Welcome back to the war against weeds Podcast. I'm Joe Ikley extension Weed Scientist at North Dakota State University. My co host today is Sarah Lancaster. Sarah, how are things in the Sunflower State?
Oh, we're doing great down here. Classes started this week, so the students are all happy.
That's a different word than I would use on the first class when I was a student.
It's all relative Joe.
Good to know there's better students now than when I was when I was an undergrad. But the main reason we're here today, our guest is someone we've had on before, Tom Wolf, from up in Saskatoon. And Tom, I know some folks have heard you on before, but want to give you the chance to introduce yourself or reintroduce yourself to repeat listeners.
Sure. Thanks. Joe, thanks. Sarah. My name is Tom Wolf. I'm a spray application specialist. Really. What I've done my whole career in Saskatoon, I serve Western Canada, some of the northern parts of the states, and you know, occasional, occasional times, and I talk about how to improve your spray application, droplet size, water volume, water quality.
And maybe before we really get into the water quality that we want to cover today, Sarah, we have to take a minute. We've got a couple of football champions right here. So so bison won the FCS championship, and Tom, your alma mater, just secured a championship recently as well,
the buckeyes by Alma Mater, they did it on Monday night, didn't they? I watched that game, so congrats to you, and I guess I'm happy as well on both for both of those results.
All right, but the main topic at hand today we brought Tom on is we want, wanted to talk about spray water quality, so kind of have a conversation about what that is and how it can affect performance. And so why don't we just start at the top of what is spray water quality? What does it mean when we're talking about that term?
Well I guess to me, it means, you know, what's in the water, other than h2o there's a lot of other chemicals that can be in there, particularly if it's groundwater, and those are mostly salty, dissolves sometimes in surface water, you can have suspended solids, you know, like soil, like runoff material, organic material, soil, small soil particles and make it to turbid. But some of those can interfere with herbicide activity, and that's really the issue.
And so you kind of got into a little bit about some of the sources of of of water, and how they may fix spray water quality. As you mentioned, ground water, what are some other water sources people might be drawing from, and potential issues with those water sources?
Yeah. I mean, the easiest things is, in fact, you know, if you have a well, obviously ground water is a big one. The problem with ground water is it's usually old water, aquifer water, so it's been in contact with with subterranean, you know, rocks and things that, and it has had a lot of times, 1000s of years, in some cases, to for some of those materials to dissolve into the water. And those can be harmful. So, you know, we've got the hard water cations. Those are the big ones.
And and the groundwater sources are more likely to have those. The other sources. The easiest other alternative is, of course, to go to a surface water so a dugout pond. Some people have a stream or creek nearby that they may draw from, but that's relatively rare. We're usually talking about an on farm dugout. In Saskatchewan, we have sloughs. So some people draw water from sloughs, not necessarily the cleanest water, but it's another surface water option. And then, of course,
some of my clients are opting to go to municipal water. They have not got a good well, they haven't got easy access to surface water, or they don't want to bother with, you know, filtration and attribute issues. So they will, in fact, haul water from a municipal source. In fact, just this past summer, I was driving into southern Alberta. I saw a tender trailer truck on the side of the road and was doing something. So I
pulled in, and it was, in fact, a municipal water source. It was the St Mary's River Irrigation District, which serves the bow Island, Tabor Lethbridge region. And they provide about a 200 gallon per minute electric pump underground, and they basically go to fill up. And it's cost him $46 for 6000 US gallons to do that. And it took him about 25 minutes to fill up, which I thought was very fast. So I thought, well, that's a very good option on the highway, easy access, if it's not too far from
the farm. Some people will, in fact, store water from invisible sources on their farm. They'll buy a large water tank, and they will haul it when they have time. They will make sure it's full enough, and then when they need to have, you know, 10, 2030, 1000 gallons on hand for a week of heavy spraying. They've got that ready made. And then a very small number of people will go to RO water, reverse osmosis water. It's, it's, you know, it's the creme de la creme. I mean, of course, you're taking
everything out. It's questionable to whether it's worth it, you know, and and it, it creates other issues. And for example, the biggest issue is, of course, that you're now, mean, you know, you're managing a water quote, filtration system of sorts as a power requirement. You have membranes that may need service or replacement, and you have to dispose of excess enriched water. So for every gallon of RO water you make, you dispose of a gallon of enriched, saltier water. And where do you
put that? If it is quite salty, you can't just put it, you know, on the grass or on the shelter belt, because it'll likely harm those plants. So you shouldn't really put in the ditch, although that's an option. Some people put in a dugout. So those are issues you have to contend with. But let's, let's face it, I mean, the vast majority of farms have wells, and unfortunately, in that case, they do need to make sure that water is good.
