Varah, A., Ahodo, K., Childs, D.Z. et al. (8 more authors) (2024) Acting pre-emptively reduces the long-term costs of managing herbicide resistance. Scientific Reports, 14 (1). 6201. ISSN 2045-2322
Abstract
Globally, pesticides improve crop yields but at great environmental cost, and their overuse has caused resistance. This incurs large financial and production losses but, despite this, very diversified farm management that might delay or prevent resistance is uncommon in intensive farming. We asked farmers to design more diversified cropping strategies aimed at controlling herbicide resistance, and estimated resulting weed densities, profits, and yields compared to prevailing practice. Where resistance is low, it is financially viable to diversify pre-emptively; however, once resistance is high, there are financial and production disincentives to adopting diverse rotations. It is therefore as important to manage resistance before it becomes widespread as it is to control it once present. The diverse rotations targeting high resistance used increased herbicide application frequency and volume, contributing to these rotations’ lack of financial viability, and raising concerns about glyphosate resistance. Governments should encourage adoption of diverse rotations in areas without resistance. Where resistance is present, governments may wish to incentivise crop diversification despite the drop in wheat production as it is likely to bring environmental co-benefits. Our research suggests we need long-term, proactive, food security planning and more integrated policy-making across farming, environment, and health arenas.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Agroecology; Environmental economics; Evolutionary ecology |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 21 Mar 2024 11:50 |
Last Modified: | 21 Mar 2024 11:50 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Science and Business Media LLC |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41598-024-56525-0 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:210508 |