MY IPM AND NUFFIELD JOURNEY HAS STARTED… Is the adoption of IPM (integrated pest management) a journey? A journey of change required to react to changing market demands; a journey of learning, stemming from wanting to do something different to protect natural beneficials and predators; a journey to increasing profitability from the production of a crop grown to an IPM enhanced standard? Teresa Meadows, Nuffield Scholar 2020, shares her thoughts as she sets out to look at this topic in more depth.
The start of my global Nuffield journey has shown these themes developing through the conversations held with farmers, growers, consultants, researchers, CEO’s and organisations across the world. I am looking at how we can learn from these people and practices around the world to be able to increase the uptake of integrated pest management in the arable sector back here in the UK. Embracing the virtual world over the last few months, I have had the pleasure of speaking to people both at home and abroad from the comfort of my home office. I have spoken to those who are long established IPM practitioners, such as Andrew Watson, cotton grower of Australia; those that are carrying out research so that an IPM approach can be adopted, such as Sarah Mansfield, researcher on pasture pests in New Zealand or those that are taking those practices out to the field, such as Vinod Pandit, running the Plantwise programme in Nepal. The conversations from Bangladesh to Switzerland and the US to Germany have covered crops including leeks, cotton, pumpkins, tomatoes, onions, pasture,
The faces of Nuffield conversations, 2020
cut flowers; protected glasshouse and field crops and every conversation has been had with someone with an enthusiasm and a passion for the topic of IPM, in its different guises. There have been so many highlights already and many conversations that have served to provoke or change thinking. A selection of these are included below…
Putting IPM at the start and heart of a programme Fargro’s IPM specialists, Neil Helyer and Ant Surrage (www.fargro.co.uk/) work hard with their horticulture growers on creating IPM programmes – putting cultural control and biological approaches first and at the heart of what they do…and only using chemical approaches as a last resort. Can we change our mindset in the arable sector to design an ‘IPM programme’ for our crops, rather than a ‘fungicide/ herbicide programme’? There are lots of good examples of IPM being employed across our sector, but do we bring this together as a holistic IPM programme at the centre of what we do for everything, and name it that? Perhaps not quite yet?
Monitoring to increase understanding Andrew Watson, cotton and arable farmer in Australia (Twitter: @bugs_r_ us) has driven the use of recording through the season, not solely of crop growth stages, but also of pests and natural enemy levels and has gained so 12 DIRECT DRILLER MAGAZINE
ISSUE 13 | APRIL 2021
