Beat pests by using advantage

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Weeds have advantages that crop and pasture plants don't. Weeds are adapted to your conditions. Your crop and pasture plants are generally not as well adapted to those conditions as the weeds are.

However, advantage isn't just something weeds and other pests exploit. You can use it to boost your success in the field or in the market.

Every species must have an advantage some of the time. Otherwise it would never survive against the competition. This is so for weeds, crops, pastures, trees, human beings etc. All species need an advantage over other species at least some of the time.

Pests have advantages that other organisms (plants, animals and microbes) don't. This is because they have evolved this way and this is what keeps them alive and breeding to produce another generation of pests.

The only way to succeed with a crop is to ensure it has the advantage over weeds. If you know where your crop has the advantage and where the weed has the advantage, you can maximize benefits for your crop and minimize benefits for the weed. So it is worth looking at the differences between weeds and crops.

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What this means

This principle suits broadacre and intensive farmers in any part of the world because principles stay the same, regardless of climate, crop or soil.

Once you understand what gives a particular weed an advantage over a particular pasture or crop you are on the way to removing that advantage and giving it back to your crop.

Crop plants with inbuilt advantage over weeds
Some crop plants have an inbuilt massive advantage over weeds. Plus they can share this advantage with your other plants. Pasture legumes are special

Similarly, clover in a suburban lawn gets up above the low-growing grasses and exploits more air, light and space as a result of its initial advantage of having nitrogen fixed by the rhizobium in its roots. Some home lawn growers see clover as a weed because it is not a grass.
To me it is a beneficial plant in a lawn or in almost any other situation. I can't think of a time when I wouldn't want clover unless it was replacing or interfering with what I was growing. And even then ...

So, staying with weeds,

what can you take away from a weed or
what can you give to your desired plants

to shift the advantage in your favor?

Because, in the process you can

save time
save effort
spend less, particularly on chemicals, and
get more profit

while caring for

your land
your crops and pastures
your animals and
your family

now and well into the future.

This approach also gives multiple benefits from almost everything you do.

Pioneer plants such as many weeds are well adapted to

hard soils
soils that are low in moisture,
soils that are low in nutrients and
soils that are below ideal condition in any other way.

Weeds are often pioneer plants and as a result are much better adapted than desirable plants (crops and pastures) are to almost any difficult condition.

Most crop and pasture plants are relatively fussy and less capable in any but ideal conditions. So if you let conditions get to a point where they are less than ideal for whatever you are trying to grow, you take the advantage from your chosen plants and give it to the weeds.

Crop plants have been bred to perform well under those "ideal" conditions. Part of your job in getting a good return from your crop is to provide those ideal conditions.

However weeds have been bred to perform well under a wider range of conditions. The conditions in which weeds perform well vary from property to property.

If you were to look at the same species of weed hundreds of years ago, before modern cropping systems evolved, you would see quite a different plant. There would be a lot of similarities, but,
a key difference would be that the weed in your field today has evolved so that it suits your conditions ideally. In other words,

Farming breeds weeds to suit the conditions farming provides

It is not the strongest of the species who survive,
not the most intelligent, but
those who are the most adaptive to change
Charles Darwin

To put that another way, we breed weeds

we don't want,
and that are able to survive in our conditions
because we have bred the weeds to be adapted to our conditions.

At times, almost any farm or ranch is providing some conditions that suit weeds better than they suit crops.

If enough of the conditions are there, this gives the weeds enough of an advantage for them to become a problem and to get as far as reproducing so they can allow the problem to magnify.

If only a small percentage of those weed seeds germinate, the following year could see a weed infestation.
So, as with most pest problems, the earlier you beat it, the less of a problem it will be to you.

Pests are often Opportunist species and are generally well adapted to a wide range of conditions. They need no special attention, no special situations, no nurturing.

Productive species such as crops are much more needy. They need

special attention
special seed beds
lots of nurturing
high levels of fertility
plenty of water and
protection from the wider range of pests and diseases that they are susceptible to.

Because so much of our focus in farming is on yield, plant breeders tend to favor yield over competitive ability. As a result, crop plants are bred to be not particularly competitive. If they were more competitive they would be competing with their neighbor, and that is supposedly a plant of the same type as them and therefore a plant that we want.

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Using this

One of the simplest ways to regain the advantage is to select a more competitive variety of crop plant. This immediately has your crop doing more of the work that you might have been previously doing by spraying or hand hoeing (chipping out the weeds).

