Occurrence of Weedy Rice as Affected by Cultural Practices

Since weedy rice problems have emerged with the recent advent of direct seeding cultivation in Korea, the establishment of effective control strategies for weedy rice is considered to be one of the urgent issues to be solved for widely practiced direct seeding rice cultivation. A three year experiment was conducted to investigate the occurrence pattern of weedy rice in four different rice cultivation practices: high ridged dry seeding, wet drill seeding, water seeding, and machine transplanting. The highest weedy rice occurrence of 11.0% was observed in high ridged dry seeding practice followed by 9.6% in wet drill seeding, 6.4% in water seeding practice, and 0.2% in machine transplanting practice, respectively. The same trend was observed when we examine the occurrence of contamination of panicle and rice grain by weedy rice. More contamination was observed in high ridged dry seeding than any other practices. It was also found that the possible emergence depths from the soil surface was deeper in both in ridged dry seeding and wet drill seeding practice (0-5 cm from the soil surface) than those in water seeding (0-4 cm), and machine transplanting practice (0-3 cm). The highest yield reduction of 19.5% was observed in high ridged dry seeding practice followed by 13.0% in wet drill seeding, 6.3% in water seeding practice. The reduction may have occurred to the competition between weedy rice and cultivated rice, These findings suggest that among the four cultural practices examined, the machine transplanting practice is the most effective method to control and reduce the weedy rice occurrence and weedy rice seed in soil.