Manage Weeds on Your Farm is a definitive guide to understanding agricultural weeds and how to manage them efficiently, effectively and ecologically—for organic and conventional farmers alike.

With the growing spread of herbicide-resistant weeds and with the public’s embrace of sustainably raised foods, farmers everywhere, both organic and conventional, are seeking better ways to eliminate or reduce their use of synthetic herbicides. The ecological approach to weed management seeks to first understand the biology and behavior of problem weeds and then to develop an integrated set of control strategies that exploit their weaknesses.

Manage Weeds on Your Farm: A Guide to Ecological Strategies provides you with in-depth information about dozens of agricultural weeds found throughout the country and the best ways of managing them. In Part One, the book begins with a general discussion of weeds: their biology, behavior and the characteristics that influence how to best control their populations. It then describes the strengths and limitations of the most common cultural management practices, physical practices and cultivation tools. Part Two is a reference section that describes the identification, ecology and management of 63 of the most common and difficult-to-control weed species found in the United States.

Ecological weed management is knowledge intensive, rather than input intensive. But it doesn’t have to be excessively labor intensive. Manage Weeds on Your Farm shows you how to outsmart your weeds by identifying the right tactic for the right weed at the right time, which will reduce as much as possible the labor required, while ensuring your weeds don’t impact crop yields.

Note: Manage Weeds on Your Farm is focused on the weeds of arable cropping systems. It does not discuss the management of weeds in forests, turf, permanent pastures or perennial bioenergy crops. Weed management issues in forage production are discussed to some extent since forages are often rotated with other crops.