Alternative Approaches to Weed Management

Herbicide technology and use have been the focus of weed management research for the past several decades. Herbicides are an important component of weed management and will remain so for years to come. However, there is increasing pressure to improve the efficiency of herbicide use and develop alternative control methods. Herbicides are used on over 95% of the com and soybean in the Com Belt because of the presence of weeds and the need to minimize their adverse economic impacts. Large inputs of herbicides and tillage are needed to control weeds because of the lack of knowledge of weed biology and ecology, continuous production of summer annual row crops, and the absence of control alternatives. Currently, weed science has few, if any, alternatives to herbicides and tillage that are both economically and environmentally desirable

Initial dates of weed emergence

Timing of weed emergence varies both from year to year and also across the state. The table provides information on the initial date of emergence of five early weed species at locations across Iowa. Giant ragweed, one of the earliest emerging summer annuals found in crop fields, initiated emergence in the last week of March or first week of April in both 1998 and 1999. At most locations giant foxtail began emergence about 4 weeks after giant ragweed, but at the SE (Crawfordsville) location there has been only a 2-week difference in initial emergence of these species

Throughput-optimal systolic arrays from recurrence equations

Many compute-bound software kernels have seen order-of-magnitude speedups on special-purpose accelerators built on specialized architectures such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). These architectures are particularly good at implementing dynamic programming algorithms that can be expressed as systems of recurrence equations, which in turn can be realized as systolic array designs. To efficiently find good realizations of an algorithm for a given hardware platform, we pursue software tools that can search the space of possible parallel array designs to optimize various design criteria. Most existing design tools in this area produce a design that is latency-space optimal. However, we instead wish to target applications that operate on a large collection of small inputs, e.g. a database of biological sequences. For such applications, overall throughput rather than latency per input is the most important measure of performance. In this work, we introduce a new procedure to optimize throughput of a systolic array subject to resource constraints, in this case the area and bandwidth constraints of an FPGA device. We show that the throughput of an array is dependent on the maximum number of lattice points executed by any processor in the array, which to a close approximation is determined solely by the array’s projection vector. We describe a bounded search process to find throughput-optimal projection vectors and a tool to perform automated design space exploration, discovering a range of array designs that are optimal for inputs of different sizes. We apply our techniques to the Nussinov RNA folding algorithm to generate multiple mappings of this algorithm into systolic arrays. By combining our library of designs with run-time reconfiguration of an FPGA device to dynamically switch among them, we predict significant speedup over a single, latency-space optimal array

Emergence Patterns of Annual Weeds of Corn and Soybean

A better understanding of weed biology is critical for the development of more efficient weed management systems. Improved information on weed biology will not allow us to eliminate the inputs currently used to manage weeds. However, it provides the foundation for the development of new strategies and more efficient techniques to use these tools, resulting in more reliable weed management systems that are cost-effective and pose less threat to the environment

Soybean Canopy Gap Influence on Velvetleaf Seed Production

Gaps in the soybean row provide locations for velvetleaf (Abutilon theophrasti) plant growth. Gap width, and velvetleaf plant location within the gap, were investigated for effect on seed production. There was no significant difference in velvetleaf capsule production between plants that grew either centered in a gap or at the western end of a gap in east-west oriented soybean rows. Also, there was no difference in plant survival, emergence through the soybean canopy, flowering, locule number per capsule, or average seed weight of velvetleaf based on gap width. However, there was a difference in capsule production based on gap width. In 1999, seed capsule production increased from approximately 35 capsules plant-1 at 0 cm gap width to 140 capsules plant-1 in the 90 cm gap. In 2000, seed capsule production increased from approximately 9 capsules plant-1 at 0 cm gap width to 98 capsules plant-1 in the 90 cm gap. Seed production ranged from an estimate of 300 to 5900 seeds plant-1. As gap width in the soybean row increases, it becomes more important to monitor and control velvetleaf growth. It is even possible, however, to have significant velvetleaf seed production from plants that emerge in a 30 cm gap in the row