Sunflower is gaining importance due to its photo-insensitivity, short duration, low water requirement, drought tolerance and wide range of adaptability to various agro-climatic situations. Despite adoption of good management practices, the productivity of sunflower has been low. Among different production constraints that are limiting the productivity of sunflower, intensive weed competition is one of the major barriers to enhance the productivity. Sunflower, being initially slow growing crop, provides congenial environment for abundant weed growth. The loss in seed yield of sunflower due to full season of weed competition was upto 25% (Singh et al., 1997; Wanjari et al., 2000). Weed competition during entire crop season resulted in yield reductionof 55.8% (Tripathi and Vivek, 2001). Hence, the present study was conducted with an objective to determine the critical period of weed competition in sunflower.
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