Although weeds have the potential to cause millions of dollars worth of crop losses in North American cranberry beds each year, they don't often attract the attention of the popular farm press.
Weeds offer authors no dramatic, attention-grabbing story lines.
Instead, weeds silently trudge their way through the landscape with steely resolve like a slow burn in the Florida Everglades. Each Autumn perennial weeds store starches in their roots to baffle the most persistant control efforts and seeds are scattered by annual weeds a hundred ways to Sunday by wind and water. No place is safe from their greedy green embrace. As a perennial crop, cranberry beds are very vulnerable to the wily ways of weeds, particularly woody and herbaceous perennials. Dr. Susan Rice Mahr, University of Wisconsin, estimated that the loss of key herbicides in cranberry would have triple the economic impact of loss of key insecticides in an economic study published in 1994.