A Review on Potential use of Bioherbicides for preventing the growth of weed plants

Abstract

Like pests, disease and other hazards weeds are one of the major problems for farmers. They not only compete with crops for water, nutrients, sunlight, and space but also harbor insect and disease pests, clog irrigation and drainage systems undermine crop quality and deposit weed seeds into crop harvests. They can heavily damage the production of crops as well as they reduce the value of land. Weeds can also host pests and diseases that can spread to cultivated crops and increase the cost of irrigation. For this reason farmers like to use chemicals as herbicide for weed control .In irrigated agriculture, weed control through chemical herbicides, creates spray drift hazards and adversely affects the environment and break the ecology system, besides herbicides in food commodities, directly or indirectly affect human health, which are already known to us. These lead to the search for an alternate method of weed management, which is eco-friendly. In this regard the biological approach - a deliberate use of natural enemies to suppress the growth or reduce the population of the weed species, known as “Bioherbicide” are preferable. Bioherbicides may be the compounds derived from microbes such as fungi, bacteria or protozoa or phytotoxic plant residues, extracts or single compounds derived from other plant species. Their role is to attack specific weeds through the spread of diseases on them. The benefit of using bio herbicides is that it can survive in the environment long enough for the next growing season where there will be more weeds to infect. It is cheaper compared to synthetic pesticides thus could essentially reduce farming expenses if managed properly. Thus we need to create awareness among the farmers about the use of bioherbicide in agriculture instead of chemicals without affecting our natural environment. It can serve as cheap alternative way to those chemical products and it completely ecofriendly and we can overcome those hazards produce by using chemicals. Keywords:- weeds, pests and pathogens, bioherbicides, ecofriendly, crop productivity.