Management Tool Lets Growers Get Specific

Taylor Hillman Forage Crops, Pest Update, Specialty Crops, Technology, Tree, nut & vine crops

online tool

Goodell

Growers can be as specific as they want with the new UC integrated pest management (IPM) tool, organizing the wealth of knowledge from the site to suit in-field needs.

Tool Lets Growers Get Specific

Cooperative Extension IPM Advisor Pete Goodell is showing growers how the new IPM mobile tool works, and says growers can select the specific materials they are interested in. “While you’re looking at the insecticide information, we have information for resistance management about how narrow or selected or broad spectrum the product is,” Goodell says. “We have information about the impact on natural enemies and pollinators and all that is in one place as you go and make your selection. When you finish and look at the report, you get all of the information including identification photos, sampling techniques, and action and economic thresholds all in several pages.”

Goodell says the tool eliminates having to jump around internet pages on the website by organizing all of that related information. “If you were going to get the same information from our website, for an example if you’re talking about almonds, you would have to go to leaffooted bug and look at what the management approaches are. Then you would have to go over to navel orangeworm and look what the approaches are and then maybe San Jose scale and then have to jump back to leaffooted bug,” Goodell said. ” This puts it into a table-matrix type form and you can look and see which of the alternative cultural biological controls work against the individual pest, as the same with the insecticide choices so all of those alternative suggestions and approaches appear in one place.”