IWM) to the forefront.

“Those tools have always been there,” Brown says.

“In the past, we haven’t used those tools as effectively as we could. But we’re going to have to now because we won’t have a choice.”

Brown stresses the value of crop competition: adjusting seeding dates, seeding rates, row spacing and cultivar selection all help. But the biggest lever, she says, is crop rotation.

“Crop diversity is probably the single biggest thing we need to do when it comes to weed control.”

Life cycle diversity — mixing annuals and perennials, or at least spring and fall crops — can help break weed cycles and reduce reliance on any single product or practice.

Beckie’s paper indicates how Canadian farmers may have a leg up over their Australian counterparts when it comes to managing glyphosate resistance.

In Western Canada, about 40 per cent of canola acres are planted to herbicide-resistant varieties, but resistance hasn’t taken off the way it has in Australia. That’s largely thanks to the widespread use of glufosinate-tolerant cultivars and more diverse crop rotations.

Still, Beckie warns, losing glyphosate as a pre-harvest option would hit hard in pulse crops, where there are few good alternatives for controlling tough perennial weeds.

Harvest weed seed control (HWSC) is another tool Brown mentioned, and it also played a central role in Beckie’s post-glyphosate scenario. Originally developed in Australia — where herbicide resistance evolved faster and hit harder — HWSC focuses on capturing or destroying weed seeds at harvest to prevent them from replenishing the seed bank.

Beckie’s modelling leaned heavily on this strategy, especially in the absence of effective pre-harvest herbicides.

HWSC has also been gaining traction in Canada and could become more relevant as farmers look for non-chemical ways to keep weed populations in check.

“You want to destroy the weed seeds, or you want to move them, or take them off the field and not let them add to the weed seed bank,” Brown says.

Tillage remains an option, and Brown notes it’s something most farms already have the equipment to do — but bringing tillage back as a primary weed control tool comes with consequences.

Brown points out that glyphosate was instrumental in the widespread adoption of minimum- or zero-till systems, and that if it’s no longer available, it could set things back significantly.

“There’s going to be many negative consequences with that,” she says, “including soil degradation, increased greenhouse gases and even just fuel consumption.”

Hence at LaForge’s farm, for example, tillage is just not an option.

“If we have to go back to tillage in this part of the world, we (would) probably decrease our yields instantly by 30 to 40 per cent,” given the amount of soil moisture that would be lost in the process, he says.

The availability of glyphosate has increased the diversity and productivity of the farm’s rotations and “created a whole new level of soil conservation in this area.”

There’s some hope on the horizon.

Brown points to emerging technologies such as laser weeding, electrocution, steam weeding and the potential for new herbicides or non-traditional weed control products. Much of this innovation, she said, is being driven by the urgency of the current situation.

“There’s a lot of research being done because of the very situation that we’re in right now,” she says.

Extension specialists such as Brown will play a key role in helping farmers adjust. She said the core message around integrated weed management isn’t changing, but the urgency and scope of that message are growing.

“We’re just going to have to get a lot more educated on some of these products that are out there that we need to be using,” she says.

“We have to raise that level of comfort, because that will be new territory for many farmers.”

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The pesky tumbleweed, which has become difficult to control in parts of Western Canada, doesn’t like to be buried. Research has shown the seeds of kochia are less likely to germinate when they’re buried in the soil.

For the last few years, AAFC scientists in Saskatoon have been studying methods to “artificially” bury kochia seeds in the soil as a possible way to control the tumbleweed.

The idea is founded on the principle that kochia typically appears in patches within a field, rather than across the entire field.

“Only treat kochia where it is found,” Shaun Sharpe, an AAFC weed scientist, told the Saskatchewan Agronomy Research Update in December in Saskatoon.

“The idea with patch management … (is) if we can pick out where it is and manage it heavily … we can apply a mulch or something to bury it.”

