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Integrated Pest Management; How to Manage Your Pests Without Losing Your Plants (or Your Mind)
217 Plays3 years ago
Welcome to Hort Culture, the podcast for plant lovers. In this episode, we'll talk about integrated pest management, or IPM, a holistic approach to dealing with pests on your farm and in your garden. IPM combines different methods of pest control, including cultural, mechanical, biological and chemical, to reduce the impact of pests on your plants. We'll discuss the benefits of IPM, how to implement it in your growing situation, and some common examples of IPM practices. Regardless of what you are growing, IPM can help you keep your plants healthy and happy. Tune in to learn more about this eco-friendly way of working with plants.
University of Kentucky IPM Programs
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Welcome and Podcast Introduction
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Hort Culture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production, and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture.
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello, everybody. Welcome to Hort Culture. Welcome, welcome. How's everybody feeling today?
Indoor vs. Outdoor Tensions for Plant Lovers
00:00:24
Speaker
I know that I'm like staring out the window or trying to stare out the window because it looks so beautiful outside and I am in an office, which is never fun for plant people to be in an office on a beautiful day. You have a window? You have a window.
00:00:41
Speaker
Oh yeah, Josh, your office is like a bunker. Yeah. Josh,
Office Windows and Connection to Nature
00:00:45
Speaker
I'm with you. I'm team Josh. I have no window and they put me with no window because in the springtime I disappear. If it's nice and pretty, I found a farm to go visit or land somewhere to walk across. So it's good that I don't have a window. I'm looking at the bright side. Nice. Alexis is over there flexing her window. The sun is shining bright. It's 55 degrees outside. It is a pretty day in March here in Kentucky.
00:01:11
Speaker
How you feeling? I feel all right. I always look forward to talking to you fine folks and especially when we're talking about a topic where you all know so much more than I do. And so I get a chance to learn and ask my goofy questions, but I'm doing pretty good. Still have to wear glasses. So on that glasses train, huh? Yeah. I haven't figured out a way out yet.
00:01:39
Speaker
Just waiting for their bionic eyes.
What is Integrated Pest Management (IPM)?
00:01:42
Speaker
With all the screens we stare at, it's not getting any better. And as we progress through time and age, it probably doesn't get a lot better. And that doesn't help with this topic, by the way. Integrated pest management, because the aphids are not getting any bigger for the most part, so they're still hard for me to see when I am scouting.
00:02:03
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I saw the most enormous aphids ever this morning. Of course, Alexis would blow me out of the water first. I'm telling you, they're on steroids. What were they on? Anemones. They were on in the high tunnel and they have been there since before Valentine's Day. In fact, I sent a picture to
00:02:24
Speaker
Dr. Larson, who is one of our state entomologists. And I was like, uh, by the way, and it was like February 11th, and he just texted me back and he was like, it's not even Valentine's Day. And yeah, so welcome to Kentucky. You have an enemy on your enemies. Oh man, Ray, you beat me too. Literally. You were not gonna say that, were you? I was gonna say. I should have known, Brett, with your witticisms. Wow, quick draw. Man, I am glad I just
00:02:51
Speaker
bulled my way into this conversation and ignored everybody. We are on the same vibe today. This sunshine has everybody on the same wavelength. An enemy of your anemones. That is good. The enemy of my anemone is my topic someday. That may be the title of this. We don't know. That may be the title. The enemy of my anemone.
00:03:15
Speaker
It is my dahlia.
The Basics and Ecology of IPM
00:03:17
Speaker
No, stop that. Stop it. It's not dahlia. You started it. We're having fun. But what we are starting is a talk on integrated pest management, also known as IPM. If you have seen or heard of that before, it's what we're chatting about. Yeah, and before we got started here today, we talked about that it's not the individual concepts, the individual concepts in integrated pest management
00:03:44
Speaker
are not difficult in and of themselves, but defining them all together and talking about it in a comprehensive way is sometimes difficult because literally integrated, the first word, integrated pest management
00:04:01
Speaker
is a sort of an ecological or ecosystems approach to managing pest. And I'll give you kind of the number one theme upfront. And it's this, whether you're a homeowner or a commercial producer. Organic or conventional. Yes, organic or conventional is that organic and inorganic sprays, direct sprays in a IPM model, integrated pest management model, spraying for a pest.
00:04:30
Speaker
whether it be an inorganic or organic spray for pest control, is almost exclusively last on the list of management scenarios. It is the very last thing we think about is direct sprays to take care of a pest. It's on the list. It's everything. It's on the list. Yes, it's absolutely because it's one of the tools in the toolbox.
00:04:55
Speaker
We think of this as kind of linear, right? We're going to talk about things like the first thing you should do is find the pests and we're going to go through sort of that linear model. But sometimes those steps are all combined into one or two things from personal experience, I can tell you. So sometimes you're not really skipping steps. You're just cramming them into one and you're taking those stairs two at a time.
