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Summer IPM
178 Plays2 years ago
Welcome to another episode of Hort Culture, the podcast where we talk about all things green and growing. In this episode, we're going to discuss summer insect IPM, or integrated pest management, which is a way of controlling pests using a combination of methods and techniques. We'll learn about the different types of pests and how to manage them using cultural, biological, mechanical, and chemical methods. And we have a special guest joining us today: Dr. Jonathan Larson, an assistant professor and extension entomologist at the University of Kentucky. So tune in and get ready to learn more about summer insect IPM on Hort Culture!
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
Explore the culture of horticulture. Hello. Welcome, everybody, back to another episode. We have a guest with us today, and we're very excited to welcome Dr. Jonathan Larson, who works in the UK entomology department. So welcome, Jonathan.
Background and Role of Dr. Larson
00:00:19
Speaker
Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to join you. I once again have another boy on the podcast. We're going to need to get some more females on here. Yeah, boy rich.
00:00:31
Speaker
Heavy boys. Jonathan's not one of the bald boys. He has a tremendous kind of hair. He's a bald boy. I did get a haircut recently. It was a little more luxurious. We got them all cut. COVID surfer hair going on. But tell us a little bit about yourself, Jonathan.
00:00:50
Speaker
Like you said, I'm a professor in the entomology department. I'm a 100% extension professional with a little bit of teaching thrown in there. I love talking about horticultural pests. I worked in turf grass as a PhD student. I was an extension agent before I came here to UK to be a professor. And so I've kind of run the gamut on all the bugs that bug people the most. And I just love talking about insects. So any chance that I get invited to do so, like today, I'm going to take advantage of it.
Light-hearted Pest Discussions
00:01:19
Speaker
Nice.
00:01:19
Speaker
You know, I've heard that it, especially in Boyle County, if you get on the wrong side of your court agent, they can be a horticultural pest. That's what I heard. I may or may not have, yeah, I may or may not have fire ants at my disposal. So watch it. It's true. When I met Alexis, she was caught in a sticky trap actually. She's drawn to the color yellow.
00:01:43
Speaker
If you know me, you know, I drive in a minoxious yellow car. So that's actually a sticky trap. I feel personally attacked on this podcast. Got her roasted. Awesome.
Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Basics
00:02:02
Speaker
Well, we are talking about some summer IPM today, integrated pest management, which is something we all deal with a lot of, but, um,
00:02:13
Speaker
How, Dr. Larson, how do you think, when you think about IPM, specifically summer IPM, what do you think about when you think of it? I dream of monitoring. When I think about summer IPM in particular, monitoring is going to be the foundational piece of being successful with IPM in the summer. You've moved out of your sanitation time probably at that point, and you really need to have your peepers open. You got to be paying attention, looking for signs and symptoms of whatever pest you're worried about. What do you think of, Alexis?
00:02:44
Speaker
Well, I think of Japanese beetles to be honest with you. Can you explain to people difference between signs and symptoms? I like that we have a PhD on here right now because I feel like I can ask you all the questions that Brett might ask me, but I'm going to ask them. Tell me the difference between signs and symptoms.
00:03:04
Speaker
So this is, so I'm an entomologist. I have been corrected in some cases by pathologists. They say that I, I, I believe the wrong thing. So maybe it's a religious difference. I'm not sure, but they call you a logical liar. I know what I'm lying. What's the pathologist about that?
00:03:22
Speaker
The way that I grew up being taught this was that signs are the literal insect, like you see the insect that is a sign that you have that problem, and then the symptoms are the evidence that they leave behind. So, cupped and curled leaves, vis-a-vis aphids, lacy leaves, vis-a-vis Japanese beetle, anything that they've done, anything that they defecate, all that kind of evidence that they leave at the scene of the crime.
00:03:46
Speaker
And on a flip side, since we are talking about IPM also includes diseases. So the signs, again, is the actual pest of a problem. So those of you who are familiar with powdery mildew, right? It's that white stuff that you're going to see on leaves of dogwoods or
00:04:02
Speaker
I mean, all kinds of plants. So you're actually seeing the disease versus the symptoms of it could be spots, it could be yellowing, it could be burn, it could be a lot of different things, symptoms. So something to think about when you're talking, you'll sound like super smart, just like how we use soil instead of dirt, you know, now can use size and symptoms appropriately. Well, so I'm, I'm a bit of a simpleton when it comes to the plant side
Pest Monitoring Techniques
00:04:27
Speaker
of things. And so like when you're saying monitoring,
00:04:30
Speaker
Like what can you walk me through? Like let's say you have a garden or you have a horticultural plot. What might, you know, if you wake up in the morning charged and ready to integrated pest manage, you roll out into the field. What kinds of things, like what nuts and bolts processes might you be going through or implementing this time of year?
00:04:53
Speaker
I would say that at this time of the year, I would be thinking about how to zone things out in my field, in my garden plot, whatever it is that I'm trying to manage. I want sectors. I want to have the ability to say in sector A1 and sector B3, so splitting things up into columns and rows so that you can focus specific monitoring efforts.
