Crop desiccation is used as a pre-harvest herbicide and harvest aid on cereal crops including wheat and oats and on oil seed rape. As a systemic herbicide it is not a true desiccant as it can take weeks rather than days for the crop to die back after application. In the UK, it began to be applied to wheat crops in the 1980s to control perennial weeds such as common couch which was very effective and meant that sowing of the next crop could occur sooner. Use as a harvest aid in the UK increased after the introduction of strobilurin fungicides which
Cereal growth staging scales Cereal growth staging scales Cereal growth staging scales attempt to objectively measure the growth of cereals. In agronomy, the "BBCH-scale for cereals"' describes the phenological development of cereals using the BBCH-scale. The phenological growth stages and BBCH-identification keys of cereals are: with stages 21 The Feekes scale is a system to identify the growth and development of cereal crops introduced by the Dutch agronomists Willem Feekes (1907-1979) in 1941. This scale is more widely used in the United States than other similar and more descriptive scales such as the Zadoks scale or the BBCH scale. Like other scales of crop