Friends before to understand about the surfactant, we need to understand the concept of ADJUVANTS
What are the Adjuvant? –What is a surfactant in weed management?
When farmers decide to spray herbicides he didn’t apply chemicals as it is from packing container but must make formulation by adding water or some other chemical liquid into it,
such chemicals used to make chemical formulations more effective known as Adjuvants
Thus it helps farmers to achieve more desirable and satisfactory weed control in their farm.
How many ADJUVANTS are there?
Many like detergent, neutralizer binder, surfactant penetrator, additive, attractant, safener, thickeners, wetting agents, etc
But here we try to understand more about surfactant. in weed management surfactant is the most important value or we can say it plays a significant role in herbicidal management as surfactant acts as surface-active agents.
How surfactant plays the following important role in weed management.
- Wetting agent -by helping to complete wet the surface of the waxy surface of leaves during spry of aqueous herbicidal spray
- Spreading agents by helping to spread the hydrophilic herbicides uniform over the foliage or leaves
- Penetrates – it helps to the desired or targeted leaves or other plant parts
In simple terms when surfactant added in herbicides it helps to control weeds more effectively.
Example-insert leaf of weed Harari, doob grass or bermudagrass in water .pull it out , you will found its not wet then you add drops of surfactant it helps to wet the complete surface of the
Classes of surfactant
Crop oil concentrate,Non-ionic, nitrogen surfactant seed oils and Organo silicate
From studies, it proved that weeds manage to fetch more nutrients from the soil than the main crop you are cultivating and hold more quantity of nutrients in them.
Example – Amaranths can hold over 3% Nitrogen on dry weight basis known as nitrophils
Nutrients uptake by weeds leads to huge loss of nutrients to be for main Crops
Effect on moisture- weed use almost double of the water for their growth so it’s become a more stressful condition in arid and semi-arid areas
In crop field where weeds too much they absorb soil moisture up to such critical levels that at fruiting stage of the main crop soil moisture availability is drastically low leads to significant crop loss.