Harvest Weed Seed Control (HWSC)

Grassweeds are one of farming's biggest drains on productivity -- blackgrass alone costs the UK farming industry £0.4bn every year.

One of the main reasons is that it has built up resistance to the herbicides on which farmers rely to keep it in check. Problems with other grassweeds are also on the rise as product withdrawals and changing farming practices reduce the choice of weedkillers available to farmers. UK wheat production is now alarmingly reliant on just one herbicide: glyphosate.

Farmers are increasingly turning to other means of weed control, but one of the most effective - ploughing down the weed seed to stop it germinating - is expensive in fuel costs, while turning the soil releases huge volumes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, exacerbating the effect of climate change.

One means of controlling weeds spreading is by preventing their seeds falling on the soil. That can be achieved with Harvest weed seed control (HWSC) systems whereby the chaff that comes out the back of the combine harvester, including the weed seed, is passed through a mill to make it unviable. Although these systems have been used in other parts of the world (i.e. Australia, Canada and the US) they are yet to be tested in the UK.

This is particularly relevant to regenerative agriculture farmers who don't till the soil, there is also a lack of knowledge on the level of viable weed seed left standing at harvest and therefore if such equipment will be suitable to farmers in the UK.

This project aims to test the suitability of HWSC equipment to English farming systems and explore how cultivations can be used with this to double down on tricky weeds.

Furthermore, a data collection protocol for use by UK farmers will be designed to produce the benchmark data on weed seed availability at harvest to inform both future research and innovations and to allow farmers to collect data on their own farm to help inform their control decisions.