Weed Slayer

I tried this last year and found it marginally effective – better than other organic herbicides but not at effective as Roundup and way more expensive. I was on the fence about using it again this year but found it suddenly unavailable when I went to price it. Now I know why. There’s a class action suit alleging it contained glyphosate and diquat all along. Not the first time I’ve felt like a sucker after a foray into organic viticulture products.

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I purchased some a year ago and didn’t use it. Was wondering why there was complete silence in the viticulture world after they made a splash a few years back. I’m beginning to think there’s a lot more to the story.

Looks like the punch was being spiked. In the organic vineyards we source from this was the go to herbicide. Suppress even at 9% does not seem to work as well as WS did. We are trying to stay away from to much hand hoeing and string trimming as possible. For us this means using offset mowers to get under the vine row, using under the row cultivators like the Pellenc Tournesol/ weed knifes, trialing propane flamers, then cleaning up by hand if need be. All of this does not bode well for Organically farmed vineyards, when coupled with rising labor costs and the new OT legislations going into effect concerning AG. I wouldn’t be surprised if a good number of Organic growers are looking to revert to conventional.

“It seemed too good to be true, and it appears it may have been — a new organic weed treatment marketed to work nearly as well as synthetic-chemical herbicides not allowed in organic farming…
…But on Dec. 4, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) took the rare step of issuing a stop-use order for Agro Gold WS — made by Florida-based Agro Research International, LLC (ARI) — when it was found to include diquat and glyphosate, two synthetic chemicals not allowed in organic farming. The latter, in fact, is the key ingredient in Monsanto’s (now Bayer’s) controversial Roundup.”

We currently use a weed knife(Braun) and string trimmer combination to beat the weeds down. In our stony ground the knife periodically hops and can take out a section of irrigation drip tubing or a vine or two. Our plan is to move to an offset mower(Fischer) to cut the weeds down and string trim near posts where it misses. A good friend that manages over 200 acres of vines in the UK is expecting the government to ban glysophate in the near future. He’s looking at a star tiller(Braun name) and following finger roller to manage the vineyard.