Sarah, you had that look on your face like you had a question at some point there.
Well, Tom, read my mind. I was going to ask him about the RO systems, because I occasionally will get questions, because we have really hard water in a lot of places here in Kansas, since I'll occasionally get questions about, do you think these systems are worth it? How much improvement will we see? And I don't have like data to answer those questions, so I don't know if you've looked at it, numbers specifically around any of those RO systems. Tom,
you know, there was an RO vendor at a trade show that I was at recently, and I did have a good discussion with him, and I think that there are a number of different options that they provide. I found the options to actually be fairly attractive. To be quite honest. I thought the cost wasn't that bad, and I don't remember the number. So there's a lot of numbers that go through your mind at trade shows, wow, you know, but then
you forget it again. But fact of the matter is that it was the capacity of the RO system that they were selling was high enough that you could keep up with your spray operation. Now you do need storage tanks, and you you're not going to be able to, you know, RO water and fill up a tender simultaneously. You're going to have to have that reserve buffering capacity. So as I said, it's a bit of a management system. It's much more convenient to just turn on the transfer pump and fill up
the tender trailer or the sprayer and be done with it. And can do that in just a few minutes. But the RO is just a little bit more intense. So I always ask people, you know, are you prepared to have another system that you need to manage? You need to have, maybe freezing protection and, you know, and overwintering it and all that other stuff? Do you want to do that? It's a good question. And some people, most people, say no, to be honest with you, but some people do bother, yeah.
And I guess the other thing I wondered if we should touch on, like most of our folks are using groundwater, we know that it has a tendency to have dissolved cations. Do you have any thoughts, or, you know, comments on what kinds of testing folks should do for their water? How often they should test to figure out what they have? Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah.
I would say there's probably three levels of testing that that some people, you know, defer to. I mean, the easiest thing for someone to do is to have a connectivity meter, which you can literally buy, you know, for, for $30 like they're just available, they're small little probes, and you can dip them in the water and they'll give you a connectivity reading in micro siemens per centimeter, and that is, you know, we basically do that only to see, hey, do we need to go further with our
testing? So the threshold number that I always use is about 5 or 600 if the number is below that in micro siemens per centimeter, we don't really have a lot of dissolved solace. And we basically can say, you know, I'm pretty sure your water is good. If the number is higher, if it's 1000 2000 in some cases, it's 10,000 I mean, we've seen it all. Then we say, Oh, you've got dissolved cations and anions. But we don't know what they are. We have no idea what's causing could be any of the things in
water. Some of them might not be harmful. So we that just basically means, okay, now we have to go further in testing. The second step, if you don't want to go, you know, all the way to the to the proper laboratory testing, is to have these water testing strips. And there's some that are come from kind of the the home spa industry, where you have hardness strips, right? And they have this color coding, just
like the pH strips. And the problem with them is, I find that in the spa world, hard water is like 200 parts per million, okay, of total hardness. That's not hard in agricultural terms, we can basically say that's pretty good, right? But for the spa people say, oh my goodness, so. So their strips tend to end at three or 400 parts per million total hardness. It's very hard to get paper strips that go even to 700 which is where we start to get really worried, right? So
it's really not that good a deal. What I always tell people is, take a jar, clean water jar, clean water bottle, send it to a proper lab and have the proper testing done. The main issue with that is it takes a bit of time. It might take a week or two, and then when you get the results back, if you haven't studied up on your high school chemistry, you could have been quoting someone. What does this mean? So that's, that's, I think, the big challenge. I just have a blanket answer. Email me
the PDF. Just email me the PDF, and I'll help you out. And I know Joe and you and Sarah. I'm not sure who's all done it, but I know Joe on NDSU's website. I mean, there are how to interpret a water quality test results there. May you, maybe you have a lot for your people as well. So there's these, these other steps, but most people want to talk to someone. When they see the test, they say, I want to, I want to hear someone's opinion here.
