Montana Weed Control Association

Why Should You Care?

Invasive weeds are the greatest threat to Montana’s environment. When these invaders are allowed to invade and spread, they cause a reduction in wildlife forage, degrade fisheries through erosion and sediment buildup, reduce property values, and erode our beautiful viewsheds in Montana. Currently, Montana has approximately 7.6 million precious acres infested with state-listed noxious weeds, and several new and potentially devastating invaders knocking on the door at our borders.

Thanks to Everyone!

Conference a Rousing Success

Thanks to all attendees, moderators and speakers who helped to make this year's conference a great success. We appreciate all your support and time.We hope you learned lots, networked and had some fun.

We are again thankful to Dow AgroSciences and DuPont for their generous support as sponsors of our 2012 annual conference.

From the Director's Desk

I just had the opportunity to attend the Idaho Weed Control Association Conference in Boise. It was a great conference with about 220 in attendance and lots of sessions to choose from. One key difference is that they don’t provide meals, so they have lots of networking breaks throughout their conference. They also had a weed ID quiz for their general session and it was pretty tough for the Montanans in attendance as they not only have 64 state-listed noxious weeds, but they threw in a few non-listed weeds as well! Weed ID Olympiad Champion Amber Burch was able to get a little over half of them correct! One thing I took away from this conference was that each state really has its own “gem(s)” in people who present well, who are experts in their field, and who have a great deal of respect from their peers. I would say one of Idaho’s gems would be Rich Old who announced at this conference that he just launched an Android application for weed I.D. This program for identifying weeds is phenomenal!! We’ve got to get Rich to Montana ‘s conference next year. In fact as we are looking at a possible regional theme, I am looking forward to finding the gems in all of our surrounding states and in Canada for the 2013 conference.