Category Archives: Herbicides

Organic Growers Can Use Synthetic Herbicides When Planting a New Vineyard

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Weedy Vineyard

Weedy Vineyard

Planting a new vineyard in a weedy field is a bad idea. Weeds would compete with the small vines for moisture, space, nutrients and light which would set back their growth. Thus, in establishing a new vineyard, growers need to clear the weeds out. Most growers use synthetic chemical herbicides when planting a new vineyard due to the high cost of hand weeding and negative effects of tillage. Using herbicides is an option for organic growers since the small vines do not produce grapes for several years which corresponds to the waiting time to be certified as organic.

“…weed management is the most expensive and technically challenging practice for organic grape production, and many organic farmers rely on mechanical and hand cultivation for weed control. Although these methods are highly effective, they are also labor intensive, more expensive, and their sustainability is questionable from a labor and environmental perspective.

Another option would be to use conventional production techniques that use synthetic herbicides during the establishment phase, and once established, transition the vineyard to achieve organic certification.”

Authors: Olmstead, M., et al.
Affiliations: Department of Horticultural Sciences, University of Florida.
Title: Weed control in a newly established organic vineyard.
Source: Hort Technology. December 2012. 22(6):757-765.

Cover Crops Provide Many Benefits-But Must be Terminated

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Cover crops are crops that are planted between the traditional growing seasons and generally without intent to harvest. Cover crops provide many benefits: reduced erosion, reduced nutrient leaching, increased soil organic matter, and improved soil productivity. However, cover crops need to be terminated so that the next crop can be planted and herbicides are a preferred termination method, as described in a recent article about a progressive California tomato farmer……

“During the past seven years, Sano Farms… has also refined a production system for processing tomatoes that uses cover crops, subsurface drip irrigation, and conservation tillage practices. Their system saved fuel by reducing the number of tractor operations, cut fertilizer inputs, reduced labor, improved soil condition, reduced overall variation in yield, and increased tomato yields up to 15% relative to the standard practices that were previously used.

An important component of the integrated tomato production system at this farm is the use of winter-grown triticale cover crop. These cover crops are typically seeded in late October or early November, sprinkler irrigated as part of the farm’s “preirrigation” program for the subsequent year’s crop, and then ended with herbicide typically in early February before the aboveground growth becomes too difficult to manage.”

Authors: Mitchell, J. P., et al.
Affiliations: Department of Plant Sciences, University of California..
Title: Evolution of conservation tillage systems for processing tomato in California’s central valley
Source: Hort Technology. October 2012. 22(5):617-626.

African Women Farmers Are Major Beneficiaries of Herbicide Use, USAID Study Finds

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Woman Weeding in Africa

Women Weeding in Africa

The burden of handweeding crop fields in Africa falls on women who spend about 50% of their time as farmers pulling weeds out by hand. This enormous amount of time for weeding prevents African women farmers from undertaking other farming activities such as the growing of cash crops. Herbicides would greatly reduce the need for weeding time and empower women to undertake other more lucrative activities.

“…the future of Malian agriculture will be increasingly determined by labor constraints. Herbicide use in Mali has doubled in the last 5 years in part in response to labor constraints and is likely to increase substancialy in the future. Herbicide use has very positive spillover effects on woman’s time and ability to work on their own crops or collect karite nuts. More extension work and agribusiness training is needed, along the lines of USAID’s IPM CRSP’s work in pesticide literacy and safety, to ensure safe and effective use of herbicides.

All labor saving technology, such as herbicide, is likely to have a gender impact not as much in women directly using it, but in it freeing up women’s time for more lucrative activities. For example increased use of herbicide would free up women’s time during the key time of year when they collect karite nuts, July-August, potentially engendering an increase in the production of karite butter and better women’s incomes.”

Author: Jeremy Foltz
Affiliation: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Title: Opportunities and investment strategies to improve food security and reduce poverty in Mali through the diffusion of improved agricultural technologies.
Source: USAID: MALI. June 16, 2010. Available at: http://purl.umn.edu/97141   

To Increase Income and Competiveness, Public Policy Should Educate African Maize Farmers About the Benefits of Using Herbicides

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Weedy Maize Field: Africa

Weedy Maize Field: Africa

Maize consumption is a major source of calories for millions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Within the next few decades, the majority of people in Sub-Saharan Africa will be living in cities. Countries in eastern and southern Africa are increasing imports of staple foods, including maize. In order to be competitive, African farmers need to reduce the cost of producing a unit of maize. Herbicide adoption would greatly reduce costs of growing maize and lead to greater yields and farmer income and competiveness.