00:05:13
Speaker
on specific spots and kind of be able to refer back to that in the future. You'll be taking notes as you do this as well, so you'll have some historical data and you may know where problems arise first and foremost. So that's stuff that I think about. You're also going to be going out and looking for the insects themselves, the pathogens themselves, you may be checking your traps.
00:05:36
Speaker
We may have a pheromone trap. We may have the sticky cards that Alexis is so lured to. We may have bull traps. I like to use yellow bull traps for squash vine bore in particular. I set up little bowls of soapy water. They're yellow so it looks like a giant squash flower and then the females fly in there and I know when they're out and about so I can start advising people that it's time to take a management step.
00:05:59
Speaker
So monitoring is just right there in the name. It's anything that you can do to be on the lookout for pests so that you know what they're up to before they sneak up onto you and then you're just reacting to bigger issues. I know that commercially we're
00:06:12
Speaker
You know, we have access to lots of different monitoring tools. But is it true that homeowners, there's lots of great tools out there that they can just order on their favorite online order sources? Is that the case, Jonathan? Absolutely. Yeah, you can find lots of different things on Amazon. Am I allowed to say company names or is that? Oh, sugar. Yeah, it's a common online order. I'll reference Amazon or about the river. That's why we have this disclaimer.
00:06:34
Speaker
Your favorite garden store, your favorite big box store. You'll find pheromone traps. You will find different kinds of lures. You'll find all kinds of sticky traps. There's many different options out there that we can use. And they are tailored. I mean, you'll want to check and see what it says it's supposed to attract and what it's supposed to capture.
Principles and Framework of IPM
00:06:51
Speaker
And you want to recognize this isn't a management tool. A yellow sticky card is not being put out in the hopes that you won't have fungus gnats this year. It's going to tell you when the fungus gnats show up.
00:07:02
Speaker
And is that kind of, for those folks who weren't able maybe to hear our first discussion of IPM, I'd be very interested. I'm always interested to hear how people introduce a topic that they know a lot about. And so maybe we'll ask you to do that in a second. But it just seems like that
00:07:19
Speaker
knowledge base or working off of actual data or information or whatever is a big part of this IPM thing as opposed to, well, it's about June. It's about time to start spraying for that. We actually know these things are here. Is that, I mean, am I hearing that right? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, what you were talking about the spray and pray
00:07:36
Speaker
or the preventive method, trying to make you just do things based on the calendar. That is absolutely a management style that we use for certain pests. And for some pests, it's the best way to go. I'm thinking of something like a white grub and a lawn where the calendar based method is really the way to go. It's going to be the way that you're actually going to get control. It should also be dependent upon making sure that the pest is there. But we know that in most cases, we're going to be able to find things like white grubs.
00:08:03
Speaker
So yes, absolutely. If you're going to be doing IPM, you are monitoring, you're making sure that you have a problem before you spend money to try and get rid of something.
00:08:13
Speaker
And so how is it that you, when you go out to extension meetings or you go out to a grower talk or even talking to agents or other folks, how do you introduce this IPM idea? You know, what's your elevator pitch for IPM or maybe a long elevator ride? How about that? Long, we got stuck in the elevator together and now we get to, okay. Two hours. Three hour filibuster. My favorite kind of audience, captain.
00:08:38
Speaker
So when I actually teach our IPM course in our entomology curriculum, so I've thought a lot about this and I just break it down to with integrated pest management, you are trying to control your pest problems with all the available tools at your disposal. Anything and everything that you can use, you should build a plan that includes all of them.
00:08:59
Speaker
It includes the best ones so that you are keeping pests at a lower level, and this is hopefully going to cut down on economic damage. That's kind of the bottom line there is we're monitoring and suppressing so that we can cut the economic problems out for growers. No, no, that's great. There are steps, maybe less expensive steps to take or preventative steps to take along the way that might be a
00:09:30
Speaker
interventions you might try first, is that part of the? Yeah, some of the things that you're, some of the words you're using here, some of the synonyms, I would say are things that I've been interested in recently. When I was building the last IPM class that I taught, I started reading more about there's this thing called PAMs, which is kind of a modern, what I would say retooling of IPM. IPM has been around in sort of federal recognition since the 70s.
00:09:57
Speaker
And there's some people who would argue that it's kind of passe at this point. I even met a gentleman once when I worked in Nebraska. He said IPM was dead, which kind of broke my heart as an entomologist. So I think that anything we can do to recontextualize it and get people to stay on board with it is good. And that's what I think PAMS is, and it focuses on prevention, avoidance, monitoring, and suppression.
Chemical Controls and Environmental Considerations
00:10:20
Speaker
So the prevention part that you were hinting at there a second ago, it's the first part of this new kind of way of talking about IPM. And I think that will also help to get more people on board, because it's kind of sequential. So do what you can to prevent a pest problem. Do what you can to avoid the pest problem. And then monitor to make sure those two things work. And if it didn't, be prepared to suppress it with one of these suppressive tools. And I think it also takes us out of the mindset that IPM doesn't include chemistry.