As Sharpe noted in his presentation, kochia has developed resistance to multiple herbicides and become a pernicious weed in parts of the Prairies.

In Canada, there are confirmed cases of kochia being resistant to Group 2, Group 9 (glyphosate), Group 4 and Group 14 herbicides.

Kochia’s resistance to herbicides is likely to get worse, so growers need alternative solutions to keep it in check.

Patches of kochia typically occur in areas near sloughs or in the marginal parts of the field.

“Wind is a major driver. Anywhere a tumbleweed can get caught… you may have a path where a tumbleweed travelled and get growth (of kochia) there. But rarely do I see a whole field infestation.”

A combine can also spread kochia seeds as it moves across the field.

Sharpe’s idea of “burying” kochia seed comes from a study done around 2005. Rene Van Acker, a former University of Manitoba weed scientist who’s now the interim president of the University of Guelph, was part of a project that looked at kochia seeds and germination.

“In growth room studies, kochia seed placed at the soil surface had greater emergence compared with seed burial to a 10-millimetre or greater depth,” the abstract for the study reports.

“Burying seed will greatly reduce future kochia populations.”

Previous studies have already established tillage is an effective way to bury kochia seed and control the weed. However, Sharpe wanted to study other methods because “we don’t want to go backwards” on tilling cropland.

“We’re in an environment where we don’t want to use tillage (because of) soil conservation,” Sharpe says.

From 2021 to 2023, Sharpe partnered with six farmers around Last Mountain Lake north of Regina for a real-world experiment.

At those six sites, AAFC scientists applied a layer of different materials to a patch of kochia, including black plastic; chaff; and hydro-mulch, a slurry of seeds, mulch and fibre that’s used in erosion control.

The researchers also mowed patches of kochia.

They did the experiment over three years and tracked the effectiveness of the different treatments.

The plastic mulch performed the best, providing 100 per cent control. However, spreading a layer of plastic on cropland isn’t a great idea.

However, the chaff was also effective. The level of control was 44-95 per cent, with higher levels in the first year of the study.

“The chaff treatment … we used whatever was in the field. We tried to get it six centimetres in depth,” Sharpe said.

“I’m very excited about this because chaff and straw is something that every farmer is going to have.”

Mowing was also effective — it controlled 50-95 per cent of the kochia population in the patch. However, it did require three to five cuttings per growing season.

The hydro-mulch was less effective.

Following his presentation, an audience member asked Sharpe about the risks associated with placing a layer of chaff on a patch of kochia. Wouldn’t that transport other weed seeds to the patch?

“Yes…. All the weeds in your field prior to harvest are coming out in the chaff,” he said.

“(But) if we’re going to seed a (weed) that’s not kochia, that’s OK with me too, just because you’re going to have additional competition in those patches.”

Sharpe’s research on “artificial” burial of kochia seeds is not yet published. At this writing he’s editing the paper and expected to submit it for publication early this year.

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This advice came from Dr. Drew Lyon of Washington State University during his presentation at the Manitoba Agronomists’ Conference in December.

While Lyon’s discussion primarily focused on integrated weed management (IWM) in dryland wheat production systems in the Pacific Northwest, the strategies he discussed are equally relevant to Canadian farmers.

He zeroed in on three major principles of IWM: preventing weed problems before they start, choking out weeds and keeping weeds off balance.

Preventing problems before they start

Lyon highlighted the importance of clean seed and outlined strategies for avoiding the introduction of unwanted seeds. 

“You want to tarp grain loads going down the road,” Lyon advises. “A lot of weed infestations start along roadsides because the weed seeds sift to the top of the grain truck and then blow out and get started along roadsides.”

He also suggests cutting or removing weeds before they set seed. And for farmers using livestock manure, he recommends composting it thoroughly to kill any weed seeds.

While herbicide resistance was first discovered in the 1950s in the U.S., the problem escalated more quickly on fields in Australia, and as a result, farmers there have become leaders in the battle against herbicide resistance. In the early 2010s, Australians introduced the concept of harvest weed seed control.