00:05:20
Speaker
So, you know, we do what we got to do right to get the get the product out But there are some things that we can do ahead of time And if you know what to be looking for and when we say pests also we're also talking about like fun Fungus bacteria things like that. So this is a pest this could be a mole problem or you know a mouse problem So think of it as anything that could cause problems Not just necessarily a bug because that's usually what people think of when they think of a pest
00:05:49
Speaker
That's a good point. What's the big picture? What's the point of doing this? IPM is essentially a strategy to prevent and suppress these pests while having minimum impact on the environment, but also your pocketbook and the amount of time you have to spend.
Emotional Aspects of Pest Management
00:06:08
Speaker
If I'm spraying, again, if I'm spraying organic or inorganic or whatever I'm doing, if I'm hand picking those insects off, you know, if you wanna do that, sometimes I have a rough day and if there's a Colorado potato beetle out there, you smash that with a rock, you will feel better, okay? I'm just letting you know. But anyway.
00:06:28
Speaker
Essentially, we're trying not to start raging. There was some emotion if you needed. It's pretty outside and I'm sitting in an office as a plant person. So I'm a little ragey today.
00:06:40
Speaker
Essentially, it's a strategy. I like to smoosh aphids with my hands as well as Japanese beetles. You take pictures on social media of you squishing various insects, Alexis. Sometimes I wonder. Yeah. So listen, this is off topic, but I feel like it kind of is on topic. So when we get Japanese beetles, if you are in Kentucky, you've seen a Japanese beetle or any of our surrounding states, you know what we're talking about here.
00:07:04
Speaker
The first Japanese beetle I find, I put it on a makeshift pike, aka I grab like a little pin of some kind and I put it on a pike and then I tape it up on one of my like one of my little rows as a warning to the rest of those Japanese beetles escape.
00:07:24
Speaker
Whoa, unto ye. You can't also use this in an IPM strategy. Welcome to biological control. Fear is a tactic. Fear is a tactic. So you were saying, so we want to prevent the pests or the pests and disease because they cut into how much good taste in food or pretty flowers or whatever it is that we get.
00:07:49
Speaker
And we want to think about the integrated techniques that aren't just spraying. Why?
IPM: Knowledge Over Pesticides
00:07:56
Speaker
Why do we not just immediately spray? What's the downside? Usually if we use just one tactic for anything in life, you know, if we overuse a tactic, what happens? It either we have escapees from that tactic that then creates a larger population of escapees or the tactic, whatever that is, becomes ineffective, you know, which is related to the first statement.
00:08:20
Speaker
And it's a more effective approach to be quite honest. And it's one that's more targeted. When I talk to master gardener groups and commercial growers, one of the very first statements I always make when talking about IPM, I said, listen, folks. And I also stress this to the organic growers as well. I said, you are substituting kind of silver bullet solutions like rescue spray treatments. You are substituting that as a first option for knowledge.
00:08:50
Speaker
and the ability to do things like monitor and identify specific pest and determine damage thresholds and all of this, you're increasing your knowledge level and you're hopefully being more effective over the long run and being more targeted for the environment around you, being more targeted towards the pest itself rather than both pest and beneficial populations. And that's why this comprehensive approach is so important because there is just simply some pest
00:09:20
Speaker
that we don't have a silver bullet spray for. We don't have those options. And what you have to back up and do is use this approach that's multi-pronged approach. That's integrated pest management. Hopefully it's going to be more effective for you in the long run. I think, you know, one another way just to phrase it again, me being the noob around here is it feels kind of like with if you
00:09:45
Speaker
If we think about this as like managing and working with plant health and soil health as part of what we're doing, the overall strategy, it's kind of like if you think about your own personal health, if you can do things like exercise, get a decent diet in, reduce your stress, get some sleep, et cetera, you're less likely to get sick in the first place. But if you do get sick, you can take medicine as opposed to not doing any of those things, go into Josh's office with no windows and we eat
00:10:15
Speaker
just living here. Just food that's not so great for you and makes you feel bad and not get enough sleep, not to all that, well, you're going to get sick and you're just going to say, well, I'm going to be sick all the time. So I'm going to rely on medicine and maybe that medicine will get less effective over time. Or maybe I just don't want to feel bad in the first place. It seems like a kind of a similar thing where it's no one's saying don't take the medicine, don't use the sprays. But there's a lot of things we can do along the line along the way to maybe mitigate some of that risk and and increase our chances of not getting sick or not having issue in the first place.
00:10:45
Speaker
Yeah, IPM can be not, I mean, we'd almost apply it to anything
Importance of Monitoring in IPM
00:10:48
Speaker
of our life. The general concepts we're going to talk about today, not the specific context, you know, problems, but it can be integrated problem management. I mean, whatever, IPM, integrated approach.
