Innovative Approaches for Weed Management in Rainfed Cropping Systems

AbstractRainfed regions contribute substantially towards foodgrain production. Weeds are one of the major threats in sustaining the productivity of rainfed cropping systems. They compete with crops for nutrients and moisture resulting in severe yield reduction in rainfed crops. As the rainfed regions are prone to soil erosion, land degradation, temperature and moisture stresses, efficient weed management becomes more important to check the nutrient and moisture drain by the weeds. Non-availability of farm labour for manual weeding and high labour cost, lack of efficient mechanical weeding tools, low adoption of integrated weed management practices, low efficacy of herbicides, problem of parasitic weeds, resource-poor farmers, lack of knowledge, etc. are the major challenges in weed management. There have been many new developments in research to address the emerging issues in weed management. Automated weed control using remote sensing and imaging technologies, drones, thermal weed management (use of hot water and hot foam, steam, flame weeding, cryogenic weed control), electrocution (weed control via electric shock), use of abrasive grit, harvest weed seed control, competitive crop varieties, allelopathy, microbial herbicides, crop diversification, tillage & herbicide rotation, genomics and RNA interference (RNAi) technologies, herbicide-tolerant non-transgenic crop varieties, nano herbicides, etc. are some of the innovative approaches to address the emerging issues in weed management. However, relying on single method of weed control may lead to problems of weed flora shift, herbicide resistance in weeds, adverse impact on ecosystem, etc. Therefore, the strategy needs to be replaced with multiple and integrated strategies in a system mode to achieve the sustainable weed management.