Mechanical weed management technology to manage inter- and intra-row weeds in agroecosystems - A review

Abstract

Traditional manual weed management is one of the tedious and costly operations in the complete cycle of crop production, reasons being high labor costs, time and tedium. The herbicide use contributes to environmental pollution in addition to other disadvantages of concern. The increasing demand for toxicant free food has become a challenge for weed control. Hence, the mechanical weeding is gaining importance. Automation in agriculture has also improved the mechanization input in weed management. The rapid entry of sensors, microcontroller and computing technologies in the field has formed a foundation of agricultural autonomous guidance systems. An automated system is time effective for field operations, avoids huge labor requirement and health drudgery issues to provide an efficient farm operation. Generally manual tools such as khurpi (hand operated small hoe), grubber, spade, wheel hoe, push pull type of weeder are used by farmers for the removal of inter- and intra-row weeds with higher weeding efficiency in the range of 72 to 99% but field capacity is very low in the range of 0.001 to 0.033 ha/h. This review deliberates on the latest work being done on mechanical weed management such as tractor operated finger weeder, torsion weeder, ECO weeder, flame weeder, harrow and sensor-based technologies for management of inter- and intra-row weeds in crops with wider rows.