More than 100 farmers, technicians and agronomists have been given an insight into Integrated Weed Management (IWM) through on open day held at Veneto Agricoltura’s Vallevecchia experimental farm in Italy. Visitors were able to witness the farm’s ongoing experimental work as part of IWMPRAISE (Integrated Weed Management: PRActical Implementation and Solutions for Europe), Europe’s first Horizon 2020 project dedicated solely to weed management.
The five-year project, coordinated by Per Kudsk from the Department of Agroecology at Aarhus University in Denmark, includes representatives from almost all ENDURE members among its 37 partners. These comprise not only research institutes and universities, but also 14 SMEs and industrial partners, and 12 advisory services and end user organisations.
The project has work packages on IWM in different crops (annual narrow-row and row crops, perennial herbaceous and woody crops), in addition to teams analysing end users’ perceptions, barriers to the uptake of new knowledge and drivers for decision making, IWM under different tillage regimes and the effects on soil quality and assessing the long-term agronomic, environmental and economic impacts of IWM.
The open day gave participants the chance to learn about the activities Veneto Agricoltura, in collaboration with Italy’s National Research Council, is conducting to tackle the complexities of IWM focused on a reduction in herbicide use.
The IWMPRAISE website reports that visitors were able to see a new concept in agricultural machinery produced by Maschio-Gaspardo in action (pictured above right). “This is a hoeing/sprayer machine that, using precision farming technologies (semi-automatic tractor guidance system with RTK correction), simultaneously applies herbicide along the crop rows and cultivates inter-row soil, with a positioning error not exceeding 2.5 cm.” It is an approach that makes it possible to reduce herbicide use to one-third of the amount used in broadcast applications.
Another trial being run on the farm is analysing weed management in the transition from conventional to conservation agriculture (CA). The latter is one of the key strategies for introducing more sustainable agriculture, reducing costs and improving soil fertility and is based on reduced tillage, crop rotation and continuous soil cover using crop residues and cover crops. It requires changes in agronomic practices, particularly with regards to weed management.
Writing on the IWMPRAISE website, Veneto Agricoltura project manager Antonio De Zanche reports: “In the trial, three strategies are compared: one strategy with high use of herbicides, both in pre and post-emergence, a second strategy based on cover crops and post-emergence herbicides only, and the third strategy aiming to reduce herbicide use by adopting techniques for sowing cover crops that increase their ability to compete against weeds, by using non-chemical termination techniques, such as roller crimpers, or by selecting cover crops which are killed by winter frost.”
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