Yes, that's, that's page we keep in our guide. And I think many people always, often refer to it because the other someone may call their agronomist, or someone like Tom and, well, yeah, a lot of numbers in my head. I'm on trade show floor. Now, let me pull that page up and make sure I'm remembering this correctly.
Yeah, for them, it's really, you know, it's really, they want to have a no go or no go answer. And you know, the other thing too, is that there is, of course, a utility modifier market, right? We do have water conditioners on the market, and there are different claims, and maybe we'll get there. Maybe you have a, you know, we should leave that to
later, but there's always this counterbalancing of opinion. So somebody says, you know, if you have a question about your water, add this product, and your product and your problems are solved. So is that actually correct? What is the
professional opinion here? So we do have to weigh in on some of those assets in the most in most cases, or other other products that we don't know the ingredients of, actually, but you know, so it's a little bit of experience, little bit of chemistry, little bit of just helping people out that aren't that familiar with it.
And I do think, before we get into some of these products and how to maybe modify spray water, maybe take the step here to talk about, you know, how does if you have this hard water? So one of these numbers that you mentioned are in the concerning level, 700 or higher. How does that affect herbicide performance? You know? Why is that problematic when that number is that high?
Yeah, that's, that's a really important question. And again, it's, unfortunately the answer is kind of chemistry, right? So most of our herbicides are, in fact, weak acids. That means they have a, basically a negative charge at some PHS, not all PHS, and the pKa, of course, determines where that tipping point is where, at lower below the pKa, they're mostly protonated, which means they're not Ionic, and then higher PHS,
they're deprotonated, which means they're Ionic. And that provides an opportunity for cations, positively charged ions, to adhere and to bind, in some cases strongly, in some cases very weakly, to the herbicide. And in that case, if that, if they bind strongly, it changes the herbicide shape
slightly. And the whole lock and key, idea of mode of action like basically enzyme binding site, lock and key, it doesn't fit anymore different shape, doesn't quite go in, doesn't inhibit the enzyme that's the mate, and the way it works, and the products that are most susceptible are, in fact, some of our most used products. Glyphosate is number one, by far, number one. Glufosinate, Liberty other and not another one. And then there are some other weak acids, 2,4-D, Amine is one. Dicamba
could be one. And then there are some of the the dims, you know, are, are are grass killer, sethoxydim, clethodim, tralcoxidim, some of the, some of the older products that we no longer use so much, the dims, have fallen a little bit out of favor because of resistance development. But they're also sensitive and but they're not sensitive necessarily to hardness, they're sensitive to bicarbonates. So, you know,
there are, you have to know a little bit. And I mean that that basically sums it up, though, but I think most herbicides, to some degree, will be, to some will be somewhat susceptible to that binding and that inhibition, depending on the Ph of your water.
And perfect you know that with pH, because that was kind of my next question of, How does pH affect herbicides, the pH or the water you're drawing out of, wherever you're drawing water from,
yeah, and it's such an important question, because the aftermarket, I mean, let's face it, I mean, there are basically two main product groups that are sold for Water Conditioning. The first one that we haven't ever talked about. Is ammonium sulfate. So that is kind of the fertilizer where the sulfate can bind with the antagonizing cations. Sulfates negatively charged cations bind with it and they form, usually a somewhat less soluble or insoluble salt that may precipitate out. And so
then the cation becomes unavailable. So that's really the number one, and probably the one that we it's a kind of our go to. It's generally available. It's not that expensive. It's kind of a hassle because you have to use a lot of it, but it does dissolve easily in water. Can be available in liquid forms. I don't want to cover that off first. So it is still our go to, but the aftermarket tends to go to the pH modifiers.
