Snow Pea IPM Workshop

Gippsland Snow Pea growers benefited from the recent Integrated Pest Management workshop at Korumburra.

The workshop was delivered by Dr Paul Horne and Jessica Page from IPM Technologies P/L.

Growers learnt from Paul and Jessica about the three components of effective pest control; Biological, Cultural and Chemical controls.

“Apart from chemical methods, growers weren’t too familiar with other ways of controlling pests”, said Paul.

Regular Crop Scouting for pests and beneficial insects was shown to be necessary for making the best pest control decisions.

A good crop monitoring program will also reveal failures in the pest control program, well before harvest.

This led to much discussion among growers and raised many questions including:

What are we looking for ?

How often should we scout the crop ?

How can we tell which insects we find ?

The practical part of the workshop gave growers the opportunity to identify a variety of pest and beneficial insects.

Some of the important insects in pea crops were so small, a magnifying glass was needed to see them.

Snow Pea Growers, Fausto Macri, Lou Condoluci, Rob Cannatta
and Tony Auddino,
at the IPM workshop with Paul Horne.

The Workshop discussed some of the main pests of pea crops including Helicoverpa and Thrips, and introduced a IPM strategy to control these pests.

Several growers stayed on after the workshop to discuss various issues with the IDO and among themselves.

East Gippsland young grower and VGA member, Matt Zagami, said it was well worth his 3+ hours travel to attend the workshop and he’d like to see more.

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