Weeds AR Wild Series, Season 2 Episode 17. 
Title: Optimizing Rogue Activity in Rice
Date:  June 15, 2022

[Music]:  Arkansas Row Crops Radio providing up to date information and timely recommendations on row crop production in Arkansas.

Dr. Jason Norsworthy: Welcome to the Weeds AR Wild podcast series as a part of the Arkansas Row Crops Radio. My name is Jason Norsworthy, Distinguished Professor of Weed Science with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. And today, I'm excited to be joined by Lance Schmidt, who's the Tech Service Rep for Gowan Company. Lance, hey, it's great to have you with us today.

Mr. Lance Schmidt: Hey, Jason, it's great to be here today. I enjoy listening to this podcast every week. It's always some good information and hopefully we can provide some good information on our new product Rogue.

Jason: Yeah, Lance, today I invited you here to meet with us and talk about Rogue. I'm excited you have Rogue in the market now. It's a new opportunity for our rice growers to use it, and it's a very unique herbicide. I don't think there's anything in the marketplace like it in terms of how this herbicide behaves in water, how we go about utilizing it. And so today I want to talk a little bit about ways really to maximize the activity of Rogue. The do’s and do not’s as it relates to the use of Rogue. Talk about what you're seeing in the field and some past experiences that we've had at least in 2021, where we had a Section 18 and got to use it on a good many acres in Arkansas, as well as I think you guys used it some in Louisiana. So with that, Lance, let's just start. And when you think about Rogue – one thing is I know that growers are wanting to use it. I believe they have to actually go in and take a test. Gowan has a training associated with it. Tell us a little bit about the training and the test that has to be in place before you can actually use this product.

Lance: Yeah, we do. We do require that just simply because it is such a unique product in the water requirements and how the activity is created within this product in the water. But it's a simple, you know, I think it's about a 30 minute test and you can go to the Gowan website, go to the Rogue web page and actually access that information. And like I said, it's about 30 minutes. It goes through a very detailed, not too detailed, but it gives a lot of good information as far as how this product works, why it's critical to have your water where it needs to be. And then at the end of it, there is a test – like a five question test, which is pretty simple. And once you do that, then you are certified to use Rogue.

Jason: Yeah, actually I had the website written here is www.gowanco.com/rogue-sc. So that's the website. If you go to that again, there's a tutorial there on really how to use the product, how to optimize the activity. And that's one thing I just want to touch on here today is, is how to optimize the activity as well as the species that we can really pick up. But this herbicide is one that has to be in the water in order to be active. It’s what we, from a weed science community, call a pro-herbicide. Really, Rogue itself is not a herbicide. It has to be converted over to a herbicide and that conversion actually occurs in the water. So, if you place it on dry ground, you're really not going to have much, if any, activity of this herbicide benzobicyclon hydrolysate is the active ingredient that's formed when we put Rogue in the water. So one thing with this herbicide is, unlike a lot of herbicides based on what I've seen, the deeper the water, the more activity that we have. A lot of herbicides that are active in water, as you get more and more water out there, you're diluting the herbicide. But with this one, the more water you get out there, the more opportunity you have to convert the non-herbicidal material over to a herbicidal material. As well as the fact that you've got more plant material now that's going to take up the herbicides. So if I've got a six-inch plant and I've got a one-inch flood, I'm not getting a lot of shoot uptake. Whereas if I've got a three-inch to four-inch flood, I'm going to get a lot more shoot uptake of the herbicide. What are some other key points that need to be made in terms of optimizing the activity of this herbicide, Lance?

Lance: Well, Jason, I tell you, as far as in Arkansas where we have a lot of drill seeded rice, we really want to target that earliness before the canopy closure. That's one reason that even on the label if you go and look, yeah we've got a cutoff of two tiller rice basically, so that we can actually get good coverage to the water – is what we're really wanting. We’re wanting to treat that water layer and that is one of the one of the keys as well. You don't want to wait too late in the season, like past mid-season or something like that, where you have a lot of foliage out there that could intercept that Rogue before it makes it to the water. Then, you run the instance of not having the correct amount of material converted to actually have adequate weed control. Some of the other things, like we’re talking about the flood water – maintaining at a deep flood is very essential with this product. I know last year we had some instances where, we went out, it was probably one or two-inch flood. They were actually pumping on the field and the applications went out. And in those instances, we ran into some issues basically pushing water around and then, in the same breath you're pushing some material, the Rogue material around, too. So those are just some real keys. You want to maintain, once you get those applications out, you want to maintain that flood without pumping on it for five days – is the requirement that we have. You want a deep flood, fly the Rogue again, and maintain that flood. Don't pump on it for five days to allow the conversion to happen. And then you can start putting some more water back on those fields.

