Sustainable Organic Corn Production with the Use of Flame Weeding as the Most Sustainable Economical Solution

Abstract

Flame weeding is an alternative method of weed control. Essentially, it is a supplement to other physical and mechanical processes used in organic production. Weed control costs have a large share of the total cost of crop production. This study aimed to investigate hand weed hoeing’s cost-effectiveness, accompanied by inter-row cultivation and flame weeding applied in organic maize production using two different machines to determine the economically best solution. For this purpose, the prototype flame weeder and commercial flame-weeding machinery were used. Designed primarily for smaller fields, the prototype flame weeder was equipped with a cultivator and a 70 kg propane bottle. Commercial Red Dragon flame weeder, fitted with an 800 kg propane tank and featuring no cultivation implements, is designed for larger areas. The analysis has shown that hand hoeing produced a higher yield (8.3 t/ha in total), but it contributed significantly to the production costs. The costs per hectare decreased when the prototype flame weeder and the commercial Red Dragon flame weeder were used compared to hand hoeing. More beneficial economic impacts were recorded when the prototype flame weeder was used (489.39 €/ha) than in applying the Red Dragon flame weeder (456.47 €/ha). The efficacy of flame weeding is somewhat limited and could be enhanced by additional hand hoeing, if the effect of the machine in terms of weeding is observed. However, the analysis has shown that, in this case, investments in additional hand hoeing are not economically justified because the operating costs incurred therein (168 €/ha) were not met by a yield increase of 500 kg/ha, i.e., a surplus revenue of 100 €/ha. Moreover, the economic impacts of flame weeding would be considerably more significant in larger fields.

Soil Organic Matter Pools and Aggregate Fractions in Organic and Conventional Winter Wheat Cropping in Vojvodina Province of Serbia

“…Commonly, organic farmers are less equipped with the efficient machinery compared to conventional farmers. Based on the obtained results of soil structural properties, we speculate that plots in organic production rely on shallow, or conservation tillage which is not sufficient for crop requirement that aggravates weed control (Nikolić et al, 2018;Rajković et al, 2021). It can be noticed that the production system does not affect much the structure coefficient (K), with the exception of the Nadalj location, where the structure coefficient is significantly higher in the soil samples from the organic plot.…”

Problems and perspectives in weed management

“…Besides the low-tech mechanical devices such as cultivators, finger-weeders, brush weeders, and torsion weeders used in low density crops (Peruzzi et al, 2017), a series of alternatives have been presented by machines using heat for weed control both in pre-emergence and post-emergence phases. Indeed, soil steaming has proved to be a promising pre-emergence strategy killing most weed seeds, including dormant seeds (Kim et al, 2021); while in post emergence, heat could be used to control weeds through flaming (Rajković et al, 2021) and…”

Organic Agriculture in Focus: Exploring Serbian Producers’ Views on the Common Agricultural Policy and the National Agrarian Policy

“…Beauchesne and Bryanti [15] define organic agriculture as a social and technological alternative to conventional production, while Cifrić [16] believes that ecological (organic) agriculture is a social innovation and should be understood as giving up the dominance of the paradigm of industrial agriculture and the possibility of additional employment of labor on the family farm, settlement and society for the convenience of producing quality products on small areas, encouraging the development of "closed" production systems with greater use of natural energy and organic processes. Regardless of the differences in definition, most authors agree that organic agriculture can be defined as a system that is in harmony with the environment [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] and is profitable for the economy [14,[26][27][28][29][30][31] but respects the specific production characteristics of each economy [32,33].…”