00:11:00
Speaker
What's that, Alexis? I said I have aphids in all aspects of my life. That's a good jumping off. You've already got us into the first point, Alexis. The backbone of any IPM program, and you've led us in very nicely today, is monitoring. And I start with that first. When I talk about an IPM program,
00:11:21
Speaker
I always start with monitoring because rescue treatments are never as good if the problem gets big. Rescue treatments are never as good as preventative treatments. And when we talk about preventative treatments, there's just more options out there. Our toolbox is more full of tools, but you were talking about aphids. Was it aphids that we were talking about earlier? Yeah. And you were doing what when you were doing that? Why were you looking for them?
00:11:48
Speaker
Well, I'm checking on my crop. So you need to be out there inspecting your crop. So inspecting it for diseases, inspecting it for insect pressures, but also looking at the leaves. Is something weird happening? Are they curling? Is it something where they have frost damage? Are they looking a little yellow? Maybe you have some nutrient deficiency. So you should be consistently at least weekly, at least weekly. And if you are growing to make some money,
00:12:15
Speaker
You need to be out there probably more often and you most likely are already out there, but really start paying attention to what those things look like and you'll start to notice that damage by any pests well before you need to necessarily do anything about them and you know it's available and you can start thinking about how you're going to react.
00:12:36
Speaker
to these incoming past pressures. And monitoring, there's no substitute. The briefest little side note here. As you're monitoring too, don't forget to soak up some of the joy and beauty of what's happening too. You don't have to just be looking for problems. You can also use that as an opportunity to be like, man, look how well this is doing. Look how good it's responding to that thing that I did. Lex is out there looking for stuff to squash and put on social media. Listen, what if that's her joy, Brant? Don't take her joy.
00:13:02
Speaker
I have kind of a yin and yang type of energy here. Brett and I are very opposite, but together we make a beautiful podcast. Being plugged into what's going on. Yeah, I couldn't echo that more. Yeah, yeah. And that's just the foundation. And what you have to do, I mean, is learn to probably, Alex, is it fair to say that you need to kind of get good at knowing, first of all, what are the big problems with particular crops? If you're growing a tomato,
00:13:29
Speaker
the potential issues are going to be different than if you're growing a beet in the ground. It's going to have a different set of problems. But if you get good at knowing those top three issues, diseases and insects of those, and then scout for those and start there, you're probably miles ahead. You're already well on your way to monitoring and maybe experiencing, Brett, some joy through that monitoring that if you're doing a good job,
00:13:57
Speaker
Yeah, you don't necessarily know how to look for everything. Like Ray said, if you can pick those top three, and we have some great publications on that on scouting guides for different crops. We have some of those if you're growing tomatoes, pumpkins, peppers. We have a few of them at UK.
00:14:15
Speaker
Or just ask a fellow farmer, somebody else who's been growing it for at least one season longer than you have, what did you see last year? And if you know to start looking for these, you're going to spot them a lot earlier and save yourself a lot of time.
00:14:29
Speaker
And, you know, get some joy out of it and all those things. Now, when you see the first aphid, Alexis or Brad, I know and Josh, you guys are home gardeners and you've worked extensively in horticulture crops. All of you guys have. When you see that first aphid, do you go to the nuclear option? I mean, what's your threshold there? When you see one, you may go nuclear. Maybe I shouldn't have asked you specifically Alexis. But I mean, we talk about the thing about integrated pest management is
00:14:56
Speaker
You've got to have a certain tolerance level and you have to have an understanding of how many pests of whatever top or how much disease are you going to be able to tolerate before it affects you in some way. But that first aphid, are you just going to go nuclear and just nuke everything or how does that work? Well, my first question for a question, Tackett, is- Back at me.
00:15:17
Speaker
What part of the crop are you selling? So if I am growing a carrot where I'm harvesting the root that is underground and I have an aphid or let's say a grasshopper because it's a munching pest, right? That is eating down my carrot top. And maybe it's late in the season. Like I'm probably going to harvest any day now, but it's eaten down the top of my carrot.
00:15:41
Speaker
Does that matter as much as if I have a root weevil in there eating the root of my carrot? What is no Alexis? She's loving those softballs today. I like that one. That's a good point. I guess if you had something eating all of the top of the cat, because that is the energy factory. But once again, if you have a little bit of something
00:16:06
Speaker
It doesn't necessarily mean you have to go all out on control. And diseases are one of these things I think of more so than even insects. Let's say you see the weather forecast and you have a certain type of disease on a pepper. And you know that disease only flourishes when you have cloudy, high humid weather, but yet the weather coming up is going to be sunny and the humidity is going to drop.
00:16:31
Speaker
that's going to affect how you approach your spray schedule. Your interval may be on a certain type of management, maybe a 14 day interval management versus a seven day interval management, but all of that comes back, it sort of relates back to that action threshold and insect threshold. The answer to what you were saying earlier, what you were asking about earlier, Ray, is with almost any pest, any disease, there is no such thing as a zero tolerance policy.