When they looked at wheat harvests, they noticed weeds that developed resistance were rewarded by being spread throughout the field from the back of the combine. Harvest weed seed control attempts to address this issue.

“They started off with narrow windrow burning, which was highly effective but had issues with fire escaping and smoke-related health problems, so that approach has been slowing down,” Lyon says.

The industry is now shifting toward integrated impact mill systems, also known as weed seed destructors. These systems destroy a significant percentage of the seeds passing through the combine without leaving residue that needs to be burned or baled. But they are expensive.

Another issue is that the mature seed has to be in the head at the time of harvest; if it shatters out before that, the seeds are not going to go through the mill. But Lyon notes a suggestion from Australian weed specialist Michael Walsh — that if at least 30 per cent of the seed remains in the head at harvest, the process can still make headway.

Wild oats come pretty close to reaching, and sometimes exceed, that 30 per cent shatter threshold. But even though wild oats aren’t the ideal candidate for impact mills, Lyon points out that destroying some of the seed is better than nothing.

“Over time, the less viable seed you put in the seed bank, the less you have to deal with,” he says.

Choking out weeds

When he says farmers need to choke out weeds, Lyon essentially means they need to grow a crop that out-competes the weeds.

“I’ve put out hundreds of herbicide trials in my 30-plus-year career. And herbicides always look better in a good stand of a crop than they look in a poor stand,” he explains. “Herbicides rely on crop competition.”

Prior to the introduction of very effective herbicides, this method was one of the principal strategies for weed control.

“I think we need to get back to looking at doing everything we can to grow a good, competitive crop and getting it out of the ground as quickly as possible,” he says. “A lot of competition occurs early, so the quicker you can get your crop out of the ground and growing and competing, the better.”

He advises using quality seed that emerges early and competes better early on. He also suggests narrowing row spacing to get shading more quickly.

“In my mind, this is one of your best weed control strategies you have, even if you’re using herbicides.”

Keeping weeds off balance

Don’t give weeds an opportunity to adapt.

“The idea here is, don’t keep doing the same thing over and over again,” Lyon says. “Don’t use the same herbicide or herbicide modes of action; don’t use the same crop rotation; and don’t use the same tillage practices over and over again, or you will develop resistance.”

For crop rotations, Lyon recommends selecting crops with varied seeding dates: winter crops, early and late spring crops, and even summer crops — essentially, crops with different life cycles.

One thing the Australians do is work perennial crops into their system.

“They’ll do annual cropping for several cycles, and then they’ll plant a pasture crop for a cycle (three or four years),” Lyon says. “They’re able to drive that weed seed bank down on the weeds that are problematic.”

Farmers in the Pacific Northwest do something similar, he adds. They have a lot of Italian ryegrass problems, and farmers — especially those in low-lying, wetter areas — will plant alfalfa.

“As long as you cut that alfalfa before the Italian ryegrass sets seed, no seed goes into the seed bank for several years, and then you come back and annual-crop it again.”

Lyon also recommends choosing crops with varied competitive abilities and extended rotation cycles to manage weeds. He discussed how the length of time you stay out of a particular crop plays a crucial role in reducing weed populations — and points to a study he did in western Nebraska on jointed goatgrass with some compelling results.

“Jointed goatgrass was a big problem in our winter wheat-fallow production areas in western Nebraska,” he says. “It shares a common genome with wheat, so they can hybridize. Fortunately, most of this seed is sterile and won’t produce a plant, but a low percentage can produce and backcross.”

The results showed excluding wheat from the rotation for one year, similar to a winter wheat-fallow situation, would reduce the weed seed bank by about 15 per cent, leaving around 85 per cent of the seed still viable.

However, if the break extends to two or three years, it can reduce the seed bank to about 35 per cent, and after three years, less than 10 per cent of the seed would remain viable.