So it tends to and there are some pH, some pH modifiers that do, in fact, also bind to the cations, but there's not many. The notable one is citric acid. Citric acid does bind or tie up these cations. It also lowers the pH, but propionic doesn't, okay, it lowers the pH, but it doesn't actually tie up. So we have to be, you know, now we're getting into chemistry, right? Sulfuric acid, okay, it's not, it's not a weak acid, right? But
it does have self sulfate in it, so it will also do that. But the real reason we have a concern about the acids is that many of our herbicides dissolve better at high pH, not low pH. So we have a solubility tank mixing issue that can create problems
in Canada and in the US alike. We are tank mixing always, and we have to consider the most limiting member of that tank mix, if it's a group two product a sulfonylurea, triazolopyrimidines, you know, anything other than what's made by BASF, The IMIs, then a low pH can be harmful for tank mixing, and it may, in fact, create problems down the road. You're kicking the can down the road. So, yeah, water quality, no
inhibition of glyphosate. But now tank clean out. Now you've created a solution where things are possibly adhering to rubber and plastic and and just not easy to clean out anymore. Now we have to solve that problem. How do we solve that? Usually, with the pH adjustment. Get them back in solution. That's where ammonia comes in. So, yeah, that's kind of where, where I'm worried. And even some of the other modes of action have not
all members of these groups. But the classic example is saflufenacil Sharpen in the US. It's an important product for pre seed burn off and also in desiccation, and it dissolves better at high pH. In fact, it works better at high pH. There's a recent paper in Weed Science that showed some efficacy data. So I think we ought to cast our net a little wider than the group twos and just make sure we're good with with everything. Even some group 27 is all better at high pH.
So here's my first side tangent, just question I got asked, and it's like, oh, that just sounds like a master's project right there. But with with some of our new spray technology coming down the line, we can have the separate tank, separate line system, and someone was asking me, well, if I want to spray glyphosate and sharpen I know they're generally better at different PHS, what would happen if I put them in separate tanks and got the spray water at the right pH within
each tank to make the most soluble? That's a very good question. I don't believe I don't know what happens.
I know I have to draw on something that Peter Sikkema once said. And Peter Sikkema as you know, is retired professor of wheat Science University of Guelph so he has some opinions on this, and not particularly the two tank system, because that's kind of a new thing. But he said to me once, so you've got a water quality issue that inhibits glyphosate, so you're going to get an adjuvant. You're going to mix it in, make sure it's dissolved, and then add the glyphosate, and then do all that
stuff. I says, Why don't you just increase the rate of the glyphosate? You've already got it in your hand. It's inexpensive, and the label is so wide, most of our most of our uses, that are permitted at higher rates. And also it's maybe cheaper than the utility modifier you're gonna put in there. So I always kind of say, well, that's interesting, Peter. I mean, it's not really, I don't really like to recommend higher herbicide rates. I don't know why, but it's just in most
sometimes you could get off label a little bit on that. But I kind of wonder whether, whether we can do some of that. And, yeah, keep it simple. You know that if you look at see and spray ultimate, this is the the product that's coming on stream, pretty strong in some parts of the states now. Corn and soybean country two tanks. But the intention isn't necessarily to
tie up, like to separate two different solubilities. It's to, it's to do a pre and a post simultaneous, right and spots for the post, but broadcast the pre and so I don't know whether that's that's really the answer. It's an expensive solution to the problem, in my opinion.
And in this case, this particular person, they were one to spot spray their glyphosate and then have a higher rate of Saflufenacil in their broadcast to get some residual as well. So they're they're just doing that pre plant situation, but just trying to see how they could best utilize the system that they had.
I like it, when you just described that to me. I think that makes a lot of sense to me. If they have that kind of a system, more power to them, you know. And you know, we also have that, you know, it's direct injection. Doesn't really address it, because that does go into the same carrier stream, and then the pH will be essentially same as it would have been in the tank. But the two tank system, I mean, it's really just John Deere seeing spray ultimate. And then, of
course, green eye Technologies has it as well. One smart spray, but they're all spot spray based systems. They're they're a rather expensive way to do that.
All right, it got off my attention. Forgot where I was out of my actual list of questions,
are you recommending, Sarah, that your clients do a proper chemical water test and that's properly analyzed and so you have a good knowledge of what what's in there? Or do you have any other shortcuts that you use?
