A Review on Weed Management on Maize (Zea mays L.) Jagadish*, Shrinivas C. S., Prashant Department of Agronomy, College of Agriculture, University of Agricultural Sciences, Raichur-584104, Karnataka, India *Email: jmgayakwad@gmail.com
Online published on 23 December, 2016. Abstract Maize is highly susceptible to weed infestation because of its slow growth in the initial stages up to 40 DAS, The losses caused by weeds exceed the losses from any other category of agriculture like insects, nematodes, diseases, rodents etc, of the total annual loss of agricultural produce from various pests in India, weeds account for 45 Per cent, insects 30 Per cent, diseases 20 Per cent & others 5 Per cent. In maize the loss due to weeds is between 18 to 85 Per cent. Due to non availability of labour in time and at economic rate the weed control through cultural method becomes a great problem in cultivation of maize crop. Weeding has to be completed before critical stages of crop growth stage. Maize weeds comprise diverse plant species from grasses tobroadleaf weeds and sedges and cause substantial yield losses (18–85%). Critically viewing, the manual and mechanical methods of weed control, besides being less effective, costly and time demand as well as need to be repeated at frequent intervals. Chemical weed control is a better supplement to conventional methods and forms an integral part of the modern crop production cultivation and in this review, various physical, chemical and mechanical methods that curtail the growth and spread of weeds have been discussed. The common weed management practice for Maize is pre-emergence application of selective herbicides like atrazine or pendimethalin followed by one hand weeding. Thus use of herbicides is one of the options left with the farmers to eliminate crop weed competition at early growth stage of crop. Hence, a brief review is presented on the nature of weed spectrum in Maize, competition between crops and weeds, their effect on growth and yield, different weed management practices for Maize. Top Keywords Weed Management, Maize, Crop-weed computation, Economics, Integrated weed management. Top |