00:10:48
Speaker
A lot of people think, I have my students write a definition of IPM at the start of the semester. And all of them to a person said, IPM does not include chemical control. And we kind of had to work against that the whole semester to get them to recognize. I mean, actually, in some cases, Japanese beetles, for example, you don't have a lot of defenses against it beyond some sort of insecticidal application.
00:11:14
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not for sure where that came from, but you are absolutely correct. I always do that with Master Gardeners on the IPM chapter, and almost without exception, they say it's a way of managing without synthetic chemicals. And I'm like, and we have this discussion, and it's almost every single year that I've had Master Gardeners. And I'm not for sure how we got to that point, so I could see sort of the need to sort of reconceptualize and almost repackage
00:11:39
Speaker
this concept a little bit but you guys already touched on it but to me it's like you know you're using every information tool that you have at hand and but I don't know how we got to the organic inorganic thing actually if I could sort of touch on that I think that it comes from
00:11:57
Speaker
The historical precedent that IPM came from, came from the high days of DDT, where it was a push to try and use less chemistry. We didn't want DDT and chloridine getting sprayed as often. There was this strong emphasis on minimizing insecticide applications. It's actually, I would say, a problem for IPM because
00:12:17
Speaker
When we try to defend ipm to the federal government and to people that take stock of how successful it's been. They'll say well actually you're supposed to be cutting back on pesticides but more pesticides are used now than ever per acre or nationally by pound or gallon or whatever you want to sort of cut it up as and.
00:12:36
Speaker
you can't get them to recognize, oh, but actually these products are less impactful on the environment or they're more targeted or more pest specific. So yes, maybe there's more of them, but they're not causing the harm that the ones in the past did. I guess that's the point. Yeah. IPM is the total picture. And what you're talking about is the total understanding of the total picture, which is a little harder for everyone to grasp. And that's a great point. That's a great point. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. It's, it's making me think of just the,
00:13:04
Speaker
the socio-cultural context and implications of trying to convey a topic that has very set parameters, but once you kind of get it out into the policy and PR world, you lose a lot of control over the interpretation and fact checking of the thing itself. When I think about IPM in general, I think of it almost like as an approach to like
00:13:28
Speaker
personal health where it's like, yeah, eat pretty good, get some sleep, get some exercise, drink some water. But, you know, if you get really, really sick, it's also cool to be able to take medicines, which is pretty, that's been my experience in general as a medicine taker in the past.
00:13:45
Speaker
Yeah, in some cases the medicine is the first step right like it's good to try all these other things But if you pick up Lyme disease from a tick bite, you're gonna want doxycycline, right? Like you don't want to be told Oh, you know change your diet and maybe you won't get Lyme disease You want the medicine? So there are cases where the strongest reaction is the most appropriate reaction That's right. That's IPO
00:14:10
Speaker
So, this time of year, are there particular common pests that for you fall into that either the monitor and see category versus the treat up front? You kind of don't want this getting out of hand or is it case by case or are there particular things that fall into those categories? I would say, unfortunately, the invasive species pests, they're the ones that fall into that. Okay, we got to do something right now. We have to prevent this because
00:14:36
Speaker
We don't have the natural defenses. We don't have the natural enemy populations and things that help to keep those in check. It's our native pests that we're usually allowed to have some breathing room so that we can actually monitor for and see what they're going to do in any given year. You have outbreak years. I don't know if you all remember 2021 as the fall army worm year.
00:14:56
Speaker
where you came through and ate everything up, that's not normal. And so people got taken unawares by that and monitoring helped in some cases and in other cases it didn't. So that gives it kind of a bad rap sometimes that you can monitor for most of the normal pests, your tomato horn worms, your white flies, your aphids, your thrips, all those things. And know when you need to react in order to get something under control.
00:15:23
Speaker
How about getting some help, Jonathan, for when someone catches something in their trap? Let's say it may be a homeowner or a backyard gardener. How about getting that insect identified?
Unusual Pest Inquiries and Anecdotes
00:15:34
Speaker
That's one of the things, I guess, that one of the services that you're involved in.
00:15:38
Speaker
For sure, yeah. We love perceiving inquiries from folks that usually does go through sort of the quote unquote chain of command, right? They take it to you all at the extension office. Yes. The extension office usually identifies most of these things because you've been dealing with them for however long you've had your career. And then the cases that are kind of out of the norm or weird, those are the ones that get filtered to the entomology department and we help you figure out what- You get all the tough cases.
00:16:05
Speaker
We do get quite a few that are kind of weird. I just had one this morning where an agent wanted to know what was on this person's maple tree and it turned out to be a sample that I've never received before. It was a flat bag, they're a type of hemipterin, so a true bug with a piercing sucking mouth part.
00:16:22
Speaker
Except their piercing sucking mouth part has been modified to like coil up inside of their head and they slurp it out and they get fungal spores and stuff with it so it was a very weird looking insect and I have never received one as an inquiry before so it was kind of fun, but yeah, it took like 50 minutes of
00:16:42
Speaker
Well, this is not right. That's right. OK, then tracking it down using. I feel like it could be a whole series from you is when things are received in the lab. Yeah. You get really cool stuff because I'm sure you guys see it all. Yeah.
