Updated August 1, 2025:
Our project, entitled “An integrated approach towards the detection, diagnosis, and response to emerging herbicide-resistant weeds in soybean” is off to a great start. We met as a group at Weed Science Society of America on February 25th, 2025 to begin planning our first steps and we chose the name “Hermon” (Herbicide resistance monitoring network) to talk about our project in brief.. Funds were received in March and subaward contracts and MTAs initiated immediately. Once funds were dispersed, the 11 PIs on the team were able to open positions at their respective universities and begin the hiring process to find personal to work on this project. Due to all of us working on the school year/student hiring cycle this meant most of us were hiring to start in the summer of fall of 2025. To date we have:
1. A research associate starting at Mississippi in September.
2. A research associate and student already working at Wisconsin
3. A master’s student at Texas
4. A post-doc and master’s student at Arkansas
5. A PhD student starting at Kansas state in September
6. A post-doc already started at Michigan
7. A post-doc already started at Pennsylvania
Those of us with extension appointments have been giving talks to soybean growers throughout the year, especially I the summer months about the importance of herbicide resistance testing and monitoring, and the importance of germplasm for Hermon. We expect several new populations to be received in late summer and early fall when weeds are putting out seeds. PIs Butts, Werle, Lancaster, and Sprague have especially been active in talks, hosting field days for soybean growers with herbicide demonstrations and appearing on local radio and on agriculture podcasts. Also in extension, PI Lancaster has started collecting interviews with the various PIs on this project as well as other knowledgeable weed scientists to be turned into short-form video essays about various important components of this project including a project overview, the importance of monitoring, the importance of getting your weeds tested, the importance of weed control and herbicide resistance management in general etc. We have developed a plan with USB, TakeAction, and GROW to publish these materials and amplify their impact.
In research we have made progress on several fronts. First we have begun collecting all the information about existing weed seed collections hosted at the various participating universities. This required a standardized database with inclusive fields to capture as much information about available germplasm as possible. With this we will begin sharing important seeds for bulk up and molecular investigation in the next steps of the project. We will also use this information to populate county-level maps with cases of confirmed and suspected herbicide resistance that will be made publicly available to growers. For this, we have begun meeting with the creators of EDDmaps, a powerful agriculture database that can generate up-to-date maps with ease. We are still working on what uploading our data will look like. We have supported their application for a symposium at the 2026 WSSA meeting which has been accepted and both PI Patterson and Lancaster will talk about the Hermon project and herbicide resistance monitoring.
PI Patterson and Tranel have also begun conversations with Corteva about the importance of the Enlist trait and monitoring and studying 2,4 D resistance in both Palmer and Waterhemp. While we have enough budget to tackle some of this resistance case, we have been talking to Corteva to leverage these funds and amplify our capacity to fully understand what drives 2,4D resistance in these species.
PIs Werle and Norsworthy have been working on extensive dose response greenhouse experiments looking at waterhemp resistance to PRE herbicides in Wisconsin and HPPD POST herbicides in Arkansas. The former being importance to protect PPO herbicides for Soybean and the later due to Bayer wanting to include HPPD herbicides in the upcoming HT4 soybeans. PIS Patterson, Werle, and Brunharo have also developing methodology to test for herbicide resistance in agar for Pre herbicides which will greatly accelerate and standardize pre-emergent resistance testing, PI Avila has been screening hundreds of grass weed samples (Goosegrass, Johnsongrass, and Lolium), developing standardized screening and populations for these important soybean weeds.
The remainder of the year will focus on germplasm sharing and bulk up, developing expanded collaborations both within and outside of Hermon, finalizing some of our extension materials, developing new assays for novel herbicide resistance cases, screening new cases of HR as they are discovered later this season, and a focus on methodology standardization.