Growing Healthy Crops

I am frequently asked how to grow crops organically. The steps are fairly basic:

• maintain soil organic matter
  
• rotate the crops
  
• use clean seed, healthy transplants
  
• plant well-adapted, pest resistant cultivars
  
• minimize environmental and nutritional stresses
  
• conserve or enrich populations of beneficials
  
• know the limits of Agroecosystem
  
• Use IPM - treat with appropriate pest control products when needed

Healthy soils need good levels of soil organic matter. This helps to recycle nutrients, reduce leaching of nutrients, improves water drainage, increases water holding capacity, reduces erosion, reduces compaction, etc. Your crop will only be as good as the plants you start with. Get the right genetics and get the crop off to a healthy start. Use pest resistant varieties whenever possible. Minimize stresses on the plant. The first five steps are basic to any crop production program and have been expounded upon for over a hundred years. Current research continues to prove they are the most important steps to healthy crops.

Knowing the limit of the ecosystem has not been top of mind in agricultural decision making but it is important to protect the environment and there is more information as to how farmers can contribute. Different soils, wildlife habitat conditions, ground and surface conditions will all contribute to the potential risks of your farming operation. Programs like the Environmental Farm Plan can enhance awareness of the issues.

Beneficials come in many forms. We all know of beneficial insects such as lady bugs as well as parasitic wasps or pirate bugs that eat other insects. There are the ground beetles of various types that help to break down organic matter and crop reisdues near the soil surface. There are hawks that eat rodents in the orchard. There are earthworms that breakdown organic matter to release soil nutrients and nematodes that kill insects. Some beneficial fungi kill insects, some outcompete other disease fungi and some such as mycorrhizae attach to plants roots to help roots get more nutrients such as phosphorous. Rhizombium are the beneficial bacteria that allow legumes to fix nitrogen. And then there are the pollinating insects. Everything we do affects beneficials. The challenge is to know how to reduce the negative effects and to enhance beneficials whenever possible.

When farmers ask how to manage a particular pest - weed, insect, disease, etc - they usually want to know what product will kill them. The first seven steps in the above list are often overlooked in importance, but they are very important to the overall pest management plan for the crop. Organic farmers rely on the first seven steps to be the heart of their pest management plan and with some tolerance for low level damage it can work fairly well. Pest management can be further enhanced when needed by some biological products such as pheromones or beneficial organisms such as fungi or bacteria that can be specific to help the control of particular pests. Some of these products are currently registered in Canada (example Bt - Bacillus thuriengensis) and there are many more in development (such as Bacillus subtilis, Beauvaria bassiana, Pseudomones flourescens, etc).

Non-organic farmers frequently turn to chemical pesticides for pest control which are very effective. These should however always be used in combination with all of the other tools (the first seven steps) that we have to produce healthy plants and crops.

A successful year will the result of having healthy crops. Use all of the tools and the information you have to get there.

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