“This is true of a lot of annual grasses, which is why a crop rotation can be quite effective if you can stay out and prevent new weed seeds from being produced for two, three or four years,” he said. “You can drive down the seed bank fairly quickly.”

Another way to keep weeds off balance is to rotate or combine herbicides to get more than one mode of action working against the weeds.

“We’ve tended to throw one mechanism of action at a time at this, and when we burn that one out, then we go to the next one until we burn that one out,” Lyon says. “It’s gotten us to the position where we have fewer and fewer herbicides that now work.”

The same principle can be applied to mechanical control methods. He recommends no-till growers introduce a little tillage every once in a while, and those constantly tilling should introduce some no-till.

“You want to use cultural, mechanical and chemical rotation to keep your weed infestations low,” said Lyon. “The fewer plants you spray with herbicides, the less chance you have of developing herbicide resistance.”

The post Rethinking weed management appeared first on Grainews.

For decades, the pace of discovery of new modes of action — that is, how a herbicide interferes with the plant’s normal functions — was robust. From the 1950s through the 1980s, an average of one new mode of action every two years was registered. Since then, aside from a smattering of new active ingredients, major herbicide innovations have become rare.

Dr. Franck Dayan, a professor in the department of agricultural biology at Colorado State University, pointed to several reasons for the decline, including increasing costs of research and development programs and commercialization. But Dayan, speaking at the Manitoba Agronomists’ Conference in Winnipeg, said one of the biggest reasons for the slowing pace of innovation is hubris.

“For many years, we saw about 100 patents a year. Then, when glyphosate-resistant crops were introduced, that number suddenly dropped,” said Dayan. “We were told that glyphosate would solve all of our problems, so we stopped doing research in that area.”

The good news is, the slowed pace of discovery isn’t because researchers are running out of target sites for herbicides.

While it’s true that much of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, Dayan said scientists are still finding new target sites and new ways to exploit them more effectively.

Researchers are turning to new approaches — strategies that focus on previously overlooked biological pathways or that harness natural processes — to develop more effective herbicide solutions.

Targeting proteins for destruction

One exciting approach comes from a North Carolina company called Oerth Bio, exploring the use of PROTAC (proteolysis targeting chimera) molecules in herbicide development. A PROTAC molecule is a special type of molecule that helps an organism get rid of unwanted or harmful proteins — but they can also be fooled into targeting proteins the plant needs.

Traditional herbicides, Dayan explains, work by attaching to a specific protein in the plant, blocking its function, and killing the plant. Oerth Bio’s method is different: it uses the plant’s own systems to break down the target proteins.

Essentially, researchers identify a protein in the plant to target, then use parts of the PROTAC molecule to guide the plant’s natural protein breakdown system (E3 ligase) to tag the protein for destruction. The ligase attaches a small molecule called ubiquitin to the protein, marking it for destruction by the plant’s proteasome (a cellular “clean-up crew” that breaks down unwanted proteins).

“The beauty of this method is that it uses the plant’s own waste disposal system to remove targeted proteins,” Dayan says.

While Oerth Bio’s research is still in the early stages and not yet available commercially, it shows promise as a new way to target weeds by messing with their biological processes at the protein level.

Disrupting protein-to-protein interactions

Another promising strategy comes from the Israeli company Projini, which is tackling the challenge of what are known as “undruggable proteins.”

An “undruggable protein” refers to a protein in a plant that is difficult to target or affect with herbicide treatments because they lack the binding sites to which herbicides typically bind.

To overcome these challenges, instead of looking to disrupt traditional sites where a single protein completes a task, Projini targets biological processes in plants where two proteins must interact to complete a task.

Dayan pointed to an example where they identified compounds that prevent the two proteins involved in the synthesis of cysteine, a critical amino acid, from interacting. By disrupting these interactions, it’s possible to block entire biochemical pathways in the plant, preventing the production of critical compounds and ultimately killing the plant.

