Innovative crop and weed management strategies for organic spinach: crop yield and weed suppression

Summary

In organic agriculture, it is important to tackle crop and weed management from a system perspective to make it effective, especially in poorly competitive crops such as vegetables. For that reason, we developed two innovative integrated crop and weed management systems for a field vegetable crop sequence in a commercial organic farm that we have been comparing to a standard farm system from 2006 to 2008. The three systems are applied to a spinach-potato-cabbage-tomato two-year crop sequence and include different levels of technical innovation: Standard Crop Management System (SCMS); Intermediate Crop Management System (ICMS); and Advanced Crop Management System (ACMS). ICMS is based on a sequence of physical weed management treatments, whereas ACMS also includes a subterranean clover (Trifolium subterraneum) living mulch. In this paper we analyse the results obtained on spinach (Spinacia oleracea) in terms of crop yield and weed suppression. Both innovative systems increased total spinach fresh weight yield compared to SCMS, despite higher weed biomass. In ACMS, total weed biomass decreased linearly with increasing biomass of the subterranean clover living mulch.