Weed flora of cereals in different farming systems.

Mihály Zalai

Zalai.Mihaly@mkk.szie.hu
Plant Protection Institute, Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Szent Istvan University, 2100 0000116, Hungary, (Hungary)

Zita Domer

Plant Protection Institute, Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Szent Istvan University, 2100 0000116, Hungary (Hungary)

Abstract

Cereals are important crops all over the world. Cereals are grown on a quarter of cultivated land in Hungary. Cereals are competitive and thus they play a significant role in ecological farming. The most important species in the Hungarian ecological farms are winter wheat and spelt. Weed floras in ecological farming systems are different from those in conventional cropping systems. These differences are due to different cropping practices, including weed control and fertilization methods.Our goal was to determine how farming systems affected the weed flora. A 2500 ha ecological farm and a neighbouring conventional farm in south-eastern Hungary were surveyed four times during the season in 2007 and 2008. Effects of farming systems were assessed for weed cover, number of species, and Shannon’s diversity index.The ecological farm showed higher weed-cover than conventional farm. The differences were rather high in the inner areas and on the margins, too. Farming systems same differed in values of number of species. More species were found in ecological farm. The Shannon diversity showed significant difference only in the inner areas. The diversity of margins were similar...

Keywords:

careals, conventional farming, diversity, ecological farming, weed cover, weed flora