Author(s):

Senthilkumar D, Murali Arthanari P, Chinnusamy C, Bharathi C and Yalabela Lavanya

Abstract: Weeds are competitive and adaptable to all the adverse environments. It has been estimate that in general weeds cause five percent loss to agricultural production in most developed countries, ten percent loss in less developed countries and 25 percent loss in least developed countries. Weed control by cultural and mechanical methods have some limitations as they are labourious, time consuming and expensive. Chemical weed control although is one of the effective method and have plagued with problems such as pollution of environment, development of weed resistance and above all is depend on fossil fuel. Stale seed bed is an eco-friendly alternate methods for weed control. Stale seedbed is based on the principle of flushing out germinal weed seeds prior to the planting of the crop, depleting the seed bank in the surface layer of soil and reduction of subsequent weed seedling emergence. In dry direct seeded condition SSB using glyphosate application @ 1 kg ha-1 was more effective in reducing the weed density and it recorded higher grain yield and B: C ratio than SSB using shallow tillage. The stale seedbed recorded significantly lowest dry weight of weeds, followed by soil solarisation and deep ploughing in groundnut. In corn cultivation, SSB by application of paraquat @ 0.5 kg/ha or glyphosate 2.0 kg/ha followed by pre-emergence use of either atrazine 3.0 kg/ha or pendimethalin 0.75 kg /ha before sowing gave better weed control. Stale seed bed technique should not be viewed as a stand-alone treatment that maintains weed suppression during the entire cropping cycle and thus may often require it be part of an integrated weed.

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