“Rural smallholder production remains highly labor-intensive. On average, family labor accounts for 62% of the total cost of maize production in Zambia’s small- and medium-scale farm sector. Promoting the identification and adoption of practices and technologies that save labor and/or identifying labor-productivity-enhancing technologies through research and development will therefore help to make Zambian maize more competitive and allow farmers to maintain profitability even at lower producer prices.

Although only 3% of fields had herbicides applied, regression results suggest the benefits of its use are quite high. All else equal, applying herbicides increases gross margin between ZMK 363,700 to ZMK 376,300 per hectare planted… The magnitude of this effect is fairly large compared to the national average margin of ZMK 1,108,542 (in other words, at the mean, herbicide use would increase gross margins by roughly a third). …these results indicate that public policy measure should be considered to educate farmers about the benefits of herbicide application, as its contribution to smallholder income growth and regional competitiveness may be comparable to and highly synergistic with increased fertilizer use.”

Authors: Burke, W. J., et al.
Affiliation: Zambia Food Security Research Project (FSRP)
Title: The cost of maize production by smallholder farmers in Zambia
Source: Food Security Research Project. Working Paper 50. March 2011. Available at: http://www.aec.msu.edu/agecon/fs2/zambia/index.htm 

Herbicide Use on Cotton Farms Could Greatly Increase Income of Farm Families in Africa

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African Cotton Herbicide Experiment

African Cotton Herbicide Experiment

The income of family farms growing cotton in Africa is low largely due to the small size of farms- about one hectare. A major reason that farm size is small is because fields are weeded by hand and there usually is not enough family labor to weed more than one hectare. With use of herbicides, the need for labor is reduced dramatically and individual cotton farms would be able to significantly increase their acreage and incomes.

“Under rainfed agricultural production, common throughout most of Africa, labor bottlenecks at planting and weeding times often critically constrain farm output. During the four to six week period following the first rains, farmers must prepare their soil, plant and conduct the critical first weeding.

Under these circumstances, early season labor constraints, particularly during the first weeding, set an upper bound on the cropped area a family can manage using only household labor. For the average farm household in central Zambia, with five family members, peak-season labor bottlenecks limit the area they can cultivate under conventional hand hoe tillage to about 1 hectare.

In Zambia, herbicide application, instead of weeding with a hand hoe, cuts peak season labor requirements in half.

When combined with dry season land preparation, this reduction in peak season labor requirements enables farm households to crop 2.7 hectares of land under hand hoe cultivation using only household labor. As a result, hand hoe farmers can increase their income from these three crops to 2.9 million Kwacha ($620) per year, triple what they can earn under conventional hand hoe agriculture…

This suggests that cotton company inclusion and financing of one round of herbicides in their cotton packs could potentially raise cotton production and household income considerably.”

Authors: Steven Haggblade and Christina Plerhoples
Affiliations: Department of Agricultural Food and Resource Economics at Michigan State University
Title: Productivity impact of conservation farming on smallholder cotton farmers in Zambia
Source: Food Security Research Project. Working Paper 47. July 2010. Available at: http://www.aec.msu.edu/agecon/fs2/zambia/index.htm 

Ebenezer Scrooge Returns as an Organic Ag Advocate

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Ebenezer Scrooge

Ebenezer Scrooge

Hand Weeding

Hand Weeding

Dickens’ fictional character Ebenezer Scrooge believed that young people should work. By not working, he considered the unemployed as “surplus population.” Organic farms require more labor particularly for jobs such as weeding fields by hand since herbicides are not used. Recently, an organic ag advocate in the UK invoked the name of Ebenezer Scrooge to explain how organic ag could make use of the current “surplus population” by putting the unemployed to work in the organic fields.

“Yet if Britain practiced Enlightened Agriculture based on small, mixed, quasi-organic farms we could easily be self-reliant in food. We could also employ all of the three million who are now unemployed, including or perhaps especially the one million unemployed under-25s, in jobs far better than the shelf-stacking and mail-order cold-calling that are now on offer. Instead we produce only about half our food while politicians wring their hands over what Ebenezer Scrooge in a remarkably similar economy called “the surplus population” who alas are left on the sidelines.”

Author: Colin Tudge
Affiliation: Writer
Title: Enlightened agriculture a people’s takeover of the food supply
Source: Food Ethics. Summer 2012. Volume 7; Issue 2. Available at: www.foodethicscouncil.org

IITA Recommends Herbicides for West African Farmers

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Laborers Hand-Weeding

Laborers Hand-Weeding

The International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) located in Ibadan, Nigeria has been conducting weed control research since its founding in 1967. For many years, the research focused on “low-input” non-chemical methods of controlling weeds. However, the “low-input” methods were never widely-adopted by African farmers who resorted to the centuries-old practice of handweeding their fields. IITA considers handweeding not to be sustainable and recommends that West African farmers use herbicides to control weeds in maize fields.

