IMPORTANT OF WEED CONTROL
There are a lot of reasons to control weeds. Weeds are unsightly, they can interfere with harvest, they can carry crop pathogens or host damaging insects, and most importantly they rob a crop of its yield potential. Weeds do compete with crops and reduce crop yield and crop quality, but how and when? The traditional answer is that weeds and crops compete for the same resources, light, water, and nutrients, but this is only part of the story. Plants have the ability to detect if another plant is growing nearby. They do this by detecting the light that gets reflected off nearby plants, which is of a different wavelength than light reflected off bare soil. Once weeds are detected, a crop may devote more resources into becoming more competitive, such as by growing taller, and less energy into producing seed. This change can happen early in the season, even before weeds and crop are competing for resources such as water or nutrients. So how soon do weeds need to be controlled? During ...