Climate impact, toxicological risks and economic efficiency of conventional and new weed control methods in sugar beet

Abstract

The aim of this study was to assess the toxicological risks, the climate impact and the economic efficiency of conventional and new weed control methods with reduced herbicide use. For this purpose, i) resource consumption, CO2 emissions, number of field work days, costs and labor hours were calculated for 11 weed control methods; ii) the toxicological risk for non-target organisms was modeled for 4 methods with reduced herbicide use and for conventional spraying with SYNOPS-GIS. The results showed that no method is fully environmentally friendly. Although the use of the FarmDroid hoeing robot is toxicologically harmless, it is disadvantageous in terms of CO2 emissions and overall costs compared to broadcast spraying. Equipping a FarmDroid with spot spraying would reduce the toxicological risk by 90% and CO2 emissions by 5% compared to conventional broadcast spraying. The costs would be only slightly higher than for conventional surface spraying. Although the new CONVISO method has the highest aquatic toxicity, it is the most favorable in terms of climate friendliness, energy consumption, terrestrial toxicity and cost-effectiveness.