Soil behaviour of pre-emergent herbicides in Australian farming systems: a reference manual for agronomic advisers
Published: 6 Nov 2023
The value of pre-emergent herbicides
When devising a weed control strategy, pre-emergent herbicides can be a valuable additional tactic to help drive weed numbers down. Used alone they often do not achieve the objective of driving down weed seed bank numbers, but when used amongst a suite of tactics, they can be particularly effective.
Benefits of pre-emergent herbicides include:
- Offers an alternate mode of action to many post-emergent options
- Reduced selection pressure on subsequent post-emergent herbicide applications
- Removal of early season weed competitive pressure on a crop often protects crop yield better than later applied post-emergent applications, especially in weedy paddocks
- Cost savings, especially in the fallow where multiple knockdown applications may be required
- Reduced time pressure on other spraying operations, both in crop and in fallow
- Major role in patch eradication where a weed blowout can be GPS logged and a pre-emergent herbicide applied to manage the patch
- After a cultivation event, there will always be some weed seed in a position in the soil profile that is ideal for germination. Applying a pre-emergent herbicide after the last cultivation can manage these weeds that would otherwise emerge and ultimately return additional seed to the soil, and
- Some crops have few post-emergent options (e.g. grass weed control in sorghum, or broadleaf weed control in pulses) and hence often rely on pre-emergent herbicides for in-crop weed control.
To obtain a print copy Freephone 1800 11 00 44 or email: ground-cover[email protected] and quote GRDC Order Code GRDC1277.
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Region: National
ISBN: 978-1-921779-60-2 (print)
ISBN: 978-1-921779-57-2 (Online)
GRDC Project Code: ICN1811-001SAX, ICN2307-001SAX,
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