Acting pre-emptively reduces the long-term costs of managing herbicide resistance

Varah, A., Ahodo, K., Childs, D.Z., Comont, D., Crook, L., Freckleton, R.P., Goodsell, R., Hicks, H.L. ORCID: 0000-0003-1325-2293, Hull, R., Neve, P. and Norris, K., 2024. Acting pre-emptively reduces the long-term costs of managing herbicide resistance. Scientific Reports, 14: 6201.

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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.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Scientific Reports
Creators:	Varah, A., Ahodo, K., Childs, D.Z., Comont, D., Crook, L., Freckleton, R.P., Goodsell, R., Hicks, H.L., Hull, R., Neve, P. and Norris, K.
Publisher:	Springer
Date:	14 March 2024
Volume:	14
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1038/s41598-024-56525-0 DOI 1879320 Other
Rights:	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/.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	27 Mar 2024 10:51
Last Modified:	27 Mar 2024 10:51
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/51179

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