Jason: Yeah. And also, the importance really of getting it to the water is that it's all about trying to control small weeds. This isn't a salvage herbicide. Everybody says, well, it's a post-flood material. So if it's a post-flood material, it's a salvage herbicide. And I don't think of Rogue as being a salvage material. 
It's a material that can be part of a planned program. And with that, when you flood up, it's all about trying to get the herbicide in the water as soon as possible. Because the smaller the weed, the more of that weed that's actually going to be covered with water and essentially the herbicide. Another thing that we've seen in our plot work and I was a little bit surprised with it initially, but it occurs every time that we look at that – and it is the fact that adding MSO. For some reason even getting it to the water, this is not a herbicide it's going to be taken up by the shoots. But when we add MSO so to it, I see about 5 to 10 percentage point improvement in weed control. And so for that reason, I like to recommend an MSO product with these Rogue applications. Some other things that we have seen in our work is that, just talking about spectrum here, it's a very good material on sprangletops. And regardless of the sprangletop species, we've had very, very good luck on those. Again, I don't like to see it out there on heading sprangletop. I've seen some folks want to put it out there on large heading sprangletop; and I'll be frank, I've killed some in some instances, but that's not where the herbicide really needs to be. If you go into flood and you've got some sprangletop out there, it's a very, very effective herbicide. Annual sedges – the sedges today are actually the second most problematic weeds that we have in Arkansas rice. Annual sedges, a lot of them are ALS resistant. I know Gowan has products – the Permit, the Gambits, the Permit Plus products, and those were very effective herbicides for us at one time. But today a lot of our annual sedge is ALS resistant. This is a very, very effective herbicide on annual sedges. And then also, a lot of the aquatic weeds that we typically deal with in rice we're going to control with this herbicide. The one weed that we're not going to control, and I've seen this time and time again in my research has been redstem.

Lance: Yes.

Jason: You know, Lance. I mean, have you seen some failures of Rogue on redstem?

Lance: Yeah, Jason, that's something that we saw this past year and that may be some education gap on our part. But we have a lot of Rogue that went out on some fields and in return we had a lot of redstem in those fields. So, it adds basically zero activity on that. Now we do have your Permit/Permit Plus/Gambits, which are very effective on it. And usually in those situations, if you know you're going to have a redstem problem in those fields, we recommend those products to go with it in those situations.

Jason: Yeah. And you know, in addition to redstem – jointvetch, coffee bean. I mean, those are some of the weeds that we have out there. My experience has been, if we've got any size on those weeds, it may be if they're under the water, we may pick them up with Rogue. But if they're out of the water, we're not going to get those. And so I really like putting a Permit or a Gambit or something in there that's going to help me pick those up. I don't consider Rogue to be a barnyardgrass herbicide. That's a question that I commonly get when I'm talking to folks about Rogue. “Will it kill barnyard grass?” I've killed it before. If it's one-leaf, two-leave. If it's under the water, but if it's out of the water at all, it's suppression at best. So, with that, if I've got barnyardgrass, it's things like Ricestar, Clincher, or I mean, you're product of choice that you want to go with to pick up barnyardgrass. If I've got black seed, if I have yellow nutsedge. Me and you were talking earlier. This is not a material that's going to kill yellow nutsedge. If I'm going to need yellow nutsege, I’m needing a Permit. It's going to need some help. So with that, this is a herbicide that we can use as a tool, but is probably not just a stand-alone herbicide that's going to kill every weed specie that we have out there from a post-flood standpoint.

Lance: Yeah. And one we were talking about earlier was smartweed. We get a lot of questions on that. And we were pretty optimistic looking at a few fields last year where we had some smartweeds and initially, we saw a lot of bleaching on those. We thought we were having pretty good control, but eventually they went ahead and grew out of that. So that's another one, definitely like a Gambit. It's very effective on the smartweed in those situations.

