Organic agriculture ensures healthy food, soil, plants and the environment through the absence of the usage chemicals. Certain pest e.g. insects, weed, pathogens could be detrimental to cultivated crops and therefore the need to employ the appropriate control measure.
Pest control measures other than chemicals are usually adopted from natural sources or optimization of the cropping systems e.g. adopting crop rotations to break disease or pest cycles, or usage of resistant or tolerant varieties.
Weed control in organic systems is mostly achieved by mechanical means e.g. hoeing, mowing etc.
Organic Crop Protection; Organic crop protection refers to the measures used to prevent, control or remedy disease infection or insect pest or weed infestation in cultivated crops.
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Crop Pest in Organic Crop Production
Crop pest include: insects, weed, pathogens (fungi, bacteria, virus and nematodes), invertebrates and vertebrate animals.
Organic Pest Management Strategies
There are three management strategies used in pest control, namely: prevention, monitoring and suppression.
Identification and monitoring: identification of pest and their natural enemies is an important step to adequately manage pest. Monitoring is the regular inspection of field crops for pest to determine their abundance and level of damage. The information gathered helps to the decision making regarding management and evaluation of control methods.
In conclusion, Crop protection in organic crop production systems can be achieved if fields are monitored or observed regularly and pest are identified early.
This will help determine the abundance of the pest and level of damage which will consequently guide in the decision making regarding management methods to be adopted.
Organic crop protection refers to the measures used to prevent, control or remedy crop pest namely: insects, weed, pathogens (fungi, bacteria, virus and nematodes), invertebrates and vertebrate animals.
Management strategies used in these pest controls are prevention, monitoring and adoption of appropriate measures to suppress the pest.
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