Rice production in rainfed lowland is constraint with non-availability of suitable cultivars, puddling at right time and infestation of weeds, Puddling of soil and manual transplanting are labour intensive and require a lot of water and power at critical peak season. Continued puddling of fields for rice destroys soil physical properties and negatively affects yields of puddled rice and succeeding crops (Singh and Singh, 2001; Hobbs, 2003), Hence, aerobic seeding of rice with zero till drill is considered as an alternative crop establishment system over transplanting in puddled condition for overcoming these problems, The crop is more susceptible to severe weed competition at initial stage due to its slow growth in this system and loss in grain yield goes upto 73% (Kolhe and Tripathi, 1998), Continuous use of butachlor in rice may result in weed shift or resistance problem. Thus, the use of new herbicides can be a better alternative to reduce the weed infestation, minimize weed shift and also to avoid resistance problem. Therefore, the present investigation was carried out to assess the performance of cyhalofop-butyl, metsulfuron-methyl+chlorimuron-ethyl and different cultivars under direct dry seeded zero till lowland rice situation.
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