Jason: You know, when you have a herbicide this active in the water, we talk about holding that water as long as possible. And, at times we have excessive rainfall events, so we start losing water, we start pushing water. We have levees break. I mean, what can you expect if you lose the water? Are you going to lose some herbicidal activity? What do we need? What can we expect if we lose water, we begin to push water in a field?

Lance: Well, if you're pushing water out of those field, you're going to lose some efficacy. There is no doubt. I guess the timing, it seems to be critical on that. Like where I was talking about, I have that flood established and stagnant for about five days – seems like that gives you time to get enough conversion out there. You get some pretty good control. But basically – if you got to rain before then, you're probably going to lose some efficacy, if you get a rain. Or if you lose water after that, then we've still – And we actually had this situation last year, we had a field. We held the water on stagnant for six, five, six days. He went to reestablish the flood on those fields, and his well went down. So, we drew the water down. It never dried out, but it remained muddy. And in those situations, we still had very good control of some annual sedge, sprangletop, some of the other aquatics that were out in that field. Now, as far as your residual aspect, you probably lost some of your residual in that situation. But, I think the timing is the critical part of it. And if we can maintain that stagnant flood for those five days, it seems like it does a very good job.

Jason: I agree with you. It's all about trying to make sure that you don't at least let that field dry out. I mean, if you do, if you have a levee burst, let's try to get those levees back together and get that field flooded up before that field dries. If it field dries, you're probably going to have little to no activity, based on my experience – little to no activity of the Rogue is going to be left at that time. Another… go on - 

Lance: Well, I was just going to say, just on staying on this topic, we actually had some situations this past year. Levee field irrigation, then, of course, in the top running water through the field. And we got a call on it. It’s not controlling my sprangletop. Well, you go out there in the first two paddies, you got a lot of sprangletop, but you got down to the bottom field and it was clean as a pin. So basically, we pushed that material to the bottom of the field in that cascading situation. So that's just kind of giving you an idea how this product works. And, when you're pushing a lot of water through there like that, especially if you've got one of these 2000 gallons per minute wells, you're pushing a lot of water through those fields.

Jason: Absolutely. If you're pushing water, you're pushing herbicide. 

Lance: Right. 

Jason: And so essentially what's going to happen is your uppermost field is going to have a lower concentration of herbicide. And to some extent, if you're not losing water out of the bottom of the field, you're accumulating herbicide in those lower bays. 

Lance: Yeah. 

Jason: And so for that reason, you're going to see more activity. And with that, again, I really like the herbicide in a zero-grade system where I'm not pushing water. I like the herbicide in a side inlet system where again, I'm not pushing as much water across fields in a side inlet system. That's really where I think it's worked best, based on the research that we've done to date. Another thing about this herbicide – there's some herbicides, contact herbicides, you put out there. And I'm thinking of things like Propanil, Sharpen. I mean, you put them out there and two days, three days later, you say, “ Wow, I see weed control.” Even some of our slower acting herbicides – Ricestar, Clincher, the Regiments. I've seen seven days, ten days – you've got a pretty good idea of what you've got. This herbicide here is not one that you're going to walk out at seven days, ten days and say, “Wow, I know what I have at this point.” I mean, it's a slow acting herbicide.

Lance: Right. Oh, yeah, definitely. And that's something – I'm just using another field as an example. But we had a field, had a lot of umbrella sedge in it. It was last year. As well as some bulrushes and some of those other rushes like that. And basically by the first week, we saw a lot of bleaching. You started seeing the bleaching, and then in two weeks started seeing some of the brown. And by three weeks we're starting to see some death in this stuff. So, like you said, it takes time. I think that's going to be a learning curve for folks – is the speed of activity with this product. Because it does take so much more time than say a Propanil, which you can see it the next day on a lot of stuff. But this one, it's a great product, but sometimes we’ve just got to be patient with it.
Jason: I don't think we have in rice today anything that behaves-

Lance: No.
 
Jason: The closest thing that I can think of, and this is going way back in the day, is just Molinate.  

Lance: Right.

