Karin Tifft featured in urban Ag News:
Making integrated pest and disease management work
“Ironically, one of the biggest misconceptions greenhouse growers have with controlling pests and diseases is actually related to the success of their control programs,” said Karin Tifft, an integrated pest and disease management (IPDM) consultant. “If growers are doing a good job, it seems simple. But when things go wrong, they can go wrong in a big way.”
Tifft works primarily with greenhouse vegetable growers to develop IPDM programs. While she doesn’t yet have any ornamental plant growers as clients, she said she expects setting up an effective IPDM program for ornamentals would be more challenging because the whole plant needs to look good, not just the fruit. In a recent interview with Urban Ag News, she said that ornamental growers actually have more natural enemies and chemical options than food crop producers. “Microgreens and lettuce probably come the closest to selling the whole plant like with ornamentals,” she said. “The difference is that microgreens and lettuce are such short term crops that there is not a lot of time for pest and disease pressures to build up as much. However, this does not mean proactive treatments, as in the release of natural enemies, are not needed. The greenhouse is never usually empty when growing lettuce and greens.”
Tifft said an IPDM program can incorporate multiple techniques, including cultural, chemical and biological.
“My specialty is what I call Bio-IPDM, biologically-based integrated pest and disease management,” she said. “I focus first on using natural enemies where I can. For the disease aspect, I look a lot at cultural control. This includes the ways disease can be prevented in the first place or limiting the spread and economic losses.”
Read the complete article with Tifft, written by Dave Kuack, at Urban Ag News