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Comment by JamisonM | Hacker News Reader

I am a farmer.

It is quite close to impossible for weeds to establish once many crops reach a certain stage, this is pretty consistent with the perennial idea.

Stripper headers are quote commonly used all over the world:

https://youtu.be/nppu5OfjisQ?t=90

The assertion that a perennial plant "cannot be damaged" is also incorrect, many perennial crops benefit agronomically from a "trim", even non-perennials have economic circumstances where it makes sense to "damage" the crop, e.g. grazing winter crops in the late fall.

https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/dual-purpose-wheat...).

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Permaculturist here.

With the exception of trees, most plants that establish after their taller peers do not try to dominate the canopy. They have already lost that fight. Instead they either stay low and work with the limited light available, or they aggressively grow in the spring to complete their entire lifecycle before the deciduous canopy closes at the beginning of summer. They might steal a little fertilizer, and some water, but the jury is still out on whether some plants conserve as much water as they use. It's a fuzzy enough area that you can find people who claim that some plants increase total available water.

We are just beginning to fully appreciate all of the ways trees have to ladder up from the forest floor to the canopy, and some of the things we perceive as competition may be a misunderstanding.

Thanks for info, neat!

Most problem weeds on the prairies where I farm are taller than the planted crops when mature, particularly as yield benefits have been gained by shortening more and more varieties over time. A pigweed or a smartweed will outrun a wheat crop with a week of head-start like nothing. Corn can't take any competition at all, I had a planter row in my Barley of corn one year, I figured the corn would simply outgrow the barley and leave it in its proverbial dust.. quite the opposite, I sprayed the Barley out at about the 4-leaf stage and the corn was a full 2 feet shorter than the row beside it at maturity!

That all said of course a natural prairie is different, the tall-grass prairie - as far as I understand it - competes for water under the ground more than light above it - shade can actually help! (Lord knows I mow under my trampoline twice as often as the rest of the lawn.)

This is also true in nature. Weeds (or think invasives in an ecological) tend to be plants that do best in disturbed contexts like fires, landslides, after logging, or in the agricultural sense, tilled soil. Invasives tend to struggle to gain a foothold in established healthy ecosystems

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