00:16:57
Speaker
weirdest stuff is when you get you know, a bag of pants or I got water once somebody soaked their feet and a bunch of vinegar and then brought it to me in jars. They wanted to know what bugs are in it. Yeah, I've seen. That's I don't think I've seen that foot trap on order source. I don't think I've seen the foot trap. That's something that's a one off. Yeah, that's a one off. Yeah, for sure.
00:17:24
Speaker
Um, do you have, do you have, do you keep a like, uh, other than mentally, like a list of the things that you haven't, haven't seen like a wall of wall of shame or fame or something like that? I used to be more diligent about that when I was a county extension agent or educator was what we were called in Nebraska. Uh, we had kind of a, uh, a, a ongoing list of me and a colleague.
00:17:47
Speaker
She has something that she calls her wall of no-no's, which I think is what she still calls it. It's like all these samples that she's gotten over the years of like, she's trying to teach people that work at the front desk and stuff, like don't accept these things. This is a biohazard. No more foot water. No more foot water, bags of scrabs, you know. Oh, man. Wow. I haven't had any piss management includes at all, folks. I've had a coffee pot come in.
00:18:14
Speaker
and she swore there were bugs in the coffee pot. And I was like, no, those are coffee grounds. That's rough. I looked at them under the scope. To be fair, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. You always have to look. Yes, you have to take it seriously until you've proven what it is or isn't.
00:18:34
Speaker
I got a beard trimmer once that was interesting he brought it in and left it in a bag and then he didn't want it back it still works pretty well.
00:18:49
Speaker
Why? Oh, yeah, beard boy. No, so you guys you guys have seen it all. I mean, it's an integrated system that covers a lot of ground, I guess. So it's monitoring identification. What else? What are we missing in the integrative? I mean, I was gonna ask we're gonna take action. Yeah, I was gonna I was gonna ask you had mentioned about the the invasive species. Are there are there like a couple top top most wanted top five or least wanted top five or 10 that
00:19:18
Speaker
come to mind as far as things around here for people to be on the lookout for?
Invasive Pests Discussion
00:19:23
Speaker
Well, so I can tackle that question a couple of different ways. One is things that aren't quite here yet or are just getting started here. And then the other is Alexis's friends, the Japanese beetles and the things that have been here that we don't necessarily have a great grip on. For that list, it would be Japanese beetles, spotted wing drosophila. There'd probably be brown-memorated stink bug on that list.
00:19:46
Speaker
Maybe a couple others, but those are the ones that are here. Those have been here. The monitoring for the stink bug is just kind of look up at yourself. Check your toothbrush in the morning. All around you. In Japanese beetle, we have traps. People kind of misuse the traps occasionally, but you can also just look for the damage. The ones that aren't here yet that we are sort of
00:20:09
Speaker
really actively monitoring for and making sure that they don't get here, would be Spongy Moth, formerly known as Gypsy Moth, the Asian Longhorn Beetle, which is a tree pest that is in Ohio in the Cincinnati area. And then Spotted Lanternfly, also found in the Cincinnati area, about three miles from the state line. And in Switzerland County, Indiana, also about two or three miles from Kentucky.
00:20:34
Speaker
And then the Asian Longhorn Tick, which wouldn't confront horticultural enthusiasts such as your listeners, but it does affect the beef cattle industry, which is a major agr seat in the state. And then the last one would be fire ants, imported fire ants. I think Alexis, she said she's aligned with them or she's in cahoots with them earlier. Is that what you're joking? We clean work together. Not here only by the grace of her.
00:21:04
Speaker
That is one that for like 20 years has been kind of on the periphery of Kentucky. It's popped up in the land between the lakes area quite a few times, but it's always been defeated. And then in 2022, we got snuck up on and now it's in Whitley and McCreary counties and it is established there. Oh, oh my. Yeah, I remember seeing to my wife's from
00:21:29
Speaker
Pennsylvania and so we were up visiting. I remember seeing some of their anti-lantern fly propaganda. Get everybody involved and just killing these things. Squash them. Do your part. Get the kids involved. Get the kids to yeet them out of the backyard. I was like, oh, God, yeah. Did it say yeet? That's amazing. It didn't say. I think I might be paraphrasing. Updating it for the modern audience.
00:21:57
Speaker
I see every April or May, there's a new story about this state government says, go out and squish it. And I'm like, I don't know if I support this. I do not support this message. I mean, yeah, it's fine, I guess. Can you expand on that?
00:22:18
Speaker
You mean violence is the way? It is a very distinct looking insect, but I get a lot of inquiries about spotted lanternfly that are other insects. And so the people are just going to go around and be like, Oh, that is a butterfly and squish it. Uh, uh, you know, there's, there's going to be some innocent bystanders.
