Weed ID Contest Puts Plant Knowledge to the Test
Weed Identification Contest at the Iowa State Fair – A Botany Showdown!
How fast can you tell a pigweed from a pokeweed? At the Iowa State Fair’s Weed Identification Contest, it’s all about smarts, and a sharp eye for plants. From ag students to amateur plant sleuths, participants try to name as many weeds as they can from a table full of wild specimens. It’s more intense—and more fun—than you might expect!
Transcript
Hello, my name is Meaghan Anderson. I'm an extension field agronomist with Iowa State University. And we are here this morning at the Iowa State Fair Weed ID Contest.
All right, we got another competitor coming up. Excellent.
[Woman 1] I have a short attention span this morning.
[Woman 2] Yeah, it's some kind of grass.
So the Weed ID Contest is a long standing tradition at the state fair.
[Man 1] I did this as a joke. I just wanted to glance at them, and now I'm trying to fill it out. It's not going well.
[Meaghan] It's a competition between anybody who would like to come try their hand at identifying weedy species that are found in the state of Iowa.
[Woman 3] I'm totally guessing.
[Child 1] It kind of looks like pumpkin.
[Meaghan] And so today we've got 35 of them here for people to identify. We change it up a little bit every year. And then after the contest is over on Friday morning, we'll put the weeds in the Ag Building so everybody can see them with their identities noted.
[Man 2] I thought this was what I thought that was. Yeah, but it's not. No, that's right.
[Meaghan] So since I know there's a lot of people that may be watching this at home and not able to see these plants up close, I thought you could maybe try your hand at identifying a couple of the species today. And so we have two species here that both have kind of a similar look to them.
And they both have a special characteristic called whorled leaf arrangement. And so that means that any node on the plant, they are going to have three or more leaves that all come off at the same place. And so at first glance, they look really, really similar, but you have to look up a little closer to them.
All right, so maybe you thought about it and you figured it out. 25 right here. This one with the hairs on it is called catchweed bedstraw. And number 24 here, the one that has no hairs on it, and the pretty white flowers, that's a summer annual. This one is called carpet weed.
Big pinky blue flowers that look kind of like trumpets.
[Child 2] Trumpets? Instrument?
[Meaghan] Yeah.
Yeah, it's called a funnel form flower.
I think a lot of people have different definitions of weeds. Right. So many people would say that weed is just a plant out of place. That's not necessarily the definition that I would use because weeds are sort of a special category of plants that share similar traits, right?
They can typically grow fairly aggressively. They typically are very adaptable to lots of different areas. They produce a lot of seed usually. They may reproduce vegetatively, like below ground or above ground. And so not any plant can be a weed.
They do share certain characteristics, but there is quite a bit of controversy over some species and whether or not they should be considered weeds. Because some of these are edible, some of them may have medicinal properties, some of them are beneficial for things like pollinators.
Ow.
[Producer] Did you prick yourself?
[Meaghan] Yes. It's not bleeding, but I definitely stabbed myself. Generally, I consider all 35 of these to be weed species.