No, So my you reassured me Tom, because yeah, my standard answer is that, if you need to know what's in your water, it's, in the long run, not that great of an expense to get the sample set to. You know, there's a handful of labs down here that will, will do that. So, yeah, that's, that's my general recommendation, yeah. So, you know, we talk about, especially if they got, like, new farms, new wells, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, one big change that we've seen here in the last, say, five or maybe slightly more years has really been the formation of Winfield united. That's really how Winfield came into Canada. I mean, they were already, you know, one of the largest distributors in the US, and they had a very strong program on water conditioners. It's the product here is called Crimson. It is an ammonium sulfate based product. But they were then ramping up the, you know, the
marketing for it, and they made people aware. And of course, they have a network, and they talked about water quality. And of course, the thing, the brilliant stroke that they pulled was that they used John Nalewaja's formula, right? So back in the day, John and his lab said, what is the actual strength of each can in terms of inhibiting, you know, herbicides. And then he developed a multiple regression
formula. So if you have the PPM of iron and magnesium and calcium and potassium and sodium, and you just put that into the formula, it tells you how much ammonium sulfate to add. And that has been a brilliant stroke, in my opinion. So first of all, it's really useful. But second of all, it brings to mind these two approaches to water treatment that we've always had in Canada. One of them is there's a certain amount of water hardness that would just simply say we're good
with it. It's not a problem, like I mentioned it maybe, is it 200 maybe is it 300 I don't know what it is, but below that, we say, You know what, your water is good. If you put a 200 part per million water quality test into the null wire formula, it ends up with about a pound of ammonium sulfate per 100 gallons, or crimson or whatever, right? So basically, any water sample will call for some AMS, right? It's a very good way to
get people to put that in the tank. They may may may or may not benefit from it, to be quite honest.
So, so yeah, that's the question that that comes next, right? Is, even if you can improve the water quality, are you actually improving weed control? Right? There's some buffer built in there in terms of, like herbicide rates and the water quality might not be the limiting factor there.
Very true. And, you know, there's the other really interesting part of ammonium sulfate. One of the reasons I like to like to promote its use, to become honest, it has ammonium in it, right? So, I was taught undergrad Weed Science by a professor from Scotland who was on sabbatical. He replaced Ian Morrison. His name was George Marshall, and in undergrad, Weed Science at the University of Manitoba, he
taught us about ion trapping. This was the 80s, right? And he's talked about what ammonium does, what its contribution is in ion trapping. And to make a long story short. It, the presence of ammonium in the water tank actually facilitates the pH gradient across a membrane, which is driving force of ion trapping and weak acid herbicides are the benefactors of this, because they're charged and they're they're more likely to be negatively charged at high high PHS, and more likely to be
positive or neutral at low PHS. And therefore, you acidify the outside wall, the membrane through this proton pump, you're more likely to cross that membrane if you're a herbicide, and then you can't get back out. Deported when you're on the inside and you're now, you're in the symplastNow you got to translocate. You have no choice. And you know, that's one of the reasons that UAN URI ammonium nitrate, it has ammonium in it also sometimes works as an adjuvant, even though it doesn't
have sulfate. So I find that that little tidbit to be really useful, like, what's the downside of adding AMS if you don't need it? There isn't hardly any, but there's an upside. You just can't attribute the increased efficacy necessarily to the tying up of Cations and it might be ion trapping, right?
The other part, I know Nalewaja would also preach, and he also had a lot of lot of work with electron microscopes and looking at weed leaf surfaces is you also don't know which weeds are out there, what the cations on the leaf surface might be. For instance, velevetleaf tends to have some calcium on the leaf surface that having additional AMS in there, or other products will help kind of overcome some binding up on those leaf surface. Cations, yeah,
is, is lambs quarters in that camp as well. Or I'm mistaken about this mostly velvet leaf. I don't even remember exactly, but, but
lambquarters has a lot of stuff going on, but no velvetleaf was the classic one with calcium,
gotcha, yeah, yeah. And I think in that case, yeah, it doesn't matter what's in the water, it's already, already on the leaf, yeah.
