Red Root Pigweed

(quoted from post at 10:20:24 09/12/19) As I wait for the county agent to get back with me, I wanted to see what knowledge is here.

Yes I know it's poisonous when consumed green in large enough quantities. I have a strip of this weed growing in my seeding. It appears to be a spreader width for a quarter mile of the field. I'm guessing it was a load that did not get composted long enough or the outside scrape up.

Regardless, in my youth, I remember seeing it in seeding, and we would cut, dry, bale as normal. I don't remember any ill effects to livestock.

So my question: Does drying Pigweed in hay reduce it's toxicity?

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In a field study in Colorado, preventing seed production for six consecutive years reduced existing redroot pigweed seed populations in the soil by 99 percent (Schweizer and Zimdahl, 1984). When weed control was discontinued after three years, the pigweed seedbank level recovered to more than half of the starting level by the end of the study. Fall moldboard plowing in plots with high seed populations reduced redroot pigweed emergence the following spring by more than 90 percent (from 3,500 to 250 per 10 square feet), but plowing fields in which seed production had been prevented for six years brought deeply buried seeds to the surface, and thereby increased emergence from 1 to 25 per 10 square feet.

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(quoted from post at 07:48:42 09/13/19) Grazon is great for that and won't harm your grass.

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