The planning stage of any project is crucial to deliver a positive result. In farming, a broad range of factors collides into a highly complex arrangement – an agroecosystem. 

 

Taking into consideration the complexity of each farm’s agroecosystem – with all of the uncertain events that might happen, plus everyone’s daily-life-related distractions – it’s challenging to plan a successful Integrated Pest Management (IPM) strategy. Besides doing what farmers do all the time - knowing the performance of the important varieties, identifying the crop’s main arthropod pests and diseases, getting a handle on the weed-seed bank present in your field, and tracking weather patterns and forecasts in the region - it can be helpful to stay in touch with research projects that have potential to make farming more sustainable.

You can know an insect pest’s common and scientific name, its appearance, or when it started to become a problem in your county. But for an IPM plan, it’s advantageous to know more, such as the pest’s range of hosts, and its life cycle – which is directly influenced by weather conditions and availability of its food sources (your crop or other types of plants).

Putting together all this knowledge takes time but helps make IPM work for the most important pests and diseases. Investigating and trying out new alternatives to alleviate pest management problems can add useful new tools to your IPM toolbox.

IPM practices are especially challenging in organic agriculture. So organic IPM puts more effort into a balance of long-term strategies: cultural practices (cultivation, row covers, crop rotation, etc.), balanced plant nutrition and soil health, and genetic resistance in crop varieties. Organic growers must be attentive to monitoring and action thresholds to deploy biological controls (antagonistic organisms, parasites, predators, etc.), natural pesticides, and/or mineral-based agents such as clays or diatomaceous earth.

 

 

 

Our team’s organic cucurbit project is exploring how some of these strategies could fit into a rational organic IPM program for important insect pests and disease. Our funding comes from the North Central Region SARE program and USDA’s Organic Research and Extension Initiative (OREI). We focus on managing two bacterial diseases - bacterial wilt and cucurbit yellow vine disease (CYVD) - and the pests that spread them: cucumber beetles and squash bugs, respectively. We’re pyramiding several IPM techniques – mesotunnels as pest barriers, living mulches to suppress weeds, and biological control – to protect marketable yield and profitability in muskmelon and acorn squash. The three states in the project are Iowa, Kentucky, and New York, so we expect that our results will apply to organic cucurbit growers in much of the eastern half of the U.S. Despite limits imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve managed to gather interesting information from field studies in all three states during 2020. We’ll summarize what we’ve been finding in later segments of this blog.

 

So please keep following us if you’re interested in learning about our results and how they might apply to your farming operation!

 

By Jose Gonzalez, Project Coordinator – Iowa State University