“Although manual weeding is an age-old practice in West Africa, it is no longer sustainable because of high labor costs and the aging farming population. Judicious use of herbicides is recommended to control weeds effectively and increase maize productivity. We normally recommend the use of postemergence herbicides to kill weeds before land preparation and planting.”

Author: Alpha Y. Kamara
Affiliation: Reporter
Title: Best practices for maize production in the West African savannas
Source: IITA, R4D Review. Issue 9. September 2012.

National Academy of Sciences Credits Herbicides for Adoption of Conservation Measures in the U.S

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Tillage vs. Herbicides

Tillage vs. Herbicides

In the early 20th century, American farmland was eroding at an alarming rate. The cause of this erosion was continuous plowing of fields to keep weeds out. When herbicides were introduced to control weeds, farmers could reduce tillage. As a result, there have been major reductions in soil erosion in the United States. The National Academy of Sciences has pointed out that this improvement in conserving the soil would not have occurred had it not been for herbicides…..

“The use of herbicides has reduced the need for growers to cultivate to control weeds and that reduction has led to an increase in the practices associated with conservation tillage. These include no-till, ridge-till, strip-till, and mulch-till—practices that leave at least 30% cover after planting. Leaving cover after planting reduces soil loss due to wind and water erosion up to 90%, and it increases crop residue (organic matter) on the soil surfaces up to 40%. Conservation tillage in the United States has increased from 26.1% of the total acreage in 1990 to 37.2% of the total acreage in 1998. Without herbicides, widespread adoption of conservation tillage would likely not have taken place.”

Author: Committee on the Future Role of Pesticides in US Agriculture
Affiliation: National Research Council
Title: The future role of pesticides in US agriculture
Source: Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources and Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology Commission on Life Sciences. 2000.

Herbicide Use in Finland has Increased Significantly to Protect the North Sea

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Herbicide sales: Finland

Herbicide sales: Finland

In 2001, herbicide use began to increase in Finland largely due to government policies subsidizing growers to no longer plow fields for weed control. Finland is a signatory to the North Sea Treaty which includes a goal of reducing nutrients into the North Sea by half. Research showed that a considerable amount of phosphorus moves into waterways with eroded soils from fields that are plowed in the autumn. Thus, growers now are using herbicides to control weeds without plowing in order to keep phosphorus out of the North Sea.

“Our weed survey represented part of a follow-up project on the impacts of agri-environment policy in Finland. For instance, reduced tillage has been one of the subsidized measures primarily implemented to reduce nutrient leaching. Spring cereals, 1.1 million hectares in total, covering 50-55% of arable land, dominate crop production in Finland. In the 1990s ploughing was still the standard tillage practice in spring cereal fields, while the latest statistics show that only approximately half of the cultivated cereal field area is currently ploughed. Ploughing has been replaced with reduced tillage methods (29%) or direct drilling (17%). At the same time, the sales of glyphosate have more than doubled within a decade in Finland.

Increased use of glyphosate in Finland is notable; in 1999, the annual sales of glyphosate products were sufficient to treat about 13% of arable land under cultivation or fallow, while the same figure had increased to 37% in 2010.”

Author(s): Salonen, J., et al.
Affiliation: MTT Agrifood Research Finland, Plant Production Research, Jokionen, Finland
Title: Impact of changed cropping practices on weed occurrence in spring cereals in Finland – a comparison of surveys in 1997-1999 and 2007-2009.
Source: Weed Research. 53:110-120. 2012.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Lower With Herbicide Use

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Cultivating Weeds in Australia

Cultivating Weeds in Australia

Agricultural greenhouse gas emissions can be curbed by decreasing fuel use by field equipment. The largest contribution to reducing emissions associated with farming is made by the reduction of tillage operations which are made primarily to control weeds. By substituting herbicides for tillage, dramatic reductions in fuel use and emissions occur because one herbicide application substitutes for multiple tillage trips. Tillage equipment is also heavier than herbicide sprayers and needs more energy to pull steel implements through the soil. A row crop cultivator requires four times more diesel fuel per acre than an herbicide sprayer. A recent study in Australia calculated the effects on greenhouse gas emissions…..

“In a wheat fallow system in semi-arid subtropical Queensland, Australia, practicing zero tillage reduced fossil fuel emissions from machinery operation by 2.2 million g CO2/ha over 33 years or 67 kg CO2/ha/year (four to five tillage operations with a chisel plough to 10 cm during fallow each year were replaced by one herbicide spray).”

Authors: Ortiz-Monasterio, I., et al.
Affiliation: CIMMYT, Mexico
Title: Greenhouse Gas Mitigation in the Main Cereal Systems: Rice, Wheat and Maize
Source: Climate Change and Crop Production. CAB International 2010.