But that was a good way to get me back to find my list. and, we were, we were about right there on track with what I was mentioning, anyways, is some of the methods and products to mitigate some issues with poor spray water quality. We've kind of talked about ammonium sulfate, but you alluded to some other products earlier, and and some things to discuss with some of those. Yeah,
I mean, the the, you know, the the low the pH modification modifiers are, you know, they're interesting, but again, it's a chemistry thing, you know, I look at the pKa, for example, of glyphosate, it has three pKa, while it actually has four. But one of them is irrelevant, but the pKa is are pretty low, right? Two of those three, the three or four PKAs are pretty low, which basically means, if you want glyphosate to be fully protonated and therefore more oily, more oil
soluble. The pH has to go way down. I mean, we're gonna have to be at two, okay. I mean, that's very, very low. And even if you're at four or five, you might still have two of the of the, you know, groups acidic, right, and Ionic. And so doesn't take a lot of ionic character on a molecule like that to make it completely water soluble. I mean, many herbicides are completely water soluble. Have just one acid group, right? And glyphosate and glufosinate have so many so you can protonate all
you want. They're still going to be water soluble, and they're still not going to make it across the membrane that easily, right? And so that's why I'm kind of think the the the acidifies a little bit oversold here right now. I Are there others that I'm missing? What are you hearing in terms of effective non AMS, conditioners? Is there something, something out there?
Most of the ones that I get questions on, I mean, the the other thing that became an interest that three or four years ago was products that raised the pH, and this was because of some label language on on the Dicamba labels that we use in soybean and cotton and in the US, where basically said, you know, we need to raise a pH above a certain threshold and
top my head. I can't remember it, but, and basically just said, if your pH after you mix is below this contact your extension specialists for products to use, we're all like, wait a minute, besides a basic blend adjuvant. So it's kind of like, well, there's, don't know exactly what the marketplace is for right now, but that was that was still chemistry. I mean, but basically to avoid volatility from Dicamba, so getting it above a certain threshold pH where it would be less likely to volatilize,
right? And it was explicitly prohibited from using AMS Dicamba, because AMS does acidify slightly, and it just enhanced the vapor loss from from dicamba to such a degree, yeah?
And that also led to another class, you know, the of the non nitrogen containing water conditioners, to still try and tie up some of those cations without acidifying the solution. Again, kind of driven around minimizing the chance for volatility.
That's right, yeah. But you know, there are, what do they call them? EDTA? What is that? That's there's a term for it. I've lost. It's the molecules that envelop and take others out of solution in a different way. And so those are also possible ways of doing it. And, you know, some of the professional water conditioners may have those in them, and
that's also obviously very beneficial. Just getting back to, you know, raising the pH, we do have a number of products, not just now, but also historically on the Great Plains. They're group twos, where ammonia was recommended as an adjuvant to increase solubility. And the classic one that we still use is peroxylam. It's called simplicity. It's a group two gramicide, also broad leaf killer. It has ammonium
hydroxide as a little jug in the in the box in Canada. And the other instructions are, add the ammonium hydroxide first, that raises the pH, and that will increase the likelihood that that simplicity dissolves better in the tank, and then you have less clean out problems, right? Again, kicking things down, down the road a little bit. So that is still good. And so there are label statements, or at least supplemental label statements,
in some cases, that guide you there. And of course, there's other ones, you know, if you remember anthem and Sundance, the misstep by Monsanto about 20 years ago, where they brought in group twos that were highly pH dependent in the solubility. We had carryover issues, like there's no tomorrow, and they actually withdrew those products again from from the Canadian Prairies, but in the interim, they said, add ammonia to increase the solubility. So but as I said, you know, like we
have more we have such complex tank mixes. Now, because of resistance, you you just have to know what the solubility of each of those components are and be guided by them, and then the neutral PHS are, in fact, the safest.
And that the tank clean out is another important one. Some of our herbicide labels specifically say and get to this certain pH when you clean out the tank, because to get that better solubility, and make sure we get it all, all the surfaces on the tank and in the hoses and valves and everywhere else.
Yeah, what about longevity in the tank? Have you done any work on that? Either of you on, you know, whether, if we, see, have to quit because of rain and are storing, you know, 1000 gallons in the tank that didn't get sprayed out, that's already mixed. What is the pH? What is, what is the likelihood of that to degrade and to be useless in a few days?
So I remember, when I was in grad school at Texas a&m, there was a lab mate of mine that was looking at, I think trifloxy Sulfur on right, is that staple? I think that's staple. Maybe. I don't remember, I
I don't know, it's cotton
it's a cotton product. Exactly, yeah,
what's cotton?
