Effect of herbicides on growth, yield and quality attributes in sweet potato crop

Abstract

In recent years, the areas of commercial cultivation of sweet potato have increased considerably in the State of São Paulo. One of the main challenges of the sweet potato production system is weeds management, due the few management tools, which makes control difficult and increases the risk of interference. Thus, this project aims to evaluate the of different herbicides on the sweet potato crop, seeking to understand their influence on the parameters of growth, productivity and quality of the roots, in order to obtain information that may be useful in the identification of herbicides with potential use for the management of weeds in the crop in the future. In addition, it will also be evaluated whether, using the high-throughput phenotyping technique, it is possible to identify whether the studied herbicides cause phytotoxic effects in the crop and whether these are associated with a reduction in growth, production and crop quality parameters. The research will be carried out in the field, in the summer season 2022/2023 in municipality of Dracena/SP, in a typical dystrophic Red Argisol with a sandy texture. The experimental design will be randomized blocks with four replications. The treatments will be composed of 9 herbicides (flumioxazin, oxyfluorfen, metribuzin, clomazone, S-metolachlor, linuron, atrazine+S-metolachlor, glyphosate), applied in the pre-emergence of the weeds and shortly after planting the sweet potate vines, in addition to a control (without herbicide application). The effects of treatments will be measured periodically through evaluations of visual phytoxicity, gas exchange, chlorophyll contents, high-yield phenotyping, and at harvest time, yield, quality, starch content and productivity in tuberous roots. Data will be subjected to analysis of variance and treatment means compared by t test (DMS) at 5% probability.