00:17:01
Speaker
In fact, sometimes those zero tolerance policies are part of what becomes responsible for things like resistance later on down the road. I have many times in my home garden, in other contexts, we're just managing a crop for a research project or something like that, found a small pocket of a certain pest or a small issue of disease
00:17:23
Speaker
just pulled the diseased leaves and it was more than enough to kind of let things roll.
Realistic Pest Tolerance and Resistance Issues
00:17:29
Speaker
Maybe adjust the amount of irrigation you're putting on it, maybe being aware of which parts of the field are having issues. But you could just squash the bugs. If you see a little pocket of aphids on one leaf, I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna squash every single one that I can. And then if I don't see them anywhere else, I'm definitely not gonna go and just spray just to spray.
00:17:50
Speaker
And that absolutely worked because you did early monitoring. You were probably out there on a regular basis and that's so true of a lot of different insects and disease pests that if you catch it early you can sort of manage it on a local basis rather than wholesale spraying an entire area.
00:18:07
Speaker
And that's knowing your pest, being able to identify whatever that pest is and take an early action. That's one of the best ways to implement integrated pest management is just through that monitoring, knowing the thresholds, knowing how bad the disease could possibly get, the environmental conditions for that disease or insect. But yeah, that's a great example. I love it. Love it. You got on top of the problem early. And sometimes it is that you squash them day one.
00:18:33
Speaker
think you got everything and you come back in two days and they have in fact spread and they are all over the place. And that means then you're going to have to up your game and think about a different type of intervention. But at least now you know, and you know, for if you're a good record keeper, you've written in your field journal, where you found that stuff, or you've made some sort of note of that. But sometimes you sometimes you win it, sometimes you don't, but you're you know, early, early detection,
00:18:58
Speaker
on so many different things is so key. Right. Inside your tolerance level. So, you know, if you're growing a cut flower, uh, that flower has to be perfect. So my tolerance level.
00:19:10
Speaker
for an aphid is going to be a lot lower on a cut flower than it is on a tomato plant because that aphid is going to be on the leaves of my tomato plant. So I can harvest that tomato and nobody's going to know that I had aphids. Now, eventually, yes, it gets to a certain point, but that's that tolerance level that we're talking about. Deciding what you're willing to deal with, you know, we see this a lot with apples and like fungicide programs.
00:19:33
Speaker
Here in Kentucky, it's a very humid state to be planting apples in the first place. So we have a lot of disease pressure here. And if you are growing them for mostly home sales or even for canning or something where visual appearance is not as important, you can get away with not doing sprays for something like apple scab, because it's mostly just something that's just a physical abnormality, right? It tastes good still, all of that jazz, versus if you're
00:20:01
Speaker
somebody who's selling to the public or to a grocery store, you kind of have to have a perfect thing, so you know you're going to have to do some preventative sprays or other tactics for that tolerance level. As we're talking about all this, just a thought come to mind from a professor, a very good professor I had in my undergrad studies, and every year he would put a sample out.
00:20:25
Speaker
you know, we were looking for pests on different, you know, agronomic and horticulture crops. And he would put a number of samples out that had absolutely nothing wrong with him.
00:20:35
Speaker
And I would ask him, I said, why do you keep doing this, Dr. Thompson? I was like, why do you put these? There's no diseases on there. He said, your problem, Tackett, is you know what you're looking for with the pest. He said, but you have to start on the reverse of that. You have to know what a healthy plant looks like. And Alexis, she said something that made me think about that. She knows what a healthy crop in her high tunnels look like.
00:20:59
Speaker
And I thought that was a profound comment and I've always thought about that in integrated pest management. That's one of my jumping off points is you have to know what a healthy tomato plant in general looks like. And then you can, that relates to, you know, the apple scab discussion that relates to is that, is that normal? You know, is that an acceptable level? Is that a representative example of a product that you can sell? Maybe, maybe not. But yeah.
00:21:25
Speaker
And all of that goes back to monitoring and action thresholds. It all ties in sort of circular into the conversation. Something else I'd like to kind of quiz you guys about or kind of pick your guys brains about cultural practices. That's sort of another big concept in integrated pest management. And we talked a little bit, we touched on some of these concepts in a previous podcast when we were talking about succession planting.
00:21:54
Speaker
Cultural practices are things like modifying planting dates or cultivation patterns or harvesting practices to manage pests. But you guys have any comments on that? This is one that is just for me another big concept.
