Introduction to Weed Management Strategies

Weeds are the unwanted plants in a community of plant aka crops or some recreational place or any other place where they are not desired and they are as harmful and devastating for crops as the diseases so their management is a must step in a healthy crop stand. Practically there are three ways for weed management in agriculture in regard to the crop stand.

1. Prevention

2. Control

3. Eradication

A farmer plowing the field to uproot weeds and prepare to sow next crop

Prevention

To prevent the weeds from coming to the crop fields is more dutiful but perhaps the most practical method with good results. The method of preventing a given weed from contaminating a given area can be accomplished by any of the following method;

i) Preventing the mixing of weed seeds in crop seeds

ii) Preventing the weed seeds to come in animal feed

iii) Cleaning the agriculture machinery before and after bringing to use in field they may be contaminated with weed seeds

iv) Preventing the vegetatively reproducing weeds to come in contact with crop seeds or water bodies.

v) Cleaning the irrigation drains so that weeds in them do not spread their seeds into crops.

If these prevention steps are carefully carried out then weed problem can be reduced to a greater extent and the costs on other farm inputs such as herbicides can be reduced.

Control

Weed control methods are employed if weeds are present in the crop fields. the number of weeds is limited to the extent that they cause minimal damage to crop yields and output of the farm. Control can be done byphysical, chemical, biology or cultural methods depending upon the farm economics and resources available to the farm. Thus weed control adopted directly has an impact on the costs of the farm products.

Eradication

Eradication means to completely eliminate a weed from the given field or any other place. Eradication is usually done for a particular troublesome weed in a small area of the fields.

Eradication is often expensive and incomplete because it is very difficult to remove the vegetative propagules or seeds left in the soil. If soil fumigation is done, it can be hazardous to the environment and often the herbicides used are persistent in the soil and may reach our stomach through food chain and these chemicals also have effects on non-target organisms.