Advances in Plants & Agriculture Research Research Article Open Access Ecologically sustainable integrated weed management in dry and irrigated direct-seeded rice Abstract Volume 8 Issue 4 - 2018 Weeds are one of the major biological constraints in direct seeded rice farmer’s field and cause a substantial rice yield loss owing to greater diversity in weed flora due to alternate Mona Nagargade, MK Singh, V Tyagi wetting and drying. Sometimes more than three flushes of weed infest the direct seeded Department of Agronomy, Banaras Hindu University, India rice (DSR) in whole life cycle of crop. In India, weeds are mainly controlled manually in rice. However, manual weeding is becoming less cost effective because of labour crisis at Correspondence: MK Singh, Department of Agronomy, critical times or increased labour costs. Herbicides are replacing manual weeding at a faster Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi -221005, Uttar Pradesh, India, rate in rice as they are easy to use but there are concerns about the sole and repeated use Email
[email protected] of herbicides, such as evolution of resistance in weeds, shifts in weed flora, cost of weed management to farmers and concerns about the environment. Therefore, there is an urgent Received: June 17, 2017 | Published: August 01, 2018 need to effectively integrate different aspects of ecological weed management strategies especially preventive measures like stale seedbed technique, summer tillage, precession land leveling, crop rotation and sowing methods, cultural methods like competitive varieties, herbicide resistance varieties, seed rate, crop residues/straw mulching, cover crops and live mulching, brown manuring, water and nutrient management (specially organic amendments), manual and mechanical method, bio-control agent to achieve effective and sustainable weed control in DSR systems.