00:22:12
Speaker
I would say the healthier your plant is, the less pest problems you're going to have. So we know that. What makes it healthy. I mean, like, yeah, it goes, exactly, exactly. And that, that starts whether it's a seed, getting a disease free seed, which is important. There's a lot of seed borne, seed borne diseases or getting a healthy transplant. And that goes back to knowing what a healthy plant looks like. I don't know, Brad, have you ever bought it or Josh, have you guys ever bought a dud of a,
00:22:40
Speaker
home tomato and brought it home and it already had, you know, some sort of issue with it. And you just basically brought the problem home and it just got worse. Only once. Only once. Yeah. Once. Shame on you or shame on them. I forget how it goes. But yeah, if it happens more than once, you need to self evaluate, I guess. But sometimes that does happen. I think one of the one of the cultural practices or the suite of cultural practices is to have that related to the succession planning on our
00:23:10
Speaker
uh, planting on our last episode is having some sense of like the quote unquote field history or the bed history. In other words, if you had tomatoes in that spot last year, don't put tomatoes back in that spot again this year. And we talk about crop rotation as a concept and people will think about like the soil resting or alternating things that don't feed as heavily so that the nutrients can be built back up again. And that's certainly part of it.
00:23:35
Speaker
But a big part of it too is that certain diseases can overwinter in the soil. They can hang out, especially if there's a bunch of leaves and plants that you didn't clean up. And the insects as well can lay their eggs and they're right there. And so if you have a crop of insects that have laid their eggs and they hatch right where you've now planted that same plant host plant again, those are what I think of cultural practices. Those are the ones that come to mind right away. A big one. That may be the biggest. And we're not talking about just rotating
00:24:03
Speaker
between different crops, we're talking about, I think Alexis maybe mentioned in a previous podcast, rotating within families of crops. Didn't you mention that? Was that you or was that Josh? I think that was Alexis who mentioned that. That's definitely a good rule of thumb when rotating and combining that with, as Brett said, the seasonality of when you're putting things in. It's one thing to rotate throughout the season, but you also want to make sure you're not planting
00:24:33
Speaker
the same family in the same place that it was in the same time in the previous year. The pests can go into these dormant states, but if every spring their perfect coast plant keeps showing up
00:24:51
Speaker
It's an absolute buffet. And Alexis kind of nailed it. I mean, basically if it's a healthy plant, it's by default more resistant. And all these cultural practices we're talking about, we're just talking about creating an optimal environment for the plant and one that's not so good for the pest in some situations. You're not selecting necessarily one for the other.
Soil Health in IPM
00:25:13
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So certainly that's part of it, planting dates and rotation, but also
00:25:19
Speaker
Since we're an extension group, we absolutely have to mention what? Soil testing and soil amendments. We had a whole podcast on soil, but yes. How does that, how is that a cultural integrated pest management concept? Soil testing. Well, what, what's that going to do if you have the proper nutrients in your soil and you maintain your soil profile in an optimum manner? What does that translate into? Alexa said it. Hopefully healthier plant. So that's another big concept is, um,
00:25:49
Speaker
manage your soil nutrition very carefully because not only is light and temperature important, but the nutrients in the soil, a fast growing healthy plant is just gonna do better. Because remember, that thing's a living organism and if you scratch the surface of your skin, you may get an infection. And guess what? If you bump a tomato plant as you're cultivating, you're scratching the skin of another living organism and it may get an infection of some kind.
00:26:20
Speaker
And if it's healthy and growing well, it just does better. And that sort of ties back into, Brett, was it you that mentioned earlier the health kind of the analogy?
00:26:29
Speaker
Sort of ties back into that, healthy plants, more resistant, healthy people, more resistant. Yeah, I agree. Do certain things. I have to have a caveat here of. Oh, do it. Yes, Ray is right. And so, but not only soil test for to know what nutrients to add, but knowing the amount to add, because especially with things like nitrogen, too much, there could be too much of a good thing. So if you already have an aphid problem,
00:26:56
Speaker
Or you know a cucumber beetle pop problem or something like that if you over fertilize with nitrogen You're gonna get a lot of fast weak growth And it's gonna be very rich and nutrient and it's very excited and guess what your aphids get really excited about protein Shake the energy drink
00:27:19
Speaker
that when really those plants don't need that much. So knowing exactly how much to put down and not overdoing it. If we say put down two pounds don't put down three because it'll come back to bite you and you just wasted a lot of money. Yeah these imports aren't cheap so hopefully that's another aspect of integrated pest management. In the end if you're being more productive and you're reducing inputs hopefully you're becoming more economically viable. You're
00:27:45
Speaker
Profits will increase if you're a commercial gardener or a commercial producer. Hopefully so. That's kind of what the discussion is surrounding today. Healthy plants and better plants, better production. Earlier on I outed myself as a bit of a hippie with touchy feely stuff about the joy of monitoring and looking around and I think
00:28:05
Speaker
For me, with plants in general, and this would include perennial stuff that we have in our yard and see around and help my parents take care of some of their stuff, as well as garden plants, the sooner you can get to a point of thinking about it as trying to provide the plant with as many contextual factors and support as it can get for it to defend itself and take care of itself.
