Pest management in Wayne County
- Frank Becker, OSU Extension Wayne County
- June 24, 2022
- 864
For farmers, commercial fruit and vegetable growers and home gardeners alike, this time of year keeps us busy. Our time is consumed by planting, taking care of weeds, and doing our best to make sure our crop is taken care of.
Once seeds are sowed and transplants are rehomed in the ground, there is commonly an underlying sense of worry. What insects may be damaging my plants? Is my crop going to be infected with a disease? Are they receiving enough water? All of these concerns, among others, are all important questions when thinking about crop care, and on a broader scope, plant health management.
One of the most critical components of plant health management is integrated pest management. Integrated pest management is a strategy of pest management that focuses on long term prevention of pests, diseases, and weeds by using a combination of techniques such as cultural control, mechanical control, biological control and chemical control. These management methods combined with prevention measures, identification, and monitoring allow for increased financial savings and environmentally sound pest management decisions.
Did you know that the Ohio State University Extension Office in Wayne County has an Integrated Pest Management Program? Since 1978, the county has had an IPM program. Some of you may recognize the name Ron Becker. Ron, (my dad) was critically important in maintaining the existence of this program. During the late 70’s, every county in the state had an IPM program. By the mid- 80’s, this number dropped to only a handful of counties, and present day, we are the only county with a program like this left.
This program initially offered crop scouting primarily to agronomic farmers. Starting in the 1990s, the program began enrolling acres of peppers, tomatoes, and strawberries. Today, the program is involved with an extremely diverse range of commercially grown crops including orchards, small fruit, field grown vegetables, high tunnel production, cut flowers, greenhouse production, agronomic crops (organic and conventional) and other specialty crops like sunflowers grown for oilseed production.
This year, our IPM program covers over 2,600 acres of crops weekly, looking for pests, disease or other factors impacting crop health. Additionally, our program deploys an extensive network of pest monitoring traps that help us determine pest populations in and around the production areas. Our program sets out over 100 traps in all kinds of crops and covers nearly every corner of the county, which makes out program one of, if not the largest, trapping networks in the state. All of our numbers are recorded and shared with the state IPM program. The trapping network can be found online at u.osu.edu/jasinski.4/pestvisualization. The goal of our county program is to work with stakeholders to help them make educated and effective pest management decisions using IPM methods and strategies.
Whether you are a commercial vegetable grower, large acreage ag crop farmer or you have a small garden at your home, it’s good to know what’s going on in the area around you. Accordingly, I want to share a short program report with you on what we are seeing in the fields.
For you folks with fruits and vegetables, the recent weather conditions have been favorable to development of some bacterial diseases. In fruit trees, we began to find some cases of fire blight. This bacterial disease is caused by the bacterium Erwinia amylovora. Rain, heavy dews, and high humidity combined with temperatures over 65 F are the prime conditions for fire blight infection. Management of this disease for homeowners and small-scale growers relies heavily on planting less susceptible varieties. There are some chemical management options for large scale growers.
We also began to find a few instances of a bacterial disease in onions called slippery skin, which was confirmed by the vegetable pathology lab at OARDC. Slippery skin is caused by Pseudomonas gladioli. This bacterium is spread via soil splashing from heavy rains and enters the plant through natural openings or openings from mechanical injury. For those with vegetables, you’ll also want to keep an eye out for some problem insect pests, like cucumber beetle, Colorado potato beetle, flea beetle and squash bugs.
For agronomic crop growers, overall, the disease and insect pressure right now is low. Some slug damage occurred in the previous weeks to emerging crops, but at this point we are starting to exit the window of opportunity for slug damage to be detrimental.
If you’d like to read more about our crop scouting updates and receive free weekly updates on insect and disease presence and some helpful IPM tips and recommendations, you can subscribe on our page, u.osu.edu/waynecountyipm. More in-depth reports on agronomic crops/alfalfa, fruit and vegetables are available on this site and weekly updates will be published through the end of the growing season.
Frank Becker is the Wayne County OSU Extension Agriculture & Natural Resources Integrated Pest Management Program Coordinator, and a Certified Crop Adviser, and may be reached at 330-264-8722 or becker.587@osu.edu.