Pre- and post-emergence herbicides for weed management in finger millet

摘要

Finger millet [Eleusine coracana Gaertn.) commonly known as (rag/), is one of the important staple food crops of South India. It is drought tolerant crop and widely grown in rainfed and dry land conditions in red soil area. In India, the crop occupiesan area of 1.31 million hectares with a production of 1.93 million tonnes and productivity of 1.64 t/ha. Among finger millet growing states, Karnataka stands first with an area of 0.79 million hectares, with an annual production of 1.27 million tonnes and productivity of 1.87 t/ha (Anonymous 2014). The finger millet crop is slow growing during initial stages due to which weeds pose severe problem. If weeds are not controlled in early period up to four weeks after transplanting, yield is reduced drastically by 34 to 61% (Nanjappa and Hosmani 1985). Delayed weeding will be less effective because sufficient damage would have occurred at the critical period. In present days, apart from expensive labour charges, timely availability of labour is a limitation for undertaking cultural operations like hand weeding. In such situations, suitable technology with less labour requirement will be most helpful to farmers for controlling weeds effectively and chemical weed control is one of such measures. However, environmental pollution due to application of higher doses of herbicides is a concern. Some low dose herbicides have emerged. Further, broad spectrum weed control is another limitation in finger millet crop. Hence it is needed to test the available pre-mixformulation of herbicides to control diversified weed flora in finger millet.