00:28:30
Speaker
rather than just as this thing that you're trying to, this object that you're trying to manage and spray the stuff off of it or dump the fertilizer into. It is a being, a living being that wants to live. It wants to grow, it wants to survive, and you're in charge of providing some of the context, some of the things that it needs.
00:28:52
Speaker
I think IPM is a lot about that. It's about, okay, this thing stresses a plant out, just don't do that. You're like a parent. Yeah, I was going to say, as a childless person, you're not trying to mold your child into the, you're trying to help them figure out who they are, do what they want to do in a safe way that's healthy and support that. And so again, this has been Mr. Rogers,
00:29:19
Speaker
plant people with feelings. Plant support line. But I do think that's like, it's, it's a little bit of a frame, a frame of reference shift. So we got healthy plants, we are monitoring, but there are some times you're just, you know, you're going to get a Japanese beetle infestation in June in Kentucky because we have, you know, these invasive species that our plants are not, you know, used to dealing with and we're going to have to do something. So one,
00:29:49
Speaker
Easy, relatively speaking, sometimes it can be difficult to actually do, but an easy thought is this idea of physical methods of, we've talked about hand picking when I've had a rough day. You know, you go out and you squash some beetles, or you dump them into a bucket of soapy water or something like that. If you all were seeing us live, you would see all of the crazy hand movements that my co-stars here are making.
00:30:16
Speaker
But you know but you can also do things like a row cover or spraying them off with water I like row covers a lot row cover conventional or organic both of our growers No matter what they are love row cover because it saves them a lot more and more covers out there It's great and I guess in other parts of the world I know that they are more accustomed to using but maybe they don't have access to products rescue treatments and
00:30:41
Speaker
But in other parts of the world, row covers have been around for and utilized for a long time. But a newer concept in the US, relatively speaking. But yeah, the row cover stuff is really, really cool. I know that you have to allow. I've worked with some local producers and they've had to manage like pollination requirements.
00:30:59
Speaker
Because at some point you have to open the thing up or you have to put pollinators under the row covers. But yeah, that's a super, super good point. And so in that case where you're physically excluding the pest rather than simply removing it. Those row covers, they're a lighter weight than what you use for like a frost blanket or they can allow more air penetration.
00:31:20
Speaker
And light, and light, and light through. But yeah. There's so many versions that when you look at a gardening, even a home gardener manual, you can purchase many different types of row covers, depending on which qualities you need out of those row covers. So yeah, there, there are a lot of different ones out there that out
Physical Barriers in Pest Control
00:31:38
Speaker
there. And for commercial producers, there's a lot, even more, there's even more, but that's a, that's a great point of Lexus. And that's another big, one of the foundation concepts is the use of barriers.
00:31:48
Speaker
traps both in monitoring as trapping but as in just simply trapping pests whether it's a trap crop or otherwise and then the use of barriers i think is great because there are some pests that are going to be there they're going to like you know cucumber beetles and they're vectors of diseases but for a synthetic chemical to work they're going to land on there and feed but by the time they've landed on there and feed
00:32:15
Speaker
the synthetic chemical does its job. It may kill the insect, but it's already become a vector, injected some virus or other disease into the plant, some bacteria. And even though the product is working to control that population, they still do the same amount of damage over and over. And that's where barriers are such a great tool, is physically keeping some of these passed away from valuable crops. Yeah, it's great. So we've said this several times now, but Alexis, I'd like for you to explain to me
00:32:44
Speaker
So I get why the organic growers might wanna use something to exclude. Why would that be something that's useful to a chemical, I mean, to a conventional grower who has certain other more powerful chemicals available? And why would I even consider this IPM stuff if I'm conventional? Yeah, so I mean, for me as somebody who's a grower, and of course, IPM is very important, and I help people with that.
00:33:13
Speaker
physical barriers are, save me a lot of time and money and save a lot of time and money for, you know, to go the opposite of the feel good, feel goods, which are very important. But when it comes down to it, I can put a row, row cover on or a grower can put a row cover on and not have to mess with that very often and know they're getting a hundred percent control or about as close to it as possible. Versus if I'm getting, putting a spray down, sprays are expensive, right?
00:33:41
Speaker
And then the time it takes for you to pay somebody and hopefully pay yourself to mix that up, to put it down. You've got to have the right protective equipment on. You can't be doing it on a windy day. You know, we need to be following the label. All of these things can really come into play with restricting when you can use that. And so versus putting a row cover down or something like diatomaceous earth where, you know, if you've got crawlers, slugs, caterpillars, stuff like that,
00:34:09
Speaker
that are crawling onto your plants, you can put some diatomaceous earth down and you're going to get pretty good control around those plants versus all the time and all the money spent to use these sprays. And so, you know, we see a lot of our conventional growers doing these physical methods because it's just, it's easier and they can go do something else. Yeah. I think the time and money and if you're selling your product, those are the same thing.