00:22:39
Speaker
It's not a good time to be a look-a-lock. That's right. If you have spots or stripes as an insect, you got to be shaking in your forehead right now. You're off in the wrong place at the wrong time. To be clear, can I self-wash Japanese beetles with my bare hands? Absolutely. Yeah. All right. That's pretty good. Oh, yeah. You got that on YouTube?
00:23:02
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I have a special thing I do with Japanese Beatles. The ball boys have heard about it. Um, sorry, Ray, I jumped, I, I lumped you in, um, Ray is not bald. Uh, I put them on pikes at the end of my road as warnings to the other ones. Um, I don't, I don't know. Huh?
00:23:29
Speaker
It's like Vlodlix, but that's her name. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very like Janissary, Ottoman Empire conflict. Yes.
00:23:36
Speaker
I mean, this is very barbaric, Alexis. Do they get it? That's mechanical control, I would say. She's a machine.
00:24:00
Speaker
The psychological part, I don't really know where that was fall. We don't really have a category. It's hard to develop resistance against mechanical methods. Yeah. Yeah. It's very true. Yeah. Cannot run these fists kind of energy. Catch his hands there, Bugs. Catch his hands there. There's very contemporary on this podcast, you can tell.
IPM Decision-making and Protocols
00:24:26
Speaker
if we if we do like we are you mentioned the kind of the monitoring as the the main thing you're thinking about this time of year and then in the case of some things you're going to need to just spray or otherwise address them if there isn't really a good way to control or there's no sense in monitoring for the for the ones that do how do you what's what's the calculus for determining okay we're at the point where maybe I want to spray or any may look at see what I what I'm going to spray do you encourage people to have like
00:24:56
Speaker
plans in mind even before the season that these are the things I'm going to need. These are the types of chemicals that I might use or the types of measures, et cetera, or what's that kind of decision making process going from monitoring to action in times that needs it.
00:25:11
Speaker
So for that, you absolutely have to be kind of thinking about this all the time. It's an unfortunate byproduct of growing stuff is that you have to be sort of plotting and planning the whole time of what you're going to do. And we have, I like that you said calculus because we do have some mathematical formulas that help to sort of dictate when people take action with some of these pests. So we have the economic threshold, we have the action threshold,
00:25:34
Speaker
the point where you're supposed to go out and do something to keep the pest from reaching critically important levels and suppress their populations a little bit lower. That's written in lots of extension publications for lots of different pests. Many of them are based on a high-end agricultural scale, so big numbers, big plots. For a home garden, it may be as low as one or two when you see just one or two of these insects in your trap or on your travels through your garden.
00:26:01
Speaker
that may tell you that it's time to initiate one of the protocols that you've designed in your head. And we have these written out as well. If I stick with my squash vine borer example that I talked about earlier, so you put out this yellow bull trap, you catch one female moth in it, that tells you that it's time to either go ahead and apply an insecticide to the base of the plant so that when they try to lay their eggs, it intercepts that female and kills her.
00:26:27
Speaker
if you are not interested in insecticides, you may be somebody that wants to go with a physical barrier. So you get some remay, or you get some sort of cloth that you can put over the plants and use ground staples to secure it. And then look inside and make sure that you haven't actually pinned moths in with the plants that you're trying to protect. And then you have a force field. You have the ability to sort of exclude these moths from being able to lay their eggs on the plant.
00:26:52
Speaker
There are problems with this as well. You got to take it off so that the plants can get pollinated. You got to keep the traps going so that you know when it's safe to remove the cover. And then you'll have to put it back on if this is what you're going to stick with because we have multiple generations of this pest. That's the other thing with IPM is that
00:27:09
Speaker
A lot of people, when they just spray for stuff, you're done, right? You sprayed it. The spray is out. You win. These things are for a growing season. And so you don't have to think about it as much anymore. But with IPM, you are going to be constantly battling this thing. Just because you got rid of the aphids, your monitoring isn't done. You need to be just like Batman and keep ever watch full eyes on your Gotham City, your garden. And then when the thrips show up, you can be like, oh, no, the thrips, I got to get those now.
00:27:39
Speaker
Uh and and go out and deploy whatever management tool you want for that Yeah, but the hardest thing for me has been teaching the plants to operate the bat signal because they yes, they don't have Yeah, I had a question about something you had mentioned earlier and this kind of the threshold of activity It sounds like it's you know based on Sort of a density Amount right like an amount of these particular pests within a unit area which you know
00:28:08
Speaker
in large scale operations means one thing and smaller scale operations looks differently. And back to what you had said earlier about, you know, creating, thinking of your growing space in zones, right? Is there sort of a good all around functional unit for like an area to think of a garden?
00:28:29
Speaker
I would say it would be an acre. That's what all of these things are based on is an acre of this, or it may be broken down into number of sweep net samples. So if you read through some of our soybean publications, you'll see references to per 100 sweep nets. If you've caught 25 stink bugs, it's time to do X. And so it's either the action itself, the trap that you're using,
00:28:56
Speaker
or the amount of space, and they're almost always written by acre or by number of plants in a certain row. So in a garden, your blocks are going to be much tinier. I just was putting my garden in over the weekend. I've got my hot pepper block. I've got my cantaloupe block. I've got these different sectors, but it's just going to be about looking at one or two plants really. So it's not as intense.
