The Process of Growing Grain: Dealing With Weeds

As my first crops of wheat, barley, and oats grew up and turned bright yellow thanks to mustard flowers, I got a lot of pressure to spray my grain fields with herbicides. My old friend and mentor, seventy-five-year-old Clarence Huff from Compton, Québec, showed me his five-gallon pails of MCPA 48 potassium salts—a mere ounce or two of the stuff mixed with water and applied to an acre would make those pesky mustard plants disappear.

My own brother-in-law, Ted Welch, was working for the Velsicol Chemical Company of Chicago, Illinois, at the time. Velsicol’s primary product was Banvel, a 2-4-D herbicide for use on cereal grains, and Ted kept asking us if we wanted a free five-gallon pail.

We knew that dioxin, which was one of the deadliest chemicals on the earth, was a by-product of 2-4-D, and there was no way we were having any of that stuff on our farm. This was in 1977 and 1978, and the concepts of organic farming were just beginning to be understood at the time. And so we simply learned to live with the mustard.

Good Vs. Bad Weeds: What’s the Difference?

Fortunately for us, it turned out to be not such a bad weed after all. Mustard flowers quickly and ripens to make seed quite early in the season. Unsprayed grain fields will turn completely yellow with mustard flowers when the cereal crop is twelve to sixteen inches tall and still in the vegetative stage. Then all of a sudden, the yellow color is gone and grain heads begin to pop up.

The mustard is still there in the bottom of the grain crop in its reproductive state, forming and filling its tiny little seedpods. The good news is that mustard will make dry mature seed several weeks before the grain is ready to harvest. So at least the mustard seeds don’t pose a threat to the ripe kernels of grain once the crop has been through the combine.

Other later-maturing weeds like red root pigweed and lamb’s-quarters, however, are still quite moist and green at the time of the grain harvest and will impart moisture to an otherwise dry grain sample. If these soggy wet weed seeds are not removed immediately, the newly harvested grain will heat, develop mold, and spoil. Other unwanted plants like ragweed not only impart moisture into the newly harvested grain crop, but also flavor the grain with undesirable pungent smells.

A trained nose can very easily detect the sharp essence of ragweed in wheat berries even after they have been cleaned. After considering all of these possibilities for disaster, a dry mustard seed that is basically inert and stable doesn’t seem like such a bad thing to have mixed into your grain sample. It’s also quite interesting that the clean grain outlets of most older combines and threshing machines made before 1960 were all equipped with little rotary screen cleaning devices known as scourkleens.

The tiny round black mustard seeds would fall through the screen into a separate bag while clean kernels would continue on to the combine’s grain tank. Farm equipment manufacturers eventually did away with scourkleens in the 1960s because herbicide use on cereal crops became universal. But in my early days of grain growing, I was fortunate enough to have harvesting machines with these built-in cleaners.

Managing Mustard Flowers & Other Common Weeds