Jason: Just Molinate from the standpoint of how you had you had to have water. You couldn't lose your water, hold the water, put it in. And this herbicide has a lot of characteristics, I think, similar to too Molinate.

Lance: Oh yeah. And that's how we've had to relate it to some people. I mean some of the older people, they remember Molinate, and they're like, “oh yeah, now it makes sense.” But so yeah, that's a good way to describe how to manage it for sure.

Jason: Okay. Well, also just again, back in terms of tank mixing, I think the slowness of the activity is another reason why you might want to put something else with it. Because one thing is, when you injure these plants, these injured plants are going to be more sensitive to this herbicide. Or as you begin to help try to melt these down into the water, you're going to be getting more shoot uptake of these weeds that we're trying to control with this herbicide. And hence, again, the reason of maybe putting a Ricestar, if I'm after things like sprangletop – or even barnyardgrass, Rogue plus Ricestar, Clincher, or things where I'm mixing those together. I'm going to have a lot more activity than just going after them with Ricestar, just going after them with Rogue. Those products alone in a salvage situation, and what I'm saying post-flood. Their post-flood environment is not going to be as effective as putting those together.

Lance: That's correct. And that's another thing, you know, this past year, we actually saw that with not so much the Ricestar. We did see a few fields with Ricestar, the same kind of situation. And it just simply – the tank mixture with these herbicides and Rogue makes all the difference it seems like. Another instance is Regiment. We actually saw it on some really, really large barnyardgrass that I wouldn't, it was past Regiment size. And actually, with the Rogue mixture in there, I mean it was just amazing how we cleaned up some of those fields. 

Jason: Again, you wouldn't expect any activity out of Rogue. You're saying that's probably too big for Regiment to actually kill, but you put the two together and it worked great. And that's what I've seen in my plot. Mixing things together with Rogue. There's some benefit associated with that. You know, something else, as I looked through the label and one thing that I found intriguing on the label, partly because I've been doing a lot of research kind of in this area here over the last several years with Loyant. And that is coating onto urea. Coating onto fertilizer with various herbicides. And I noticed that you guys actually had on the label that you can place Rogue onto fertilizer and put it into the to the flood. Tell us a little bit about the thoughts behind that.

Lance: Yeah, and really a lot of that comes out of Louisiana, because a lot of the guys down in Louisiana are putting herbicides on urea. They've done it for years. And we actually, we had several of the EUP fields down there in the past three or four years, where they have put it on urea and have very good results using that method of application. And, you think about it, those applications are going out, you're putting it on urea, you're getting it straight down in the water. You're not having to worry about the spray penetrating the canopy in some of those situations. So, that's why we put it on there. And of course, we're doing some work with you this year, actually looking at some a spray versus urea-coated so we can have some more information here in Arkansas as far as those applications go.

Jason: Yeah, I'm anxious to see how that's going to turn out in our plot work. Again, going back, looking at other herbicides, when I've coated that on urea, coated it on fertilizer – performance generally has been slightly less. Or, I’ve needed more herbicide to get the same effect that I did with the spray. So, I'm anxious to see how the results turn out. We’re actually getting ready. I think this week we're going to begin to make some applications where we've got Rogue coated on urea, potash and things like that that we're going to drop into the flood. One other weed that we haven't mentioned here on this podcast today, and I know I get a lot of questions about, based on some of the plot work we've done in the past. That is weedy rice, and I noticed you got the label, and this is very interesting because it's almost virtually impossible to take a merged weedy rice out of conventional rice. Hence the reason we've got Clearfield. We have FullPage. We have Provisia. But we've had a lot of success depending upon the type of weedy rice we have. There are some weedy rice plants out there, that are just purely tolerant to Rogue. There are some that are sensitive. And we actually know today why that's the case. It has to do with the genetics, has to do with some mutations within the plant. Some are sensitive. Some are not. But we've had some success. One thing that I just want to say as it relates to the weedy rice, it's all about trying to get that field flooded as soon as possible. The smaller the weedy rice, the better your chances of controlling. And actually, what we've been able to find – if I've got one to two-leaf weedy rice regardless of what the trait is in that weedy rice, If I can get the water over one to two-leaf, I'm going to improve my chances of controlling it. If I've got three four-leaf, five-leaf weedy rice, it's really going to be hit and miss as to whether we're going to be able to control it with Rogue. The other thing that I've seen in our work with Rogue is, you guys have an 8.4 fluid ounce and you've got a 12.6 fluid ounce rate. If I'm dealing with annual sedge, if I'm dealing with some aquatics. There are times that I can be out there with 8.4 fluid ounces. If I'm thinking about suppressing weedy rice or even controlling weedy rice with this product, there's only one rate. And that's 12.6 fluid ounces. Anything less than that, you're not going to have much, if any, activity at all.

