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 development, the Feekes scale is useful in planning management strategies that incorporate plant growth information for the use of pesticides and fertilizers to avoid damaging the crop and/or maximize crop yield. The Zadoks scale is a cereal development scale proposed by the Dutch phytopathologist Jan C. Zadoks that is widely used in cereal research and agriculture. Knowing the stages of development of a crop is critical in many management decisions that growers make. They are represented on a scale from 10 to 92. For example, in some countries, nitrogen and herbicide applications must be completed during the tillering stage. In