Effect of post-emergence herbicides on weeds and productivity of wheat

important staple crop after rice. It is predominant Rabi season crop of northern, central and upper peninsular region of the country. Among the various factors re-sponsible for low productivity of wheat, weed infesta-tion during early stages of growth is one of the major factors. Due to initial slow growth, it provides a con-genial environment for weed growth. In wheat gener-ally, first 30 to 40 days are highly critical from the point of crop weed competition. Mechanical weeding is costly, time consuming and sometimes not possible due to non-availability of labour. Under such a situa-tion, chemical weed control offers a better alternative to manual weeding during early stage. Since, meagre information is available on the comparative efficiency of different herbicides for weed control, weeds before critical period of crop–weed competition. An experiment was conducted during Rabi sea-son of 2010-11 at Agronomy Farm, College of Agri-culture, Pune. The experiment was laid out in random-ized block design with three replications. The soil of the experimental field was clayey loam and low in to-tal nitrogen, medium in available phosphorus and high in potassium. The ten treatments comprised different weed control methods, viz. T1- One hand at 20 DA