Legume-cereal intercropping as a weed management tool

Summary

Weed density and biomass is often markedly reduced in intercrops (IC) compared to the respective sole crops (SC). Such IC-weed control advantages by either (i) Weed-suppression; a more effec-tive use of resources by IC or suppressing weed growth through allelopathy compared to SC or (ii) Weed-tolerance; use of resources that are not exploitable by weeds or convert resources to harvestable material more efficiently than SC. A higher degree of interspecific competition combined with a certain complementarity between intercropped species improves the crop stands competitive ability towards weeds. The weed-suppression approach from Liebman and Dyck (1993) are the most likely to explain the presented pea-barley IC findings.