I own about 15 hectares of agricultural land in SE Asia and recently have given up on our manual battle against weeds and have temporarily opted to go for herbi

I own about 15 hectares of agricultural land in SE Asia and recently have given up on our manual battle against weeds and have temporarily opted to go for herbicides. We are presently planting a new batch of trees and the weeds have grown faster than our farmhands ability to keep up and have strangled our saplings. Hopefully after the trees have matured, the amount of sunlight hitting the ground would reduce and this should in turn reduce the weeds ability to grow. I am fortunate in that I can support the farming from other income sources, but a typical debt ridden farmer in this region would be completely unable to do so. But using herbicide makes me a bit sad, from a lush biodiverse field we now have something I would describe as a barren wasteland minus our monocrop. I wish there was another way.