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Practices we use on our conventional farms as far as chemical controls are heavily regulated
and we also practice IPM to the tee - Integrated Pest Management.
We employ five pest control advisers who walk our ranches on a daily basis.
We use pheromone traps that are consistently checked, and we also use a degree day model,
which measures the number of degree days accumulated on a daily basis for pest cycles.
We all know that a snake sheds its skin as well as most of the pests are worms that we
have on our ranch do the same thing. And we can tell at what instar a certain pest is
just as we look at it. And we can time our sprays around that particular instar to be
most effective. It's not economical or ecological to just
go out and spray whenever we need to. And we use our IPM techniques to do the very
best to apply our chemicals in a safe manner. We use mating disruption by hanging these
small, card-like structures about the size of a playing card onto a tree branch, which
emits the scent of the female of the particular insect you're trying to protect from.
And by doing that it allows us to distract and confuse the insect to keep it away from
the fruit, rather than having to put on an additional spray drop of an insecticide to
kill that insect. In conjunction with the mating disruption
pheromones we have traps in the trees that have an individual pheromone that smells like
that insect we're trying to trap for and we can monitor those traps and if we see that
those insect levels are in excess by a number of insects in those traps.
Then we can decide to put on a pesticide if we feel that there is enough of a population
to justify that application.