Doubling down on phosphonates

Another company pushing the envelope in herbicide development is MicroMGX, which focuses on discovering new phosphonates — chemical compounds with strong potential as herbicides. Glufosinate and glyphosate are both derived from naturally occurring phosphonates.

Phosphonates work by mimicking natural substances that plants need and disrupting their ability to process nutrients. For example, glufosinate mimics glutamate, a molecule that affects plant growth by interfering with an enzyme called glutamine synthetase.

To find new phosphonates, MicroMGX looks at the genomes of microbes to identify enzymes involved in producing these natural compounds. By screening a wide range of microbial strains, they’ve pinpointed a gene cluster in Pantoea ananatis, a type of bacteria.

Dayan says the Chicago company was able to retro-engineer this gene cluster, identify the structure of the phosphonate, and figure out how to grow the microbe to produce large amounts of a powerful, natural herbicide called pentafos.

Built-in resistance gene

Along similar lines, Dayan referenced a 2018 study published in Nature that uncovered some intriguing findings. The researchers focused on a compound called aspterric acid, produced by the aspergillus fungus, which has herbicidal properties. The researchers sequenced the fungus’s genome to identify the genes responsible for producing the herbicide compound.

The key point with this study is that, in addition to finding the genes for the herbicide, the researchers discovered another gene that gave the fungus resistance against its own toxic compound, allowing it to protect itself from the herbicide it produces.

“So you basically get a new herbicide and a new resistance target for that herbicide,” Dayan explains.

While these new technologies and approaches have led to a commercially available herbicide, they could become fruitful in the coming decades, and they could provide an abundance of new herbicides. But Dayan said the industry has learned from the overconfidence that surrounded the development of glyphosate-tolerant crops.

“Integrated weed management is still where we need to go,” he said. “If we keep doing the same thing we’ve been doing, we’re going to have the same problems over and over.”

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“I think the best management practice that someone could do for weed resistance is the one you’re not currently doing on your farm,” says Rory Cranston, technical strategy lead with Bayer. “Weeds figure out habits. They don’t figure out different system approaches.”

Cranston spoke on a panel about herbicide-resistant weed management at the Bayer CropScience booth during July’s Ag in Motion show at Langham, Sask.

Shaun Sharpe, a weed ecology research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), who was also on the panel, said afterward that using novel approaches to weed management doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Chemical control is the backbone of weed management strategies, he says, but the backbone is breaking — and farmers will have to adapt.

In conventional terms, spraying is timed to optimize yield, which seems like sound logic. The problem is that weeds that emerge later are often ignored because they don’t affect yield.

“Conventionally, we’ve just been leaving those alone. But, of course, those weeds produce seeds that go back into the seed bank,” Sharpe says. “Something like wild oat that emerges later has more potential to grow and produce seeds later in the season.”

The pillars of any weed management strategy are chemical control (herbicides), cultural control (crop rotation, cover crops), mechanical control (mowing, hand weeding) and, to a lesser extent, biological control.

Sharpe says farmers should focus on cultural strategies to reduce weed populations.

“We want to get canopy closure quickly, and we want to have a very competitive crop. So we want to pick crops that are going to be competitive against weeds, and we want to plant them in a way that we’re going to get good canopy coverage quickly.”

Those strategies could include higher seeding rates, using cover crops or introducing intercropping.

While none of these techniques are new, Sharpe says there is more interest in intercropping as a weed control method.

“When I was at AIM, I spent a lot of time at the intercropping plots for AAFC. I found that there is a lot of good feedback from the growers. They’re interested in how you seed it, how you harvest it, whether you can spray anything in it, and how it does against disease and weeds.”

AAFC is focusing on intercropping as a management strategy to combat herbicide resistance.

“I think that that system is going to grow. It’s just going to take some time, because it’s a new way to farm for a lot of folks who are doing monocultures,” Sharpe says.

