**Author details**

Graham Brodie\*, Muhammad Jamal Khan and Dorin Gupta The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

\*Address all correspondence to: grahamb@unimelb.edu.au

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

**8. Conclusions**

*Canola pod yield response to increasing microwave treatment.*

**Figure 9.**

**190**

**Microwave treatment Control Hand**

Canola pod yield (g pot<sup>1</sup>

*Sustainable Crop Production*

Wheat grain yield (g pot<sup>1</sup>

(2016/2017) - crop was cold affected at panicle initiation

Strawberry runner production (daughter plants m<sup>2</sup>

) – Dookie Year 1 (2015/

) – Dookie Year 2 –

) – Old Coree – (2016/

)

Rice grain yield (g pot<sup>1</sup>

Maize (g pot<sup>1</sup>

Rice (t ha<sup>1</sup>

Rice (t ha<sup>1</sup>

Rice (t ha<sup>1</sup>

Wheat (t ha<sup>1</sup>

Tomato (t ha<sup>1</sup>

2017)

**Table 2.**

2016)

**weeded**

*Pot trials*

**Microwave energy (J cm<sup>2</sup> )**

**136 318 545**

) 0.27a 0.56<sup>a</sup> 0.36<sup>a</sup> 1.25<sup>b</sup> 1.95<sup>c</sup> 0.55 250%

) 0.66<sup>a</sup> 0.67<sup>a</sup> 0.68<sup>a</sup> 0.75a 1.25b 0.3 87%

7.5<sup>a</sup> \_\_ \_\_ \_\_ 10.1b 2 35

2.1a \_\_ \_\_ \_\_ 3.9<sup>b</sup> 1.3 84

7.7<sup>a</sup> \_\_ \_\_ \_\_ 9.1b 1.2 19

6970<sup>a</sup> \_\_ \_\_ \_\_ 8445<sup>b</sup> 670 21

) 40.0a 41.3a 43.3a 59.0ab 64.0<sup>b</sup> 18.9 55%

) 5.3<sup>a</sup> 6.6a \_\_ 10.3ab 12.8b 4.8 92% *Field trials*

) 5.7<sup>a</sup> 6.6ab \_\_ \_\_ 7.8b 1.4 18

) 64.1a 65.2<sup>a</sup> \_\_ \_\_ 89.6b 24.7 37

*Means with different superscript letters (i.e. a, b, c etc) are statistically different from one another at a probability of 0.05.*

*Summary of pot and field trial crop yields in response to microwave soil treatment.*

**LSD (P = 0.05)**

**Change from hand weeded/ control (%)**

Pre-sowing microwave soil treatment acts as a soil sanitation technology and results in significant increases in crop yield, as would be expected from other soil sanitation techniques. Microwave treatment has some major advantages over other soil sanitation techniques in that it is purely thermal in nature and allows immediate
