Project Overview
Information Products
Commodities
- Additional Plants: ornamentals, cut flowers
Practices
- Farm Business Management: budgets/cost and returns
- Pest Management: field monitoring/scouting, integrated pest management
Summary:
Crop losses due to certain key pests like cucumber beetles, aphids, thrips, lepidoptera larvae, fusarium and more have been persistent problems in the organic cut flower industry. Currently, there is a minimal amount of readily available and regionally-specific information regarding sustainable Integrated Pest Management (IPM) practices for organic cut flower farms that are effective and economical. The question our research project is answering is what IPM methods are cost-effective for reducing losses due to key pests. This project is utilizing monitoring, data collection, and analysis; followed by implementation, further monitoring and data collection, and additional refinement as needed.
During the monitoring phase, we identified key pests. During analysis, after identifying the highest pressure pests, establishing economic thresholds, and analyzing what the best sustainable management methods are, we implemented those methods, and continued to monitor and record pest pressure and efficacy of the implementation utilized.
The significance of this project was the development of research material on central coast pests on an organic cut flower farm that were and continue to be shared with the broader community, as well as decreasing pest pressure at Do Right Flower Farm. We have disseminated existing research, tools and techniques for monitoring, project results, and IPM methodologies to the wider agricultural community through social media postings, the ASCFG newsletter, two bilingual field days, and two off-site educational events, and a virtual final presentation that is recorded and available on youtube. This final research report should help inform other growers in the region on successful methods to control key pests, ideally giving other producers better information and methods to improve yields and profits across all central coast organic flower productions.
Project objectives:
Research:
- Identify key pests affecting a Central Coast CA organic cut flower farm.
- Research and determine cost-effective sustainable IPM methods for suppressing key pests.
- Reduce losses from key pests.
Education:
- Share research findings (research data, economic impact, implementation strategies) with local Central Coast growers and farm educators in English and Spanish.
- Share tools and methods for monitoring so that they can be reproducible on other farms.