00:29:22
Speaker
And therefore your thresholds are much lower because you can't afford for one of the two price to get killed. Right. Right. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. And well, I mean, in a lot of horticulture growers, there are many in the state that, you know, it's market garden size, but that can mean a couple of acres.
00:29:40
Speaker
to think of things in terms of an acre, a fraction of an acre like works. Yeah. Thresholds are one of the areas that I think we need a lot more work on. It's such an applied thing and applied research like that isn't necessarily as supported as it used to be. And some of the thresholds, they're older, they're based on these huge farms and it's harder to find information for a high tunnel.
00:30:02
Speaker
for a greenhouse, for a small horticultural plot like you're describing. And it's difficult for organic growers because these are all also based on sort of conventional procedures. And organic usually requires a lot earlier threshold, a lower threshold, I should say. So we have to update those things. It's hard to do though.
00:30:26
Speaker
And as far as the, you know, what chemicals to apply, I'm not asking for a specific recommendation on the squash fineboard, but in general, where would you recommend people go?
Reliable Resources for Pest Treatment
00:30:37
Speaker
They're thinking through, they're getting their plan, and they've realized, okay, you know, this is, once we cross this threshold, I'm gonna need this to treat.
00:30:45
Speaker
Where might they go to find what should they be putting down or putting out? Well, if I can be extremely self-serving, you should go to the Entomology Department's website and go to the Infacts page and look through a lot of our Infacts. I am proud of the fact that a lot of our extension publications are pretty direct in their recommendations. It lists out different products that you can use for specific pests.
00:31:07
Speaker
It gives you some advice on when to do that. Unfortunately, you look at some other ones that just says, contact your local extension office for more information. And I find that kind of maddening. I think that there should be an extension jail for that. Straight to extension jail if you just call the agent, because the agent might be the one reading that publication. Many times we are, it's like transferring the call to someone else that you just talk to. You're like, what?
00:31:33
Speaker
Yes. I do like when we get those direct recommendations. That's what I try to recommend people be on the lookout for. Anything with a .edu at the end, you know that they're going to be a little more non-biased than if you're getting it from, I don't know, Scott's webpage. So you go to Tolkien for your int fantasy, but the entomology department for your int facts. That's right. We don't do giant trees. What else?
00:31:59
Speaker
You know they both deal with problems that are and problems that were Just as never late
00:32:14
Speaker
Yeah, we had a really had a great discussion with, once again, finishing up Master Gardeners, but a great group, really savvy group this year. And they were a very good group about understanding when we had the IPM talking at the same time we were covering the organic section. But just the difference in thinking processes between home gardeners and let's say a commercial operation, an economic based operation,
00:32:40
Speaker
with these things. Yes, you're dealing with many times the very same insects, but it's that the thresholds become so much more important, what you have to lose and how much damage tolerance you have. But we had just a great discussion on all this and it directly tied into integrated pest management because we were talking about information systems and applying all of these concepts. But the more you have to lose, the
00:33:05
Speaker
kind of the less tolerance you have for risk in this situation. But yeah, it kind of ties in really nicely for all the things that you're saying.
00:33:14
Speaker
having those thresholds and everything, getting people on board with those is really good. And then we do have to educate them on all these different suppression tools. I'm trying to use the word suppression more often than management. 100% kill. Yeah. That is not what we're going for. Control implies a lot more than I think management does. And then management also implies some things. So suppression, I think, is more of what we're going for here.
00:33:39
Speaker
We're trying to keep their populations at a certain level that doesn't cause issues. That can come from insecticidal control. It can come from physical control, mechanical control. My favorite mechanical control is when people build flamethrower-like objects to kill things like Colorado potato beetle. We also have to talk about biological control, using natural enemies, using these beneficial organisms that we can purchase in some cases. In other cases, we can augment their populations or conserve their populations locally.
00:34:07
Speaker
by planting flowers and wildflower strips, these insect havens where they can live and then hopefully help provide some pest control. But the augmentation biocontrol where you buy them and release them, you can buy lady beetles or whatever from the big box stores online, those are also options. I would argue that if you're going to do that, get something that's an immature, so a larval form or a nymphal form, or a very small biological control organism,
00:34:36
Speaker
That way, wherever you put them is where they're going to live. That's their whole universe at that point. Because if you get ones with wings, I don't know if any of you have experienced this, but you open the box of lady beetles, and they say, see a sucker, and see the shipping, and they go.
00:34:52
Speaker
You know, it seems like with the rise of over the last several years with greenhouses and high tunnels in the state, how has that changed for someone like yourself? How has that changed the concepts of IPM? Or is it exactly the same if we're talking about someone with a bunch of high tunnels?
High Tunnels and Plant Health in IPM
00:35:09
Speaker
And what made me think about this was the beneficial insects, like in greenhouses. But how does that relate?
