Weed sustainable managment in agricultral and non-agricultural areas

Sustainable agriculture is a way to assure the availability of natural resources for future generations.Weed management
in cultivated and not cultivated areas is part of sustainable agriculture as well, and has to face three important challenges:
economical (to increase income and competitiveness of farm sector), social (give rural areas opportunity of economic
development and improvement of living conditions), environmental (promote good agricultural practices and
preserve habitats, biodiversity and landscape). The first two challenges involve the in-depth study of models, the economic
threshold of intervention, the management of herbicide resistance phenomena, the study and development of
new herbicide molecules, or even modern formulations, leading to the optimization of treatments with possible reduction
of distributed doses per hectare. Environmental issues must be set in the studies to assess and manage the factors
leading to phenomena of diffuse or point pollution (i.e. water volumes, soil, etc.). However, a sustainable agriculture
production must take into account consumers’ needs and concerns, especially about food health and safety with
respect to production methods (traditional, integrated and biological). In this context, the results obtained by the development
of more advanced active principles, the spread of public and private Integrated Production Specifications
(Disciplinari di Produzione Integrata) and the greater and greater commitment by the institutions in charge of monitoring
the agro-pharmaceutical residues in agro-food products, can be set. The SIRFI SIRFI (Società Italiana per la
Ricerca sulla Flora Infestante), thanks to the multi-disciplinarity of the structures supporting it, always takes an active
part into innovation especially aimed to the identification of tools implementing farm activity sustainability.