Muzziehead is sure right on the hogs. If I ever get hogs on my place, that will be the end of my chufa-growing. They will not only eat all the chufas, they will also destroy the field and make craters so deep that you can hardly get a tractor over it the next year. Ironically, the first chufas that were grown here in the US were for finishing hogs. I would have hated to have been the poor guy trying to break the field the next year with a mule.

Chufas are easy to grow in new ground - get the ground in good shape, plant the seed, put out the fertilizer, and forget it. But once you've grown a summer crop on the ground, chufas are a challenge. A good herbicide program is essential. Here's a field from 2009 where I used Command for the PRE and came back over the top with a mix of 2,4-DB and Aim. I got good rains and made a pile of chufas in every field that year, and fed a bunch of turkeys all thru the winter. They had pretty well abandoned them by the time the season came in, but that's normal:


The problem with that herbicide program is that it doesn't do well with sicklepod, and sicklepod, also called coffeeweed, will absolutely ruin a chufa patch. I decided to mix in a cotton herbicide called Cotoran last year. Here's the result:



You can see that the Cotoran did a great job of controlling the sicklepod, but it also severely damaged the chufas. Even so, this stand would have made a world of chufa if it had rained. From the time I made this pic, it went more than 30 days without a drop, then rained an inch or so, and then another 30 days of drought. The result was a yield of almost nothing. But look in the back right of this pic and you will see a narrow band of high weeds in the field. This was a spot where I made an error in putting out the herbicide and didn't overlap properly. The whole field would have look like this without the herbicides.

I've been planting chufas since the 60s, but if anybody has a better herbicide program, I'm all ears. I'm sure not gonna use Cotoran again. All I know to control the sicklepod is to just use the 2,4-DB several times. It won't kill it, but it will keep it stunted enough for the chufas to make.