I am impressed with the intensity of management these different growers practice and the attention they give to details. Reacting to complex pest problems with one tool eventually fails because it does not consider problems as symptoms of a system whose intricate natural controls have collapsed. That's what natural selection as all about. More than 100,000 species of living organisms are found on most farms. Yet, only a few dozen of these are potential problems, and less than a dozen will actually be serious pests in any given year.
Pests are opportunistic species that take advantage of disruptions or changes in natural systems.
Thus, the more we understand pest species and our total ecological system, the more probable that we can devise a control tactic that will be effective, economical, and will have a minimal negative impact on the environment. To control any individual organism, one needs to understand how it relates to the ecosystem in which it operates. Virtually every case featured in this bulletin includes cover crops along with a diversity of crops and crop rotations. Every case also reports reduced pest pressure and reduced pesticide use as they learn to adjust and refine their systems. This is a very informative bulletin and we highly recommend it.