We do all our food plots without using herbicides, including corn, and we get excellent results. The key is crop rotations, plowing, disking, tilling, and planting at precisely the right times, and with corn, using a rotary hoe and cultivator. I rotary hoe about 3 or 4 days after planting and again about 7 or 8 days after planting corn. At 7 or 8 days, the corn is just poking through the surface. The rotary hoe kills all the weeds because they are in the hair stage and are uprooted by the hoe, but the hoe leaves the corn untouched because it is deeper and the root has it anchored. The hoe only penetrates the top 1 1/2" or so of soil. The key with good rotary hoeing is teeth that are not worn out. I see many rotary hoes for sale, but 90%+ of them are worthless because the teeth are so worn down they will not work properly. We used to do it without the rotary hoe and only used a cultivator, but since getting the rotary hoe, it cuts down on weed competition dramatically. We then cultivate when the corn is about 4" tall and again at about knee high. Doing this, and using proper crop rotations, we end up with corn that is just about weed free and has large ears. Fertilizer is a must, unless you can have plenty of manure put on you might be able to go without fertilzer, but I've never tried that so I can't say for sure if it would work or not. I realize this is a lot more work, but for those of you who, like me, do not want to use chemical herbicides on your food plots, there is a way to do it.
