Weed management
This section of the website provides information on weed management including both cultural and more direct weed control methods. We have tried to give a broad overview of the options available in order to provide information that will be useful across all types of organic farming systems.We have also provided some guide as to the types of decisions that need to be made before planning and undertaking weed control measures.
The site is divided into three sections:
- cultural controls which provides information on incorporating weed management into the whole farm rotation and stresses a preventative approach. It includes many tips on rotational planning and design
- direct control methods which provides information on control methods to use when the crops are in the ground and growing. We have also provided links to weeding machinery sites in this section.
- crop weeding strategies which provides information on weed management in specific crops. This section is intended to provide a useful overview of weed management from the perspective of a particular crop which can then be put in the context; either a whole rotational approach or a specific farm system
The information has been purposely summarised to give the basic details so that the pages can be quickly scanned. Click on the links above to go straight to the relevant section or use the sub section headings on the side navigation bars to go directly to information of interest.
If you have information or experiences that you think would be useful to other farmers please add your own comments on the relevant pages using the add comments button. If you would like more in-depth information on a particular topic please follow the links provided or contact us to ask us to follow up any particular topic if you think more detail and links are necessary.
Further information:
The following papers provide overviews of weed management options for organic farmers:
- A review of non-chemical weed management. A fully referenced review by W Bond, RJ Turner, AC Grundy (590 Kb).
- ‘Organic Weed Management’ by Charles Merfield and providing a good overview (446 Kb).
- Principles of Sustainable Weed Management for Croplands. To some extent, weeds are a result of crop production, but to a larger extent they are a consequence of management decisions. Managing croplands according to nature's principles will reduce weed problems.... more in this paper from ATTRA.
- ‘A review of Non-chemical weed control techniques’ by Steve Parish from a paper in Biological Agriculture and Horticulture.
- A more pictoral summary is provided as picture slides on Organic Integrated Weed Management as part of a factsheet on the (US) National Center for Appropriate Technology website (330 Kb pdf file).
- Weed Management in Organic Crop Systems, a factsheet from the Manitoba Food and Rural Initiatives
- Managing weeds, the views of Canadian organic growers
- Two talks produced for open days during the project include Organic Weed Management in Arable Systems by Becky turner and Weed Management in Organic Systems by James Walsh (formerly of EFRC). These are quite big files (1263 Kb and 2325 Kb respectively) of Powerpoint presentations and take some time to download!
For a fully referenced review of non-chemical weed management, » click here (590k pdf)
Garden Organic is the working name of the Henry Doubleday Research Association (HDRA).
We are not responsible for the content of external web sites.

Comments
I need information about organic weed management
- ishaq_bzu@hotmail.com 03-05-2005
Prof.S.S. Narwal, 8/15, Haryana Agri. University, Hisar-125 004, INDIA
- Prof. S.S. Narwal, Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar, India E.Mail:narwal_1947@yahoo.com 03-05-2005
- Marcel Werps BSc (now Wood) 28-01-2006
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- Watson & Co 09-03-2006
- Liza 14-08-2006
I need information about allelopathic effect on weed management
- omar 05-06-2007
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- gedwards 04-07-2007
thank you in anticipation of your reply.
- Fay Redmond 30-07-2007
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- gemma 08-07-2008