Report 6 (of 7): The Bug Business - The Netherlands

Introduction

Consumers expect food products to be healthy and safe. As a result, chemical pesticides are being slowly removed from the market and the amount now available for crop growers to use is declining. Meanwhile, the number of pest insects is increasing. Therefore, it is fortunate that the number of natural enemies that can be commercially produced is increasing as well. Alternatives to chemical pesticides, that are environmentally friendly, are being introduced onto the market and provide a viable option for producers to protect their crops.

Methods to Control Diseases and Pests in Crops

Periodic Spraying: chemical control according to a fixed schedule without specific observations of diseases or pests.

Supervised Control: chemical control when observations show that a disease or pest may cause economic damage.

Integrated Control: control of diseases and pests using a number of techniques, including a combination of biological agents and selective pesticides. The use of chemicals is minimal and the techniques tend to be more environmentally sound.

Bio-Plus: biological control is used as the key strategy of pest management with no insecticides used.

Environmentally Friendly Crop Protection

Environmentally conscious or ‘clean’ production can be achieved by maintaining a natural balance in crop production using integrated crop protection. Integrated crop protection also offers producers a greater ease of working and increases in efficiency and productivity.

Biological Agents

‘Green’ bugs are biological agents that can be used to protect greenhouses full of crops which can be destroyed by leaf miner, aphids and other insect pests. Biological agents are insects, mites and micro-organisms which are natural enemies to pest organisms and, as such, keep them under control.

Biological Crop Management

Biological Crop Management is the maximum use of natural enemies and bio-rational crop protection products against plant pests. A product, such as a vegetable, flower or plant, can now be sold to the consumer in a healthy and safe condition with the reassurance that it has been grown in an environmentally friendly manner.

Koppert Biological Systems

Koppert is the international market leader in the field of biological crop protection and natural pollination. At its world headquarters in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, large scale production of natural enemies and pollinators takes place in modern production facilities.

Koppert has developed the Bio-plus programme which enables growers to produce their crops without insecticides and provides environmentally friendly crop protection.

Most of the products from the Koppert range are living creatures and therefore, the time between dispatch from Koppert to delivery to the client must be as short as possible. The biological agents are carefully packed for transportation with some food, where possible, to help them survive.

Natural Pollination

The flowers of most fruit bearing crops must be pollinated in order for the crop to provide a good yield. Until recently, pollination in tomatoes took place with the help of an electrical vibrator which was a tedious, manual operation and very labour intensive. In 1987, it was discovered that bumble bees could provide an effective alternative to humans. They are fast and efficient workers and can visit between 10 to 20 flowers a minute during a flight. They are systematic in their approach and will visit every flower on fruit bearing crops.

The Production of Bumble Bees

Koppert started producing bumble bees. Inside a bumble bee box, a fertilised queen bee lays between 16 to 20 eggs a day. Worker bees fly in and out collecting pollen and nectar to feed the emerging bee grubs. Generally, one box of pollinating bees will last for three months. The bumble bee is supplied by Koppert under the name of NATUPOL©. It gives the grower optimal pollination without the need for maintenance.

Red Spider Mites

Red spider mites are a pest of nearly all horticultural crops under glass and outdoors. The larvae, nymphs and adult mites all cause damage to plants by feeding on the plant tissue. They have a tremendous reproductive capacity which means that they can destroy plants extremely quickly.

Predatory mites, called Phytoseiulus persimilis, feed on the eggs, nymphs and adult red spider mites. They are particularly good at locating their prey and tracking down new red spider mite colonies. The predator is supplied under the trade name SPIDEX©.

Whitefly

The whitefly sucks up large quantities of saps from plants and secretes the sugar as honeydew which makes the leaves sticky and prone to fungal growth and rot.

A tiny parasitic wasp, called Encarsia formosa, lays its eggs in the larvae of the whitefly which then turn into the friendly Encarsia rather than the whitefly pest.

The parasite is supplied in its pupal stage, attached to cards, under the trade name EN-STRIP©.

Red Star Growers

Red Star Growers is the largest tomato farm in the Netherlands, equivalent in size to fourteen football pitches. The green houses hold 28,000 plants and are protected from crop pests by the use of biological agents. Cards containing Encarsia formosa are used to combat whitefly and bumble bees are used to pollinate the flowers on the tomato plants. The tomatoes on the Red Star farm are all sustainably grown which means the growers have succeeded in maintaining a satisfactory natural balance in their crops with biological control products and have been able to safely reduce the use of pesticides.
 
 

For further information, please contact:
 

Intermediate Technology would like to thank Koppert and Red Star Growers for providing the original material and pictures on their biological crop control systems.
 

Further reading available from ITDG Development Bookshop

Controlling Crop Pests and Diseases
Rosalyn Rappaport
Covers pest and disease damage, causative agents, and methods of combatting them. As well as manual and cultural techniques, the book describes the knapsack sprayer and reveals the secrets of cheap or improvised ingredients.
£6.99, (Macmillan), 1992, ISBN 0 333 57216 5

Crop Protection Strategies for Subsistence Farmers
Miguel Altieri
'Top-down' approaches that rely on agrochemical inputs which are scarce, expensive, often unavailable when needed, and some of them ecologically toxic, have repeatedly failed to solve problems among small farmers in developing countries. Drawing on examples from Latin America, Africa and South-East Asia, this book describes crop protection strategies that rely on farmers' knowledge and participation, local resources and alternative low-input methods, as a sensitive approach to develop and implement pest management schemes adjusted to farmers' needs and their socio-economic and agroecological conditions.
£15.95, (ITP), 1993, ISBN 1 85339 205 7

Extension of Complex Issues: Success factors in integrated pest management
P. Schmidt, J. Stiefel, M. Hürlimann
£10.00, (SKAT/SDC/LBL), 1997, ISBN 3 90677 602 6

The Greening of the Revolution: Cuba's experiment with organic agriculture
Peter Rosset
£6.95, (Ocean Press), 1995, ISBN 1 87528 480 X

Integrated Pest Management : Ideals and realities in developing countries
Stephen Morse
£44.50, (Lynn Rienner), 1997, ISBN 1 555 57865 4
 

TVE/ Practical Action gratefully acknowledge support for the HANDS ON programmes from the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), the European Commission (EC), the UN Foundation and UNDP/The Equator Initiative in collaboration with the Government of Canada, IDRC, IUCN, BrasilConnects and the Nature Conservancy.