00:35:15
Speaker
So I've only been involved with greenhouses since I started this job in 2019. But previous to that, I had zero experience with them. And I think that they're really interesting tools. And they're also very Kentucky. I know people in Indiana are working on them and on some other spots. But it seems like from what I've read, at least, Kentucky is like the high tunnel hotspot.
00:35:36
Speaker
And I think it offers you the best of both worlds of growing in the field and in a greenhouse and also the worst of both worlds. The best part being that you can do biocontrol releases more easily in a high tunnel than you can do in a field. The problem being that it also excludes a lot of the natural enemies that would naturally find pest populations just like it excludes other things. So sometimes pests get into a high tunnel
00:36:01
Speaker
and they run absolutely wild because there's nothing in there to kill them. Hornworms are famous for this, unfortunately. They get into these tomato high tunnels. There's no wasps that lay their eggs in there, so then they eat and munch away with abandon.
00:36:17
Speaker
There are nuances to IPM in these controlled or semi controlled environments that we have to consider when educating those folks. We've just done a three part around the state tour of high tunnel for beginning farmers, high tunnel growing for beginning farmers, Dr. Nicole Goce, Dr. Rachel Rudolph.
00:36:37
Speaker
They were the other faculty members that were on the tour with it. And yeah, it's something that I think is really interesting. You have to sort of change it up. And I have more experience in the controlled environment than I do in the field agriculturally. So I feel uniquely connected to high tunnels. I'm the high tunnel of people.
00:36:57
Speaker
You bring intensity to the intensity that is high tunnels and greenhouses. It seems like everything in a high tunnel and a greenhouse, controlled environments, semi-controlled environments are more intense. The heat is more intense. The insect pressure can be more intense. I mean, for every pro you have to...
00:37:14
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. But I knew Alexis was going to have some very personal thoughts. I'm still stripping snapdragons that are sticky at the bottom. And it just is what it is. With aphid honeydew or? Yeah. What are they sticky from? Pancakes here. I know. It's aphids, yep. Yeah.
00:37:44
Speaker
When it comes to using beneficial insects in that kind of augmentation style where you're releasing some, is it something that tends to be something like the action threshold is earlier than with chemicals? Absolutely, yeah. And you have to be monitoring to know what biological control agent you should be releasing because there's not a cure-all with these. It's not like the old days with carbaryl when it was in seven where you could kill just about anything that you were dealing with.
00:38:14
Speaker
with a natural enemy release. If you don't know what you're fighting, you may buy the wrong thing, and these aren't cheap. So you definitely want to invest some time in identification and knowing exactly what level of problem you have. One of the reasons I love working with really well-informed organic gardeners, either small scale or big scale, it seems like to a fault, they are all systems thinkers. And they really have bought into the concepts of IPM because
00:38:44
Speaker
they have honestly no other choice to stay ahead of things. And they just live and breathe these concepts day in and out. So that's one of the reasons I love working with those folks. If they're really up on things and they've invested time into the science of things, they're really good at the concepts of IPM because they monitor, they look for the first sign of any of these issues because they just don't have rescue treatments. And quite honestly, even conventional growers
00:39:12
Speaker
a lot of times don't have really good rescue treatments if things get too bad, I guess. So yeah, those folks are really good at these concepts. It seems like sometimes. Absolutely agree. Yeah. They have to know this. And I think that's part of the other reason IPM gets conflated with organic production. I think so. Yeah. Because the organic crowd, really, they invest a lot of time and a lot of brain space to these concepts because they just don't have a choice. Yeah.
00:39:37
Speaker
We see that a lot. Do you have any comment on the role of plant health in preventative thinking in general?
00:39:51
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you gotta have healthy plants otherwise. That's part of when we talk about PAMs. That's one of the avoidance strategies that we talk about, is keeping the plant well irrigated, well fertilized, whatever it is that keeps it happy and healthy. It cuts down on the likelihood that it'll deal with any of these other problems.
00:40:09
Speaker
in the future, except for some of maybe our invasive species. But yeah, right plant, right place, anything that you can do to set the plan up for success is going to cut down on the need for some of these IPM methods. Because I think that's something that I've seen is that often by the time it makes it to the Extension Office or it makes it to you all or to the diagnostic lab,
00:40:32
Speaker
Sometimes the thing that you end up looking at is a secondary or tertiary problem. And so, yeah, that just is something that every year it becomes more and more, I think, relevant and underscored for me is that that plant health component, the general basic horticultural practices in tandem with IPM or the PAMS strategies is like, I mean, and they are, to be totally meta in systems, there is no separation between good horticultural practices and
00:41:02
Speaker
IPM really at its root, but that's just something that I think sometimes it's this idea that we're going to put healthy plants out and no matter what is going to happen, no matter what happens, we're going to get some pests on them and that's just going to happen and we're going to have to spray.
Preventing Pest Problems and Plant Care
00:41:14
Speaker
And that could be the case depending on where you are, but in other cases that there is this chain of events that if you're not paying close attention, it seems like, well, the bugs just came out of nowhere, but in reality, the insects are there because there was an opening somewhere for some reason.
