What is Integrated Pest Management?

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is a strategy of pest control, which integrates all available tactics to reduce pest populations to an acceptable level in a cost-effective, environmentally rational manner. Tactics include applying the knowledge of pest life cycles, monitoring to detect the presence of the pest in a crop, and determining the levels that are damaging. Various control strategies are employed, including cultural (sanitation, weed elimination, and cultivar selection), physical (screening, using sticky traps), environmental (use of climate conditions), chemical (selection of compatible pesticides), and last but not least biological controls (introduction of parasites and predators).

An IPM programme must be custom designed for each crop, each farm and each particular way of growing.

Integrated Pest Management: Why?

The main driving force to use biological control comes from the resistance of pests to chemicals. Many imported pests have high levels of resistance. Moreover pests continue to develop resistance to pesticides, particularly in horticultural crops where frequent application of pesticides exert strong selection pressure on insects. Striking examples are the problems caused by Liriomyza triflii, Liriomyza huidobrensis, Aphis gossypii and Bemsisia tabaci. Using natural enemies (beneficial insects) can now control most of these: usually the only viable option.

This development of developing new pesticides is becoming more and more expensive, due partly to environmental concern, which results in tighter registration requirements. Consequently fewer pesticides are likely to become available to the horticultural market and so more opportunities for biological control will arise.

Environmental concern has become a political issue and many governments want to reduce the use of chemicals. This results in a greater demand for alternatives to the currently used alternative methods.

IPM is an abbreviation for INTEGRATED PEST MANAGEMENT, which means that pests should be controlled as much as possible with biological products. When there is no other possibility, the pest should be controlled with chemicals but in a way as to ensure that a biological product can take over the control.

 The changing attitude of consumers and supermarket chains towards produce treated with chemicals is the main market driving force that stimulates IPM.

 The competition between growers' co-operatives and between retail outlets strongly favours biological control

 Another direct advantage of using beneficials is the health of the employees in the field. They will not suffer any possible chemical damage, physically. Not only will people have less stress due to not using pesticides, but the plant too will not stop growing.

Due to better circumstances for the plant, it will have fewer problems with fungi, which will in turn mean less spraying with fungicides.

Spraying less with pesticides and fungicides will mean less labour costs.

To meet the challenge of the 21 st Century; high international standards, increase possibilities to export produce to world markets, personal health and high quality produce, growers are increasingly required to use “clean” products. Legal requirements and market developments on a global scale are now making this essential.

Tomagro International B.V. is committed to this challenge and is determined to meet the needs of it's clients by supplying them with the appropriate products, technical support and advice to do so.

 One way that this can be done is to maintain a natural balance in the crop using integrated crop protection, a combination of selective pesticides and biological agents.

 Biological agents are insects, mites and micro-organisms which as natural enemies keep pest organisms under control. By incorporating these agents in crop production, economic damage to the crop can be prevented. Economically too, using biological crop protection correctly can favourably compare to using traditional methods.

 With the backup of Koppert B.V. production of biological control methods and technical know-how, supplied by the Koppert research centre in Holland, Tomagro International B.V. can offer a complete service to it's clients: advice on what products to be used; fast processing of orders and dispatch of supplies; after sales technical support and visits to the field, all contribute to an efficient comprehensive service to the client.

The research centre, with state-of-the-art equipment, an entomological and microbiological laboratory and a separate laboratory for pollination and bumble bee research is staffed by 25 employees.

Contacts with numerous researchers and research institutions all over the world, such as the Agricultural University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, keep the company abreast of developments world-wide with a wealth of useful scientific information.

Working together with Koppert and our clients in the field, we aim to see the efficient methods of the present day farmer to be widely available to the farming communities in our markets.

Integrated Pest Management: a changing government policy

After years of increasing pesticide sales in the developed world, stabilization and even a reduction occurred at the start of the 1990's, particularly in West Europe where pesticide sales decreased with 20% in 1992 (expressed as sales value). In the Netherlands the reduction was 42% in 1993, when compared with average pesticide use in the period 1984-1988 (expressed in volume used).

Several European governments, e.g. Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, have made programmes to reduce the use, the emission and the dependence on pesticides. The programmes are not merely aimed at banning pesticides, but to create alternative, sustainable means of control. The three programmes are at different stages of implementation. The Swedish programme was the first and achieved a 50% reduction in pesticide use between 1987 and 1990, and a further cut of 50% is presently implemented. The Danish program achieved a 25% reduction by the year 1990.

 The Dutch programme started in 1991 and is well on schedule with an aimed reduction of 50% or more by the year 2000. In all programmes a sub goal is to replace environmentally critical pesticides with less harmful ones. In the new pesticide registration guidelines, the Dutch authorities have included the condition that first the usefulness of alternatives has to be evaluated before a pesticide can be registered. The Swedish government is working along the same idea and hopefully the European Union will also include the requirement that pesticides will be registered only if no alternative, non-chemical methods are available.

Other factors than pesticide reduction policies influence the need to search for new ways of crop protection. In Central Europe the pesticide market decreased 50% in value between 1989 and 1993, which was a direct effect of increased prices for pesticides, withdrawal of state agricultural subsidies and reduced crop plantings (Dawson, 1994). The number and amounts of conventional pesticides used will continue to decline in the near future for a variety of reasons such as:

1. Continued development of resistance against chemical pesticides

2. More stringent (re)-registration procedures

3. Decreased success ratio in identifying new pesticides

4. Higher costs of development and registration of pesticides

5. Public concern about health and environment

6. Industry's decision not to re-register because costs will not be recovered on minor crops

7. Government's decision to ban pesticides further, effective chemical pesticides are not available for many soil borne pests and insect-vectored pathogens (Hardy, 1993).

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