C4—Lancaster Farming, Saturday, November 7, 1981
Anderson speaks out on shattercane, Johnson grass control
Bob Anderson, Adult Farmer Instructor in
New Holland, teaches the difference between
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shattercane and Johnsongrass, and how to
control the problem weeds.
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NEW HOLLAND - Ten years
ago, a Lancaster County fanner
planted what he thought was
sorghum with his com'which he
planned to harvest for silage. He
inadvertently let the crop go to
seed.
Within two years, his farm was
so infested with shattercane that
he couldn’t walk through the fields.
The annual grass which is the
spitting image of Johnsongrass
above ground soon spread to 50
percent of the area farms. It
remains a severe problem today
making entire corn fields
unharvestable in some cases.
But, help is on the way. If Bob
Anderson has anything to say
about it, the problem weed will
soon be under control. The Adult
Farmer Instructor for the Eastern
Lancaster County School District,
New Holland, has been running
experimental test plots on shat
tercane control with local farmers
for three years now.
Part of the problem in teaching
farmers to* control the pest, says
Anderson, is the plant’s uncanny
resembler.ee to Johnsongrass. The
only way to be really sure which is
y '
which, he adds, is to dig them up.
Where Johnsongrass has tuber-like
rhizomes underground, shat
tercane has none.
Though, Johnsongrass rhizomes
allow that weed to propagate
vegetatively, giving it an extra
reproductive advantage over
shattercane, the shattercane seed
can remain dormant for an ex
traordinarily long period of time.
Neither of the weeds are any fun to
try to eradicate, but it’s best to
properly identify the problem first
and then proceed with an ap
propriate control program, ac
cording to Anderson.
“Our biggest problem in ef
fecting a control program has been
that farmers nave mistaken
shattercane for Johnsongrass and
have tried to control rhizomes
where rhizomes didn’t exist,”
states Anderson, who works out of
the Eastern Lancaster County
School District’s Agricultural
Department
•‘ln order to determine the best
control program, we took the three
farms with the worst shattercane
infestations and tested various
(Turn to Page C 5)
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