Eliminating even one of these factors reduces the viability of the business of commercial fruit production. Understanding the risks these elements pose for disease development, however, is an important step in the design and implementation of effective disease management programs that do not decrease the overall efficiency of production. The terms 'control' and 'management' are often used interchangeably when, in fact, they imply quite different approaches. In the early 1970s, J. Lawrence Apple summarized this issue nicely. Control, he suggests, implies a degree of dominance by man over nature that is simply not possible.
Control also conveys a notion of finality, of having controlled and, thereby, dispatched a problem.
Furthermore, should that problem develop again, the control action need only be repeated. Management, by contrast, implies an ongoing process that continues throughout a season and from season to season for the life of the crop. Management also implies that pathogens and pests are regular components of the agroecosystem and that our primary aim is to reduce the harm they cause rather than to annihilate them. Plant disease management, then, is the knowledgeable selection and use of all appropriate strategies and tactics to suppress the harm caused by disease to an acceptable level. At the same time, we have all experienced fire blight epidemics that are relatively minor affairs.