What is IPM?

What is IPM? Cue: When you hear of pest control, what is your first thought? Perhaps you think of someone using a sprayer, or sprinkling a chemical solution onto plants using a broom. But there are many ways to protect crops from pests, and farmers can achieve very good control if they learn how to combine different strategies. This approach is commonly known as Integrated Pest Management, or IPM for short. So what is the difference between management of pests and simply killing them, for example by using a pesticide? John Nderitu is Dean of Nairobi University?s Faculty of Agriculture. Recently, he spoke to Winnie Onyimbo about some of the different methods that together, make up an integrated approach to pest management. Methods that may all the difference to winning the battle against very tricky pests? IN: ?Well we have pests like bean fly? OUT: ?only managing the pest itself.? DUR?N: 4?51? BACK ANNOUNCEMENT: Professor John Nderitu of the University of Nairobi. The interview comes from a resource pack produced by CTA. Transcript Nderitu Well we have pests like bean fly, where we combine cultural control in combination with pesticide and also using varieties that are less attacked. All those now I am saying there are about three of those combinations, and they can be effective rather than using one in isolation. Onyimbo Let?s go into the details of the different approaches like cultural and genetic. What exactly are you talking about? Nderitu Well, cultural is where you use some agronomic practices that are normally done by farmers, like ridging, planting time, plant density, even intercropping, or like companion cropping; those methods that farmers have used themselves, they may have not been intentional, but we have currently tested them and found them to be effective. Even the use of aspects like the use of ash on controlling the bruchids on beans in storage, or the use of soil on maize funnels for control of the maize stalk borer. Those are some of the cultural practices that farmers have used to control the pests. Or use of even cow dung to control the beetles on maize, the black beetles on maize in western Kenya. Onyimbo And the others what about the genetic one, the chemical one? Nderitu We have of course the varietal control where certain varieties are affected differently by a particular pest, and some may be tolerant, some might be resistant and some may be susceptible. So we go for tolerant and resistant varieties which can be able to reduce the population and therefore the damage on the crop. Of course there are also the chemicals, where in IPM we would also advocate the use of chemicals. Chemicals that are environmentally safe, chemicals that are selective to the pest they attack so that they do not attack other organisms in the environment. Chemicals that are safe to humans beside other aspects and chemicals that will be able to be selective on natural enemies that we have in the field and also chemicals that have minimum residue levels. Onyimbo How is IPM environment friendly? Nderitu The concept of IPM came in mainly with a reduction of use of insecticides. And the insecticides are the most pollutant in the environment. So IPM is a reduction of use of pesticides for controlling pests and therefore it is implied that it is directly an environmental strategy. Of course we have also biological control where you are using natural enemies. It means if it is a pest, an insect pest, you use other insects which are predators or parasites on those pests or you use the insect pathogens, diseases of those insects and multiply them to ensure that we can control the pest by use of diseases. Besides that, we have both the physical and mechanical control, in form of issues like use of greenhouses. It is a method that can be able to reduce insects from outside the greenhouse and we ensure that whatever is inside can be directly controlled and you prevent further infestation from outside. That is one reason why greenhouses are part and parcel of IPM in horticultural production. Onyimbo How different is IPM from other ways of managing pests? Nderitu IPM is a combination of methods, methods that are compatible, methods that are integrated. Other methods are individual: you may use them individually, but in IPM we try to use as much combination or methods that are effective as much as possible. Because IPM quite often is recognising that pests will still be there after you control them. Your only importance is reducing them to an economic level, that you are able to produce a crop in the presence of the minimum infestation in the crop. Other methods like chemical control may be targeted to extermination or removal totally of the pest. But this IPM is recognising that it is very? You may not completely eradicate a pest from a crop, it is only managing the pest itself. End of trackAn explanation that IPM uses a combination of strategies to manage pest