Weed control efficacy of herbicides in wheat under strip tillage system

Rice-wheat–mungbean cropping system has been established as a profitable and highly accepted cropping pattern mostly under rainfed system in Bangladesh to improve water- and nutrient-use efficiency and sustain crop productivity (Naresh et al., 2013). Conventional full tillage (3-4 passes) is done for sowing of wheat but considering the environmental and economic advantages, strip tillage (single pass) is becoming popular now-a-days (Norberg, 2010). Wheat gives better yield performance and economic return under strip tillage than conventional full tillage (Hossain et al., 2004; Siddique, 2004; Hossain et al., 2014), but weed is the major barrier to crop production in the strip tillage system. Weeding is generally done by manual or mechanical means but the recent increased cost and decreased availability of labour forced farmers to rely on herbicide as the best option for weed control. Although herbicides help to control weed effectively at lower cost, repeated use of herbicides with same mode of action may lead to herbicide resistance in weeds. Therefore, it is important to select herbicides with different modes of action to control weed successfully by avoiding development of herbicide resistance in weeds. This study evaluated the weed control efficacy of some selected herbicides in wheat field under strip tillage system for identifying herbicides with different modes of action