A herbicide is a pesticide used to kill unwanted plants.

Selective herbicides kill certain targets while leaving the desired crop relatively unharmed.

Some of these act by interfering with the growth of the weed and are often based on plant hormones.

Herbicides used to clear waste ground are nonselective and kill all plant material with which they come into contact.

Some plants produce natural herbicides, such as the genus Juglans (walnuts).

Herbicides are widely used in agriculture and in landscape turf management.

They are applied in total vegetation control (TVC) programs for maintenance of highways and railroads.

Smaller quantities are used in forestry, pasture systems, and management of areas set aside as wildlife habitat.

Herbicides have been alleged to cause a variety of health effects ranging from skin rashes to death.

The pathway of attack can arise from improper applicatrion resulting in direct contact with field workers, inhalation of aerial sprays, food consumption and from contact with residual soil contamination.

Herbicides can also be transported via surface runoff to contaminate distant surface waters and hence another pathway of ingestion through extraction of those surface waters for drinking.

Some herbicides decompose rapidly in soils and other types have more persistent characteristics with longer environmental half-lives..

For more information about the topic Herbicide, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

Weed control — Weed control, a botanical component of pest control, stops weeds from reaching a mature stage of growth when they could be harmful to domesticated ...  > read more

Organic farming methods — Organic farming methods combine scientific knowledge and modern technology with traditional farming practices based on thousands of years of ...  > read more

Organic gardening — Organic gardening is a form of gardening that uses substantial diversity in pest control to reduce the use of pesticides and tries to provide as much ...  > read more

Weed — A weed is an unwanted plant. The notion of "wanted" is of course entirely in the eye of the beholder. A weed in one situation might be a wildflower ...  > read more

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