“There’s still a lot of agronomic questions to answer, but I think it does have a lot of potential, and there was definitely a lot of interest from farmers.”

One thing is certain, he says: no one is under the illusion that herbicide chemistries will be the saviour of agriculture as they once were.

“With herbicide resistance, we’re not going to spray our way out of it. That’s been the message for a few years now.”

Emerging technologies are helping farmers be more efficient with spraying. Targeted use of chemicals can extend their effectiveness and prevent emergence of herbicide resistance.

Optical spot sprayers are one tool in the fight. Boom-mounted cameras can detect a weed and spray it. The sprayers have been around for a while and the technology has recently been adapted for spray drones.

One company is taking the precision spraying concept beyond the seek-and-destroy approach of optical spot sprayers. Geco Agriculture’s predictive weed control system promises to pinpoint the location of weeds before they emerge.

It will even predict patches of herbicide-resistant weeds and it’s relatively inexpensive.

“They don’t need any new equipment, and they don’t need to adopt any new practices on the farm,” Geco Agriculture CEO and founder Greg Stewart says. “Really, what they’re buying from us is the analysis.”

The company pulls farm data (crop rotations, spraying records, et cetera) from the past five years and sources imagery data from satellite providers.

In recent years, LiDAR (light detection and radar) and NDVI (normalized difference vegetative index) technology have exploded in terms of accuracy and scope, and they’re having a massive impact on agriculture.

But despite the resolution these satellite images can provide, it’s the scope rather than individual images that interests Stewart.

“What we really do is take a step back and try to understand how the weed population is evolving dynamically over several months and then over several years,” he said.

“You can get somewhere between two and four satellite images per week, depending a bit on cloud cover. We’re actually trying to leverage all of that data.”

New tools to bear

With crop and spraying data collected from the farm, combined with the satellite data, Geco runs an analysis that produces several tools to manage weed pressure.

The first one is a five-year history of weeds in the field. An analysis produced today would go back to 2019 and indicate what weed patches looked like in each of those years, whether they’re getting better or worse, and the crops in which they appeared.

The next tool is a map that shows areas of potential herbicide-resistant weed patches in the field.

Stewart said farmers can use this as a preliminary indicator of potential resistance areas before the patches reach the size at which humans typically detect them.

The third tool is a prediction model, which estimates where the weeds will be in the coming season. The predictions aren’t infallible, but Geco has been conducting tests at a research farm run by the Winnipeg-based agricultural tech accelerator EMILI (Enterprise Machine Intelligence and Learning Initiative), and their predictions are close to the mark.

“Last year, we made predictions for 2024. We were usually in around the 90 per cent hit rate using the prediction,” Stewart says.

The final tool is a prescription map.

“The prescription map is just a file that a farmer will typically upload into their sprayer or granular applicator,” Stewart says.

“They’ll use the map to direct these actions towards the weediest hotspots, which will allow them to beat down the weeds before the season comes on.”

Ability to spray more efficiently will lower input costs.

“All of a sudden, it makes that more economically digestible to a farm and they may be willing to incorporate that into the rest of their weed protection program. So, you get an affordable way of introducing this mode of action into your strategy, and you get to focus it on where the weeds are the worst.”

Over time, “mother patches” of weeds reveal themselves.

“These mother patches of weeds that are out there tend to be your worst actors, and they will tend to donate weed seeds to the rest of the field. So, if you are able to start suppressing them, you can suppress weed emergence more generally, throughout the field,” Stewart said.

That’s just the chemical side of things. Geco’s predictive weed control system can also contribute on the cultural side of weed management.

“We’re getting people who are inputting our prescriptions into a seed drill,” said Stewart. “So what they’ll do is up the rate of seeding into the areas that are predicted to be the weediest, and that gives you some crop competition to fight the weeds. It’s just another tool in the toolbox.”

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