Studies on the efficacy of pelargonic acid for weed control

Abstract

Up to now, weed control in agricultural and horticultural crops has been carried out predominantly with chemical-synthetic herbicides. These achieve a high efficacy with a broad spectrum of control. However, the environmental behaviour of these substances is in focus and attempts are being made to restrict their use. Whether fatty acid herbicides should be used as a better alternative in this context remains to be seen. Nonetheless, fatty acid herbicides are increasingly being approved for use in more and more applications in Germany. However, data gaps regularly occur in the evaluation within the framework of the approval procedure. For this reason, several trials with fatty acid herbicides were carried out at the Julius Kühn- Institut (JKI) in Braunschweig in order to investigate the effect of these herbicides on the basis of various influencing factors. The efficacy against 24 widespread arable and garden weeds was tested. In addition to testing the different sensitivity of the species, the focus was on the applied water volume. Overall, we found that monocotyledonous weed species were less sensitive to the tested pelargonic acid (Finalsan) and that there were significant differences depending on the water volume.

Keywords

• abiotic factors
• dicotyledonous weeds
• efficacy; monocotyledonous weeds
• pelargonic acid