Smallholder farmers in southern Africa have reported on increased labour requirements for hoe weeding due to high weed infestations in conservation farming (CF) fields. However, CF proponents claim that weed pressure and labour requirements for weeding decrease within the first three years under the recommended CF practices. An observational study was carried out during the 2008/09 cropping sea...

Weed pressure in 1995 was incredible! What happened to produce such a glorious crop of weeds? The answer: drought! The Drought of 1995 and Weeds and Weed Control in 1996 Weed pressure in 1995 was, in a word, incredible! I toured many areas — golf courses, lawns, athletic fields, and institutional grounds — that were solid crabgrass, knotweed, clover, etc. In many of these areas, if there weren’...

Cultivating maize under systems of alley cropping results in improvements to the soil, a reduction in weeds and an increase in yield. Studies using ground cover from tree shoots produce similar results. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects on weed growth and maize yield of ground cover made up of 30 t ha-1 (fresh matter) of branches from the tree species: neem (Azadirachta indica A...

The Weighted Set Cover Problem (SCP) is a popular optimization problem that has been applied to different industrial applications, including scheduling, manufacturing, service planning and location problems. It consists in to find low cost solutions covering a set of requirements or needs. In this paper, we solve the SCP using a recent nature inspired algorithm: Invasive Weed Optimization (IWO)...

in order to evaluate the density and dry weight of weeds and seed and oil yield of castor bean ricinus communis l.) as a medicinal plant affected by cover crops, an experiment was conducted at the agricultural research station, faculty of agriculture, ferdowsi university of mashhad, during growing season of 2008-2009. treatments were four cover crops included white clover, fenugreek, hairy vetc...

The Chinese rose beetle (Adoretus sinicus Burmeister (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae)) is an introduced, widely-established pest in Hawai'i. The adult beetles feed on the leaves of cacao (Theobroma cacao L.), which can lead to defoliation and even death of young trees. We evaluated the impact of five commercially available products with different active ingredients (imidacloprid, azadirachtin, Beauve...

Background: The EU-project Flourish intends to establish an autonomously operating precision farming system based on the interaction between unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). For effective mission planning and site-specific ground intervention by the UGV, the growth, mineral nutrition, weed, and health status of the crop field must be evaluated efficiently. In...

There has long been observed an inhibitive response by plant species to certain neighboring plants. The Greek philosopher and botanist, Theophrastus, noted this effect from cabbage as early as 300 BC (Willis 1985). Since that time, others have documented similar plant interactions. In 1937, Austrian botanist, Hans Molisch, described this phenomenon as allelopathy, which he determined to be the ...

Article history: Received: 05 Feb, 2015 Revised: 23 Mar, 2015 Accepted: 22 Apr, 2015 ePublished: 30 May, 2015