Anything you can do to improve the success of your crop or pasture gives it an advantage. If there are things you can do that will also take some of the advantage from the weed, they can further improve the situation.

If you are sowing an annual crop, there are many things you can do to give more of the advantage to your crop and take some advantage from the weeds. You can:

use the preceding phase in the rotation to minimize the weed population
maximize weed germination before ground preparation starts to increase the kill of weeds and to help run down the bank of weed seeds in the soil
use appropriate tillage and sowing equipment to maximize weed kill
choose a variety that will cover the ground quickly to snare as many of the available resources before weeds can
sow at a rate that will maximize competition for the weed without interfering with the crop's ability to establish at a suitable plant density
provide perfect conditions for germination and this might include:
- a fine seedbed
- press wheels to ensure good contact between seed and soil
- soil at the right moisture level and more.

Once the crop is in the ground, you may still be able to provide different conditions to give your crop an advantage, assuming that there is a way to turn any difference into a benefit for the crop. That isn't always possible.

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Taking this further

And even after the crop is finished, there are things you can do to increase your advantage over weeds.

Wheat grains will stay attached to the plant up to and through harvesting. They are designed not to separate from the head until they are inside the harvester and being threshed. A wheat variety that lost its seeds progressively rather than retaining them until harvest would not be attractive for farmers and thus the breeder would reject it.

Because weeds have staggered maturity and crops have even maturity, it can be difficult to catch the weed seeds without interfering with the crop. However, you may have more success if you to take an approach that deals with the result of that.

For example in a wheat crop that has wild oats (Avena fatua) as a significant weed, the wild oat seeds will shatter and fall before and during the harvest. The wild oats might have the advantage right up to the point of harvest. You will need to take the advantage back.

Taking the advantage back during harvest:

depending on your situation, it may be best to turn the chaff spreader off, so the chaff and many of the wild oat seeds are dumped in a windrow behind the harvester
you may have the facility for catching all the straw and baling it. If so, this will allows you to remove it from the field for feeding out in a contained area or for use as mulch around trees etc

Taking the advantage back after harvest: Once the wild oat seed is on the ground, the place to beat it is either on the ground or between now and the next season.

If this field is to become a pasture, then grazing or haymaking should take care of the wild oats.

If this field is to be cropped the following winter, the wild oats could be a problem and so the time to beat wild oats is between now and sowing. This could be through:

grazing with poultry. This can be effective, if you have a massive problem with weed seeds that the birds will eat. But they have to travel a long way between feeds. You may need to fence the whole field to keep predators out to make this work. A movable chicken shed that can be locked at night may provide enough protection if predator pressure is low. Otherwise it would only be possible with some effective guard animals such as guard dogs or some easily-moved electric netting such as the Electranets Masterfence. Grazing with poultry will be easier and more effective if you were able to turn the chaff spreader off, so the chaff and many of the wild oat seeds were dumped in a windrow behind the harvester. Then the poultry would have a more concentrated feed of wild oats.
under some conditions - such as during a particularly dry time when there is little other feed, grazing with sheep can be effective. This will be more successful if the wheat crop was undersown with a legume, such as subterranean clover. Otherwise, the sheep will have to travel a long way between feeds but they are at least adapted to that. Again this will be easier if you were able to turn the chaff spreader off, so the chaff and many of the wild oat seeds were dumped in a windrow behind the harvester. Then the sheep would have a more concentrated feed of wild oats and the presence of the higher protein grain will help them digest the straw. Whether or not you turn the chaff spreader off, the sheep will trample some of the seed into the soil, ready to germinate later.
giving a light irrigation to germinate the wild oats well before sowing time.
using an early cultivation to stimulate germination of wild oats and any other seeds in and on the soil.
delaying sowing to allow frost to germinate some of the wild oats then sow the crop and kill all the germinated wild oats.

If you are looking at a printed version of this page and you would like to visit it on the internet and get a stack of other info that may assist you, the full web address is
http://www.OrganicExchange.com.au/all/fc910011.htm

Related info:

Niche

Learning from pests

Pasture legumes are special

Selective grazing

subterranean clover.

Ground cover

Allelopathy

Do weeds come to heal the soil?

SWOT analysis to boost profit

Using SWOT to beat a major weed

Understanding the causes of weed problems

Weed control without chemicals

Green manures

Green manures in orchards and vineyards

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