Are You Smarter Than a Weed?
- sushmita62
- 6 hours ago
- 3 min read
The Storm Was Coming
The Atlas storm was rolling into South Dakota on October 5, 2013, the kind of storm that makes you aware of how small you are. Low clouds, raw wind, rain coming in sideways. It felt like the right weather to talk about weeds.
Dwayne Beck had a way of choosing moments like that without ever saying he had. Sitting at Dakota Lakes Research Farm, he talked about weeds not as enemies, but as messengers. Indicators. Symptoms of something deeper going on in the system.
Weeds Are Not a Chemistry Problem
What struck me then—and has taken years to fully sink in—was how little patience Dwayne had for the idea that weeds are primarily a chemistry problem.
“Herbicides don’t control weeds,” he said flatly. “They’re part of weed control.” The real work, he explained, happens long before a sprayer ever leaves the shed. Competition. Sanitation. Rotation. Those were the levers that mattered. Get a crop up fast. Keep the ground covered. Don’t let weeds go to seed. And for heaven’s sake, stop being predictable.
Predictability, Dwayne insisted, is the one thing weeds—and insects—exploit better than we do.
Competition Comes First
If you do the same thing, at the same time, in the same sequence, year after year, nature doesn’t panic. She adapts. She waits. She selects. And then she wins.
That’s where Palmer amaranth comes in. Or water hemp. Or ryegrass. Or whatever the weed of the decade happens to be. They aren’t invaders so much as opportunists, filling niches we’ve left wide open—bare soil, gaps in timing, systems simplified to the point where the outcome is all but guaranteed.
Sanitation Is About Timing, Not Clean Fields
Dwayne liked to say that Mother Nature isn’t malicious—but she’s relentless. She has, after all, been running research and development for a few billion years.
Sanitation, as he used the word, didn’t mean sterile fields or perfection. It meant not letting weeds set seed. It meant early action, not heroic rescue. Most resistance problems, he argued, begin when we let weeds get established and then try to save the day with chemistry.
Rotation Breaks Predictability
This is where his thinking on technology often got misunderstood.
At the time, I assumed he meant sprayers, monitors, precision ag—the visible tools. But what he was really cautioning against was our faith in stacked traits and genetic engineering as silver bullets. Crops engineered to resist weeds, insects, and disease all at once, as if complexity could be outsmarted by cleverness.
Dwayne isn’t anti-technology. He just didn’t confuse technology with wisdom.
He told a story—half joking, half deadly serious—about an old cowboy movie. One guy hauls off and punches another guy square in the gut. The second guy doesn’t even flinch. Just looks at him and says, “Oh…OK…, yeah, whatever!”
That, Dwayne suggested, is how Mother Nature responds when we throw our latest innovation at her and expect applause.
What the Research Eventually Confirmed
Roundup resistance. Bt resistance. Trait workarounds. None of it surprises ecology. If anything, it confirms it.
What Dwayne was saying in 2013 has since been borne out by the work at Dakota Lakes. Research led by Natalie Sturm has shown that diverse rotations—especially those that include small grains—do more for weed suppression and system resilience than no-till alone. Early-season crops disrupt weed life cycles and close niches that opportunists depend on, while longer, more intentional rotations reduce ecological predictability altogether.
You can see this clearly in Beyond No-Till: Why Crop Rotations Matter More Than You Think and Long Rotations Leave Too Much on the Table—Really?
Be Smarter Than a Weed
The lesson Dwayne kept circling back to was simple, almost uncomfortable in its simplicity be smarter than a weed. Not stronger. Not louder. Smarter.
That means diversity instead of monoculture. Rotation that breaks both sequence and timing. Crops that compete. Cover crops that fill niches. Systems that wobble less because they are built on relationships rather than recipes.
Standing there as the storm settled in, it was clear Dwayne wasn’t offering a fix. He was offering a way of seeing.
Weeds weren’t the problem.
They were the feedback.
And if we slow down long enough to listen, they tell us exactly what needs to change.
Insights informed by 2013 conversations and 2025 Dakota Lakes rotation research.
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