GOOD - Managing weeds in orchards in a context of reduced herbicide use

Weed control in tree rows is essential to maintaining orchard productivity. When it comes to weed control, French arboriculturists in “integrated farming system” currently face the following challenges:

•  A very limited selection of authorized herbicide active substances, with additional restrictions on the number and application stages, particularly in the case of young orchards.
•  High labor costs for mechanical weeding.
•  The practical impossibility of using mechanical weeding in orchards on slopes, rocky soils, planted on mounds, or on terraces.

In the CTIFL Living Lab of the European GOOD project, we seek to clarify the following points:

•  verify whether, with the herbicides still authorized today, apple growers have sufficient resources to effectively weed at the young orchard stage;
•  identify weed control strategies based on existing mechanical inter-row equipment (hoeing or mowing), which could be transferred in the short term to fruit growers using conventional systems, in orchards where mechanization is possible;
•  evaluate whether planting selected flora in the tree rows could be an effective way to regulate weeds while maintaining sufficient productivity. This approach would offer a solution to reduce herbicide use in orchards where mechanization is impractical.

Our ambition in this project is also to address labor issues related to mechanical weeding (cost and availability), with two avenues of study:

•  co-design and evaluation of guidance assistance solutions for inter-row tools, to enable faster working speeds;
•  testing and improvement of robotic solutions capable of autonomously controlling weeds in tree rows.