Lance: Right. And I'll agree with that. And, you know, last year we had the Section 18 for weedy rice control.

Jason: That's right.

Lance: And, you know, that was the only rate that was allowed was the 12.6. And we were very successful in a lot of those fields. Now, there were some, of course. You know, we had some later timings that went out on some fields and some of those instances we missed some weedy rice. But on the other hand, we had some guys that weren't expecting that much weedy rice control in some of these fields. I mean, and it was big. I mean, this stuff was a foot tall. And it is the genetics like that. 

Jason: Absolutely. 

Lance: And in those situations, it's pretty amazing when you walk out there and you see it taken down, you know, a foot tall weedy rice in those fields.

Jason: Yeah, it shocked me the first time that we saw it being able to take weedy rice out of conventional rice. I had never seen anything like it before. So, this is something that I would tell a grower going in, don't put this out with the expectation that it's going to work in every field. I mean, it's almost a bonus from the standpoint. I'd be wanting to go after annual sedge, aquatics, sprangletop, or the weeds we talked about. And you know, if you pick up weedy rice in there, consider it a bonus.

Lance: Oh yeah, definitely.

Jason: That's how I would treat it. Anything else that you're seeing as it relates to Rogue? Anything else that you would like to add that would help these growers that are listening to this podcast today really optimize the activity of this? Or what are any other thoughts as it relates to the product?

Lance: Well, like we talked about, well, we pretty well covered a lot of those. Of course, the MSO we've seen that helps. Maintain the floods. I'm just basically checking off what we've been going over here. But, make sure you're getting adequate water coverage with the applications. You know, those are the big keys to me. And also, like I said, it seemed like to me from what we saw a lot this past year, if you can maintain a stagnant, you know – putting more water onto a field there in that five days, it seems like that right there is one of the keys for this product. It seems like you go ahead and start getting that conversion. You get a lot of activity from that point on. Even if you do lose the flood, stay wet, but you lose the flood and reestablish it – we have very good control in those situations. So to me, that's one of the keys with it as well as flood depth. Maintain deep flood. Like I said, get it out there before we get to mid-season. I know that's when a lot of people, that's when they started seeing a lot of these sprangletops and stuff start coming through the canopy, and that's when they want to do something. And we actually had some applications on fertilize last year in those situations. But I can tell you it's very slow. You've got large white rice crop that's taken the product of metabolizing it that during that time. And then you've got it into that water solution on the fertilize, and it seems like on the fertilize it takes it a little bit longer than it would the spray.

Jason: That wouldn't surprise me at all. I mean, it’s going to have to release off of that fertilizer. And I think you made a good point there. That rice is taking up the herbicide and so the larger the rice is, the more herbicide that rice is taking up and breaking down. And so that's less material that's available to the weeds. And also, it's all about getting it to the to the water.

Lance: There's just so many things you run into with those late applications like that. And, we saw it last year. I mean, and it was funny. You know, you go to look at some of these fields and one in particular was a bad sprangletop field. They put it on the fertilize. We went out there two weeks later and we still had  - the sprangletop went ahead and headed. And everybody's kind of sick about it. And by about a month later, that stuff had melted away. Now, it already kind of done its thing, but it was not inhibiting the rice. So, it's just better to be, just like we say with all the other herbicides, be earlier with the applications. As soon as that flood is establish get the Rogue out there.

Jason: Absolutely. So again, today, we were joined by Lance Schmidt, Tech Service Rep with Gowan Company. I'd like to thank all of our listeners for joining us on this episode of the Weeds AR Wild podcast series on the Arkansas Row Crops Radio, and I look forward to you tuning in next week.

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