Towards SDG 1: Helping Small Farmers by Saving Crops From Parasitic Weeds

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 1 (SDG 1) aims to end poverty by ensuring that everyone’s basic needs are met for healthy and happy life. Farming can help lift entire communities out of poverty because it provides farmers with enough food to eat and sell to others. Science helps address important challenges to farming, such as pests and weeds, which can destroy farmers’ crops and put them at risk of poverty. In this article, we present our research on controlling a weed that harms important cereal crops like rice, millet, sorghum, and maize. Using a method called suicidal germination, weed seeds can be tricked into germinating early, which causes them to die before they can cause damage to crop plants. By using special chemicals to trigger this process, the number of weed seeds in soil can be reduced, helping farmers grow more crops, maintain healthier soil, and improve their livelihoods.