00:34:34
Speaker
is a huge part of this whole puzzle that, you know, it's we say that these were, you know, doing pest management in harmony with ecology. And it's it's because it's a smart thing to do. Time and money. Not just a feel good thing. I mean, there's feel good things about it. But yeah, you're not having to spend a bunch of money on sprays. You're not having to take the time to do it. You're not having to expose yourself to chemicals. And if you don't need to.
00:35:00
Speaker
And I think that the other thing we've talked about is like the long-term efficacy of a product. It's sort of like if you take ibuprofen every time you have a headache, suddenly it doesn't work as good. But if you take an ibuprofen every once, only one that's really bad, it kind of can knock you.
00:35:15
Speaker
knock you back and make you feel better pretty quickly. And so I think it's a similar thing that we're seeing with antibiotics and other things that we're understanding more over time that if we were to just do what some of the hippies maybe said and think a little bit about living in harmony with nature.
00:35:31
Speaker
It's great when we could do both, Brad. We can realize those economic gains while at the same time using the least impactful most targeted solutions. I love it to make an OTV reference. I know most people won't get it, but it's an A-Team reference. I love it.
00:35:48
Speaker
When a plan comes together I'm glad somebody's laughing dead air songs would have broken my heart there. I just want you guys to know that no one laughs I like those comments. I like I love your comments. Yeah. Thank you. Why not do both? Why not be able to reconcile both one with the other while doing a good job being a producer? Yeah Yeah, love it. So physical what's the next one?
00:36:11
Speaker
You know, we had, we talked a little bit about another big concept here is good sanitation. It's related to some of the comments we've already made, but crop cleanup as it relates to pests, because pests, a lot of times, whether it's a disease or insect, they can overwinter or harbor in old plant refuges that you don't clean up. So you have to be aware of that.
00:36:36
Speaker
especially if you're doing things like secession plantings that are kind of intense and you're doing similar related groups of plants intensively, but good sanitation, good garden cleanup, good market cleanup, big or large, you know, the larger scales, the same applies to small scale is just good cleanup. Removing the source of the potential pest infestation is a big foundation concept. You know, that's very, very important. Can't overstate that. That is one thing. I don't know if
00:37:06
Speaker
You guys clean up your gardens, home gardens at the end of the season. I do because I don't want a lot of leaves hanging around that have potential diseases on them that's going to come back to get me. And commercial people that do a good job, they know that as well. But sanitation, that's another big one.
00:37:21
Speaker
And cleaning the tools if you use tools that are involved in that as well. Oh, yeah. A big one for homeowners. And we talk about things like early blight for fruit trees and sanitizing those and so that you don't have the disease kind of hanging out on tools. The same goes for field implements that if you're using cultivation of equipment, sanitation, yes, is a concept in the field, but it's also on your equipment. It's just on your farm in general.
00:37:48
Speaker
Remember, this is integrated pest management, so we think about the whole farm as a living system. But yeah, tools as well as plants, materials, it all applies. Absolutely. Good sanitation overall. On an earlier podcast, I keep saying that, but how about resistant varieties as it kind of goes into integrated pest management? How does that kind of flow into this? It's also part of it, right? Right. Go ahead, Josh. Oh, I was just going to say, I mean, that's kind of one of the
00:38:17
Speaker
stronger arguments for integrated pest management is because what I was taught in my entomology class was that if you're only using one form of control, you're basically selecting for resistance to that form of control.
Resistant Plant Varieties in IPM
00:38:35
Speaker
Whereas if you throw a couple of things at your problem, it's much harder, if not impossible, for that organism to react to both.
00:38:45
Speaker
Great point. Yeah, you're setting different traps. If it doesn't trigger the first trap, it may fall into the next one. I know Alexis probably likes that because it's kind of violent towards the pest. I mean, that probably appeals to you, but yeah, that's a great point. I love when you have stacked kind of defenses. Kind of if any of you guys play tower defense games, you stack your defenses. Well, that's kind of what you're doing in integrated pest management. You're stacking your defenses.
00:39:08
Speaker
Speaking of violence, this leads me into biological controls because they are often very violent. There's a comic out there and you all have probably seen it but it's a mother and a daughter and she sees these little ladybugs on a leaf and she goes
00:39:30
Speaker
Oh, look at the cute ladybugs. And then it zooms into the ladybugs and they're grabbing these aphids and they're like, rawr. And they're munching them down and it's like really metal. And that's my favorite because the insect world is violent. Oh yeah. It is. But you can use biological controls for
00:39:53
Speaker
insects primarily. You can use them for some diseases as well. There's a lot less available out there where essentially you're pitting a disease against another disease and that's a little bit more difficult. But for insects especially, you can
00:40:09
Speaker
give them other insects that will eat them or lay their eggs in them or destroy them in some way. But you can also use the fungus that will essentially infect these target insects. And what's beautiful about beneficial insects and biological controls is they're usually very specific. So we don't have this concern about targeting other beneficials like the honey bee or praying mantis or other things like that. We're being very specific about who we're targeting here.
