Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is the backbone of our approach to dealing with a wide array of pests in the orchard. While most field-crop farmers deal with a handful of pests for a given crop, there are well over fifty pests we pay attention to in the orchard.
IPM is an approach to pest management that employs a wide array of tools to minimize the impact of pests on food crops. This allows for a significant reduction in the use of pesticides. Since 1970, PA growers using IPM have…
•Reduced miticide use by 90%
•Reduced insecticide use by 50%
•Reduced fungicide use by 30%
Cornerstones of IPM that help us reduce pesticide use
- Monitoring pests on a regular basis and using weather data to forecast pest pressure helps us to carefully target our spray applications, avoiding unnecessary use or overuse of a particular pesticide.
- Establishing pest population tolerances helps us to determine when a spray application is warranted.
- Employing a variety of tools to control pests including biological control, horticultural practices, behavior modification, pesticides or a combination of these strategies.
We utilize biological control by encouraging beneficial microorganisms, predators, parasites and competitors. These “beneficials” require special care and can quickly go into decline if we are not careful to protect them. Beneficial microbial populations are added into our orchard via compost and nutritional sprays containing live microbes.
Horticultural practices represent a significant part of our pest prevention strategy. Choosing more disease resistant varieties and rootstocks, using careful pruning methods, and promoting soil fertility and tree health (See “Beyond IPM” below) are some of the strategies we use.
For some pests, we can modify their behavior with mating disruption pheromones and other methods.
All of the above practices set the stage for a more minimalist approach to pesticide application.
Beyond IPM
While IPM provides a solid framework for us to manage the orchard, it does little to guide us in enriching tree fruit nutrition and soil fertility as the first line of defense against disease and other pests. Just like the human body, a tree with balanced nutrition and beneficial organisms is more likely to resist disease (think nutrition and probiotics). Nutrition equals genetic expression and resistance to disease. The goal here is to give the trees the foundation to resist disease rather than merely killing their pests. While the average orchard spends approximately $100/acre/year on fertility amendments, we spend over $200/acre/year.
Here are some things we do that go beyond IPM:
- Our blends of fall and spring soil fertilizers include no petroleum-based fertilizers. They are a combination of the following: mined minerals, compost, and living beneficial organisms. As an added bonus, the living microbes in these mixes help to break down residual pesticides.
- In the spring, we spray the orchard floor with a mix of living microbes, compost tea, seaweed, kelp, molasses, fish, minerals, and vitamins.
- Through the summer, we spray the tree canopy of our stone fruits and our experimental block of apples with a mix of minerals, vitamins, fish, kelp, compost extracts, and a variety of living microbes. This nutritional spray has made a significant impact on preventing certain diseases and maladies in our stone fruits.
We do not use soil fumigation to kill soil diseases (nematodes). Instead, we inoculate the soil with beneficial microorganisms to compete with the soil disease organisms. We've found that the beneficial microbes in our orchards are out-competing the disease organisms.
- We feel the above practices have contributed to consistent flavor and high brix (soluble sugars and minerals) in the fruit - making the fruit more nutritious and delicious.
Bringing back “An Apple-A-Day” is a motto that depicts our efforts to cut through the limitations of food labels and simply grow food that is packed with the nutrition your body needs and thrives on. Several recent studies have shown significant decline in the nutrients present in the national food supply in the last 50+ years. Various factors are contributing to this nutrient decline including the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the loss of soil fertility, genetic losses due to plant breeding, and the indiscriminate use of nutrient-inhibiting herbicides. What was once “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” may now well mean consuming 3-5 times as much fruit as your great-grandpa to achieve the same nutrient intake. Surprisingly, very little public or private effort has been made toward reversing this trend. Even organic certification has no standard for nutrient density - only what materials may be applied to the crop in question.
We are going “beyond IPM” in an effort to reverse these nutrient losses. In addition, our experimental block of herbicide-free apples is a research-work-in-progress. Apples are said to be the last frontier in organic farming, yet in 2014, we were able to achieve an 80% reduction in the amount of conventional pesticides typically used in an IPM apple orchard!
It seems to us that farmers and consumers could aspire to a new benchmark for fruit-growing practices. Raising the bar on nutrient density in our food will mean that the researcher will begin to explore the answers to some new questions, that the farmer must do a daring dance with innovation and tradition, and that the consumer will hobnob with the farmer, learn what only the farmer can tell, and believe that beauty is only skin deep – even for apples.