Soil health: The effects of herbicides

Soil health: The effects of herbicides Lynette Abbott and Pankaj Singh from the University of Western Australia highlight relationships between herbicides and soil health. The traditional practice of ploughing soil, which has been integral to agriculture, is being replaced by reduced tillage practices (Llewellyn et al. 2012). The widespread adoption of reduced tillage as best practice in farming systems has emerged in the context of conservation tillage practices to improve soil health and sustainable crop productivity (Zhang et al. 2026). Intensive cultivation practices were traditionally used to prepare the seedbed before sowing. In addition to loosening the soil to facilitate seedling establishment, multiple rounds of cultivation significantly reduced competition from emerging weeds.