00:40:38
Speaker
Guys, this sounds great, but you're commercial producers. You have a whole high tunnel or greenhouse full of beautiful flowers and all of your best efforts and all of your greatest pool of knowledge has failed. What is your last best hope for the plant population?
Pesticides as a Last Resort
00:41:01
Speaker
We've come towards the end of our discussion today, and we said that this was going to be our last option, which is pesticides, direct sprays or direct application of some product, either synthetic or organic, to control pests. And sometimes we get to that point that it is just the way the world works, that the pest pressure and the environment has worked against you, and you've used your best knowledge and application of that knowledge
00:41:29
Speaker
to control pest and it still has not been enough, then you do have that final line of defense. Have any of you guys been pushed to that point or are you guys so ecologically smart and such system thinkers of a magnitude that you have never been pushed to the brink to have to use like a direct application, a final nuke solution?
00:41:53
Speaker
No, I've sprayed. The holistic one in the group just admitted that he has had to make an application.
00:42:03
Speaker
Well, sometimes the weather works against you and you can do all the sanitation, you can do all of the scouting, but then it rains for two weeks straight and you can't get, you know, biological control out there. You can't do these things and they explode and the populations explode and breach those tolerance levels before you have an opportunity. And so you take those steps two at a time and sometimes you got to jump and then you can start kind of back fresh with doing your scouting, releasing beneficials, uh, if you want. And.
00:42:32
Speaker
you know, once your populations are under a level that you can control with some of these other ways. But yeah, I've got backpack sprayers. Let's go. Yeah. So I, uh, one thing I would add too, just briefly on the biological side, in addition to, so Alexis is literally talking, you can literally buy containers of wasps, containers of lady beetles, containers of all kinds of things and release those. Uh, and there's lots of really interesting research been done about
00:43:01
Speaker
efficacy of that, which in some cases is quite good. You can also encourage biological activity and encourage the existence of those parasites through things like planting other types of native plants and other types of surrounding habitat for those things. But I think, you know, Ray mentioned the touchy feeling and I'm going to go again here. The reality is that when we're planting a crop and we have aspirations for that crop to exist or to come out
00:43:28
Speaker
in a perfect way or in a highly productive way. In fact, we are trying to do something that doesn't really necessarily fit within that ecological model in the first place. There's a scenario where the bugs just eat our plant and the plant has enough to reproduce maybe and that's it. And so I think part of the spraying, that band-aid spray is the times when we're losing the ecological game that is playing out
00:43:56
Speaker
And we don't like to lose, so we spray. And I think, yeah, certainly intervened. According to the label, things have to be listed. You should use the right dosage. You should go through the trainings to become a pesticide applicator. It's helpful for a lot of different things, but that would be my little two cents on.
00:44:16
Speaker
Yeah, it brings us to a good point in the discussion. Again, this is a systems approach, one in which you are, it's a reverse model in which you don't think first about a rescue spray. You're doing a lot of preventative maintenance procedures in the form of applying the knowledge that you have in this system, this integrated pest management system. And I'll sort of wrap us up here by kind of reiterating some points that we've talked about again.
00:44:44
Speaker
It starts with monitoring. Scout early and scout often. That's my motto for commercial growers and for homeowners, early and often. Be aware of the common diseases and insect problems and any other problems for a particular crop. And then kind of understand your product. And if you're marketing a product, understand how much damage
00:45:06
Speaker
you can have and still have a product that's marketable, that matters. Understanding if you're a homeowner how much damage you can have on a tomato before you have to throw that tomato away and it's a complete loss. So you have to understand thresholds. And then manage carefully all of these cultural practices we just talked about. Soil testing, managing nutrients, good sanitation, rotation, using resistant varieties that can give you just a real leg up against pests.
00:45:35
Speaker
using barriers and trap crops and managing timing carefully and planting crops and giving them the best chance to grow and do well. And then when there's issues beyond that, you know, you start to look at biological controls of pest if they still persist. And then even one step beyond that, as a last option, pesticides, organic or inorganic pesticides, and hopefully a pesticide that can be somewhat targeted
00:46:03
Speaker
towards the past. Unfortunately, a lot of our pesticides, they may be broad spectrum. They do their job very well, but they do it very well on a broad selection of insects. Some of those insects may not be pests. They may be beneficial, so that's why it's our last option. It was a great discussion today, guys. I really appreciate it. It's always great hearing from your guys' perspectives. What a great conversation.
00:46:29
Speaker
Awesome. Well, I'm going to take us out here. Thank you guys for joining us and we hope you enjoyed listening to us babble about IPM because we get real excited about it. But we hope that as we grow this podcast, you will grow with us. Have a great one.