00:41:30
Speaker
Yeah, I hear the phrase, it happened overnight quite a lot in my line of work. And it almost never happens overnight. Fire army is an exception. But with most of these things, there were indicators beforehand. There were openings, like you said, that absolutely could have been caught earlier. And that's not a dig on people. Like everybody's got busy lives.
00:41:52
Speaker
You got caught with your plants down. I think you can. I've seen you in action, man. You have fun on foot water, Ray. A bag of pants. We have to bring it all back around and make a list of approach. One last question. Can you love your plants too much in the area of dealing with insects?
00:42:18
Speaker
Can you love your plants too much in regards to insects, like spraying too early, you mean, or you're over fertilizing and you create more problems? Yeah. I think a lot of people, when we talk about plant health, they want to make their plant extra healthy, but there's too much of a good thing is the thing.
00:42:38
Speaker
Absolutely. You can make the plant very attractive to certain pests. Over fertilization absolutely does that. Irrigation does that. People deal with white grubs in their lawn. There's a reason the white grubs are in your lawn and they're not in the city park is because you irrigate your turf and you treated it with nice fertilizer and it's a very happy and healthy home for those baby grubs to be in. So the mom chooses it. We absolutely can set ourselves up for some problems with these.
00:43:06
Speaker
Uh, other times I think it's more about, uh, being in love with a plant that shouldn't be where it is. Uh, you pick out a tree cultivar or species that you really want on your property, but it really shouldn't be there. And you're just going to have problems in the future. Uh, cough, cough, white pines, maybe, uh, be an example in the state of Kentucky. But, uh, yeah, I think that that's absolutely a problem is that we can, we can, uh, love plant. What'd you say? How'd you put it? Love your plants too much.
00:43:35
Speaker
Which is another plug and if we do this every episode I won't be mad to go get your soil tested Kentuckians Well, everybody should because that way you're not going to over apply those fertilizers waste money and therefore Make your plant more attractive to insects and therefore have to spend more money to spray them or deal with them in other mechanical ways So just you know another shameless plug
00:43:59
Speaker
Yeah.
Additional Resources and Podcast Plug
00:44:00
Speaker
Speaking of plug and pulling plugs of soil out of the ground for a soil test, do you have, Jonathan, any plugs to put in?
00:44:09
Speaker
to this podcast of things to check out, maybe, you know, your SoundCloud or show me something professional as well. I do. I already mentioned the Infacts website. We have Kentucky Bugs on Facebook, where people can find interesting pictures that we post throughout the summer of different arthropod pals, trying to teach people about what's out there. We take samples through there as well, getting a lot of potential murder hornet.
00:44:37
Speaker
questions on that platform at the moment. We also have, I also have a podcast myself. It's called Arthropod. Incredible. And their relatives. We just did an episode on educating with insects abroad. We had an educator come on, his name's Kevin O'Shea. He is a Canadian that teaches in China and he uses insects as sort of a model organism to talk about lots of different concepts. Before that one, we had
00:45:07
Speaker
the history's favorite beetle the colorado potato beetle it's an hour and 45 minutes on that insect and like soup to nuts everything you could ever want or not want to know about it that's a lot of time on one beetle wow it's a it's a fascinating insect do you want me to do it right now can i do
00:45:30
Speaker
It's an amazing insect and it absolutely is history's favorite beetle. Yeah. I love doing that show and I deal with two of my good friends, Mike and Jody. If people are into podcasts, if they're listening to this, I presume they are. Awesome. Check us out too. Awesome. Oh man, that's cool. We have covered a lot of ground today, both inside the token world and outside of the token
Summary and Next Episode Preview
00:45:53
Speaker
world. But today's topic, integrated pest management started, I think, Jonathan, with
00:45:58
Speaker
us discussing the importance of monitoring and then going on to things like identification and going all the way through action steps. We talked about what was at the newer system, PAMs. I've done some reading on that myself. And it seems to be the up and coming new guy, not really new, but the newer kind of conceptualization of some of the things that we've talked about today. PAMs being prevention, avoidance, monitoring, and suppression.
00:46:26
Speaker
We talked a lot about current past and future past. That, that's a lot to talk about in one podcast. And it sounds like there's a lot more to talk about. So if any of you guys listening today want to check out that, what was it? Jonathan arthropod, is it cute spelling or just like arthropod, arthro dash pod. If you don't put the dash in, it'll just take you to the Wikipedia page on arthropod. There was something that I couldn't find it. I was like, now I'm listening something. Thank you for that clarification. But yeah.
00:46:54
Speaker
Yeah, I really appreciate you kind of bringing the topic today. A great discussion point for both home gardeners and larger scale market and commercial gardeners. Yeah, great discussion you all. Yeah, thank you very much.
00:47:09
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. Well, I believe that sums us all up. So we are going to say goodbye from now. And we hope as we grow this podcast, you will grow with us. Join us next week, uh, for talking about the joys of growing plants, because we've talked about a lot of science, a lot of good science, a lot of marketing. We've yet to talk about why we love to do this in the first place. So join us next week and thank you for being here.