Anyway? Mark was looking at three different PHS and different time periods, and there was an effect and how, how stable that molecule was in the tank. I was looking it up as I was kind of talking,
I know, and I, I want people to find all the numbers behind it, but it's one of these things that when I was at Purdue. So one of these questions comes from every year, because it's always, someone always gets rained out in that state, yeah, of glyphosate and a group one, herbicide, I think it was clethodim. Probably doesn't exactly matter, but, and, you know, basically had rained out for four days, you know what? What's the probability of that group one still being in there?
And I know the the extension answer that I had heard down there at the time was, well, basically, if you're going to want to add some more group one back in so in that lower pH environment, because glyphosate itself will drop the pH. So when you store it that long, the high probability of that group one breaking down in storage.
I found one label chlorimuron if you look at. The label, it warns against either extreme pH due to alkaline or acid hydrolysis and breakdown. But then I also found a table that was compiled by someone else, I don't remember the name on insecticides, which are usually listed as being sensitive to alkaline hydrolysis, and the half life was listed the of the probably 15 or 20 insecticides on that list. Most had half lives that were days long. Some had weeks
long half lives. And indeed, if it was alkaline, the one half life phosmate, I think it was, went to hours, but most were still on the day range. But of course, the recommendation is that if you have something prone to alkaline hydrolysis, that you should acidify the tank with when storing for prolonged periods. I don't believe that we have a lot of herbicide candidates that fall in that category. I've just not heard of a complete loss of efficacy with an overnight store.
No, I think the bigger issue would be if you got a clear or clear poly tank and have it out in the sun for those couple of days while you're sitting there waiting for the field to dry out some different things going on and get heated up by the sun and get some UV rays shining in there.
Exactly. Yeah, that's probably the bigger danger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Ph may not help you there, yeah.
So did we buy enough time for you to find that?
I couldn't find it. I found the one where I looked at absorption and translocation. But I know that we were doing some just dissipation over time, stuff. I can't, I can't find it. And it was, it was staple Pyrithiobac, not, I had the wrong AI.
you know, you know, I don't want to complain about marketing, but some products are sold, putting fear in people's minds that if they don't acidify the tank, it's going to be useless tomorrow. And I just think that we have to be a little bit more diligent about challenging those statements, because they're being used to sell product that acidifies and it creates other problems down the road. And I just want to make sure that we have the facts here.
And the good thing is, well, the limiting factor here to prove all these is time on our end. But since it is chemistry, a lot of this stuff can be replicated inside if we have the time and all the proper ingredients.
Yeah and we shouldn't really have to do it frankly. You know, the products that we're using are mature products. They've been on the market, most cases, for a long time already, and the chemistry of these and their likelihood of breakdown should be known. And you know, I do use the WSSA publication a lot that has the guide to herbicides, and it does have solubilities and and half lives in some cases, but not in all.
But we really ought to. We have the information the manufacturers should be forthcoming with sharing it.
So I'm shift gears here for the kind of the last prepared question I had, because this, this is a follow up Tom same, uh, same meeting a week ago or so as brought this up because there's an interesting question of mine during a drought year. And so the the general question now going to be specific when I was asked is, are there any water sources that should simply be avoided for pesticide applications? And I brought this up because during a drought I was, I got a call
from, actually, was up from in Manitoba. Basically, I was given two choices. I can draw from the Red River, and that time, it's very tell me you're kind of cloudy up there. So you can, you know, the soil particles at least, or industrial wastewater.
I don't want to like I grew up in the valley, okay? And for me to be pausing between the Red River and industrial waste and have that moment where I'm not sure which is better, that doesn't reflect well on the red does it?
Not by the time it gets that far downstream or upstream, I guess.
