Integrated weed management in tomato cultivation

Francesco Tei, Euro Pannacci

• Publisher: Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781838792930
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Agriculture
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Weeds pose a major threat to agriculture and cause crop yield losses in a big way. What needs to be done to counter the threat of weeds? This chapter discusses many measures to tackle the problem of weeds, especially in tomato cultivation. One of the most important is Integrated Weed Management (IWM). IWM combines direct and indirect weed control strategies to effectively tackle the problem of weeds in tomato cultivation. This chapter then looks into the preventive steps to be taken and discusses methods like crop rotation. Chemical weed control is another important aspect. The chapter also presents case studies on how research has been used to improve tomato cultivation in practice.

Table of contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Weed communities: the target
• 3 The effect of weed–crop interference
• 4 Integrated Weed Management (IWM)
• 5 Preventative measures and cultural control: crop rotation and cover crops
• 6 Cultural control: stale seedbed preparation, cultivar selection, planting, irrigation and fertilization
• 7 Decision making: weed competition thresholds
• 8 Direct weed control methods: mulches, solarization, thermal and mechanical methods and hand weeding
• 9 Chemical weed control
• 10 Case studies
• 11 Summary and future trends
• 12 Where to look for further information
• 13 References