Trevor James
Herbicide Resistance management
Trevor James is a senior scientist with AgResearch and has been involved in researching weed management for nearly 50 years. His work has covered weeds in pastoral, arable, horticultural and environmental situations. Specific research areas include herbicide resistance, soil weed seed bank and seed ecology, herbicide residues and persistence, border biosecurity and new incursions.
Trevor will report on the MBIE funded project “Managing Herbicide Resistance”, which has investigated improved weed control and vegetation management to minimise future herbicide resistance. Herbicide resistance occurs due to genetic mutation – in this case, when mutations help the plant to survive an application of herbicide to which they were once susceptible.
Zachary Ngow
Distribution of Herbicide Resistance in New Zealand
Zachary works at AgResearch on weeds. Most of his work has been on herbicide resistant weeds including annual grasses and annual herbaceous weeds: ryegrass, canary grass, summer grass, fathen, and willow weeds. He looks at risks of weeds evolving resistance in cereals and maize and in vineyards. Zach also wororks on parasitic weeds (Cuscuta), alligator weed and weed border biosecurity.
He will present results of herbicide resistant weed surveys on farms and vineyards across New Zealand, conducted as part of the “Managing Herbicide Resistance” project.
Andrew Griffiths
Tools to identify herbicide resistance
Andrew is a Senior Scientist at AgResearch where he has worked extensively on forage improvement, including researching the genetics of grasses and clovers.
Andrew’s project role saw him leading work identifying genetic markers of herbicide resistance. The broad aim was developing tests that allow the quick assessment of weed tissue that shows a plant is resistant to herbicide. Currently plants are grown to maturity, seeds harvested, sown, grown and treated with varying rates of herbicides. This is a slow and costly process. New tests developed under the programme enable rapid and cost-effective testing using genetic markers.
Dan Bloomer
New and alternative technologies
As part of the MBIE Managing Herbicide Resistance project, Dan has been investigating alternative weed control technologies.
Dan’s particular interest has been seeking very low-energy methods to kill weed seedlings using electrical shocks. But there are more and more non-herbicide technologies, which he will review at LandWISE 2023.
The rapid advances in automation, machine vision and algorithms to train machines to identify weeds are converging, with a number of robotic weeding machines coming to market. The robots are coming or indeed, already here.