But no it's, it's suspended solids. That's the issue here. I mean, yeah, it goes through a couple of cities, but, you know, we, we're doing, I hope, a half decent job of treating that water. But what we would, we sometimes talk about, and I don't know whether, like industrial waste. I mean, that's a Come on, who what? What is possibly in there? It? Could there be heavy metal? Who knows what's in that could be harmful to the food we're growing? I mean, I would be very, very
reluctant to, you know, commit to that. If we're looking at a turbid water source that's run off on clay land and it's cloudy, there is a clarifying solution that we may have. It's called aluminum sulfate. Now on our farm in the valley, we used it and we had dugouts because our well water was very saline and but we also sometimes had cloudy water. So we would shovel, literally, aluminum sulfate from a boat into the dugout, and then the recommendation was to agitate
the dugout thoroughly. The only way you can really do that is with an outboard motor. So we got a little one, and we put it on a little dinghy, and we just basically drove it around, you know, and got that thing mixed up. And after 24 to 48 hours, believe it or not, that pond water was significantly clarified. So it's a little bit like cream of tartar for anyone who makes homemade juices. It does the same. It's, it's a coagulating agent. And so I've made up. When I lived in Ohio,
Frank Hall was invited his experience. He's an entomologist. He was my supervisor, him and Kent Harrison down in Columbus. But Frank's lab did Apple work. And so they always had all these crates of delicious, wonderful apples in the lab looking for, you know, disease and insect damage, and then the untreated ones we took home, we ate them, we dried them, and we made juice, and we used cream of tartar, and then clarified the juice, right? So it was and
aluminum Sulfate does the same thing. So that's an option for some of the red river waters. I guess it's not a solution for a tank, because the sediment has to be disposed of somewhere. It'll resuspend itself. But it is a solution for a pond.
That particular scenario I said, even though we can see that there's stuff, we have to condition when the water point out of the red, I'd rather do that than the unknown of, as you said, the unknown of the wastewater, what may be in there.
Yeah, exactly. You know, remember when we had a dry couple years there? In 21 I got a call from Kim Brown, the Manitoba weed specialist, and she said, because our reservoirs, our irrigation reservoirs, are really low, and they had some surface and some dig out reservoirs near Morton Winkler area, and they need relied on them for irrigation, they were wanting to conserve water, and wanted to prevent
farmers from using that water to spray their crops. And so this is specific, suggested that the farmers use industrial wastewater, gray water of some sort. And I'm going, you know, I'd rather ask the irrigators to irrigate one quarter inch less. That would solve all of Manitoba water supply problems. For the spraying does not use a lot of water, not in the big scheme of
Now, if you're how many, what, 27,000 and change things. gallons of water in an acre inch, so a quarter of that compared to we can cover a lot of ground with that savings.
we spray all year long.
All right? Dr Lancaster, any further questions before we wrap this one up?
I don't think so. I think it was a good conversation. So thanks for joining us. Tom,
Yeah, my pleasure to be here, you know, and, and it's, it's always great. I mean, I gotta pay homage to North Dakota State on this one. I think you were fortunate enough to have John, John Nalewaja, as a long standing faculty member who really, really broke the ice on this discussion and did the work and came up with solutions. And you know, that's the sign of a of a true specialist that has the interests of farmers in mind. Not just the problem is identified, but the solution is
generated, and it has really changed how we spray. And it's a tremendous, a tremendously valuable impact. And I refer to the North Dakota State weed control guide, where many of the research that John and his fall, his, you know, subsequent replacements followed, and it's terrific information. I recommend to anyone listening to the podcast to download the North Dakota weed control guide and go to the appendix. Go to the appendices some great information there on water quality and conditioning.
We are still one of the few places that does offer that for free as a PDF online, so it's always a benefit there. But before we do go, want to make sure the time you get the chance to let people know where they can find, you know, a couple different platforms we can find you at and some of your information.
Yeah, I'm still on Twitter. I'm nozzle_guy on Twitter, and so you can still reach me there. I still check if I have notifications. I'm not tweeting as much as I used to. Some of us are reducing that activity slightly, but it was great when it was hot. You can find me on sprayers101.com. Which is a website that Jason DeVoe, who is the weed specialist, or the application specialist for the province of Ontario, run. It's a free website. It's not a commercial
website. It's intended for the use, use by practitioners. So farmers. And so on. And we do have some articles on water quality. Some of them are guest articles and and we're trying to help out with with with the pH questions, for example. And at the bottom of the of the front page, you scroll down, you'll see Tom at sprayers101.com, that's how you reach me. Jason's also on there. You can reach him that way as well.
Perfect. Well, once again, Tom, thanks for coming back on. Always great to have this conversations with you. Thank the audience again for tuning in, and we will catch you on the next episode of the war against weeds. As always, we thank you for listening to the war against weeds podcast. Just another reminder, you can find our podcast hosted on the Crop Protection Network, or CPN, for
short. So this is another great resource that's driven by extension, scientists at different universities for pest management. And with that, we will see you next week on the war against weeds podcast.