Rocket Blog

Beneficial Insects

In an effort to use fewer chemicals, Rocket Farms recently began utilizing beneficial insects as part of a biological crop protection plan. Greenhouse crops can be sensitive to a variety of pests, and the more diverse your crops are the more diverse the insects that are attracted to them. The traditional reactive approach would be to wait for pests to appear and then apply the appropriate chemical to control them.

Rocket Farms employs another method called integrated pest management where we try to be proactive with beneficial insects before problems start to occur. For example, if we have a crop that we know has a high risk of thrips, we would introduce a higher rate of known thrip predators like Amblyseius swirskii, a predatory mite that feeds on thrips and their larvae and will travel throughout the greenhouse looking for more thrips to eat. Or we might use Encarsia Formosa, a tiny wasp that lays its eggs inside larvae and after they hatch the young wasps feed on their hosts.

When managed properly the use of biological predators is a great way to reduce pesticide usage and reduce stress for the plants. Another method to control pests is the use of “banker plants” or “trap plants” in the greenhouse. These are plants other than the crop that are attractive to certain insects that will attract pests to them instead of the main crop. In addition, biological predators can then be introduced on the trap plants where they will have plenty of food, creating an in-house breeding system for beneficial insects (hence the term “banker plant”).

All in all, biological control is just one more tool we use to create better plants and reduce chemical use, which benefits us all all of us in the long run.

Comments

Jane Ramirez commented on 20-Nov-2010 09:50 AM

Like your blog post about the beneficial insects you use, very interesting! I never knew there was a mite that could be used to combat thrips yet not harmful to the host plants. It's probably more effective than chemicals that not only cost money but eventually end up in our groundwater as well.

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