Farm walk focuses on integrated management – The Fruit Grower

The second meeting of the Top Fruit Learning Network, organised by the Soil Association and Ocado once again took place at Boxford Farms in Suffolk in early June, with support from The Orchard Fruit Company. The event combined a seminar and farm walk, giving attendees plenty of opportunity to look at Boxford’s practical implementation of integrated crop management at a farm level.

The farm has introduced several measures under the SFI, such as winter bird food and grassy field corners, buffer strips, managed hedgerows and maintaining green cover through the winter on the arable land. It also includes woodland management on the golf course. “Although we’ve been doing IPM, we’ve been treating the farm as a whole,” Boxford’s Farm Director, Robert England says. “Now, with weather stations and disease models we are starting to treat blocks of land as we see different weather, even within a small relative distance. You can have a rainfall event in one block of orchards and not in another, so why spray the whole lot?”

To enable this approach, the farm is expanding the number of weather stations and using more pest and disease models, as well as looking at new options for pest trapping, allowing far more specific and targeted crop protection treatments. Using Hutchinsons’ Omnia platform, the farm has also expanded beyond field-scale soil testing to produce detailed maps of the entire farm this year for variables such as pH, phosphorus, potassium, organic matter, and organic carbon. “While we can’t do individual treatments yet, we are going down the route of precision application, whether that’s for pesticides, herbicides, or fertiliser,” he said.

The farm’s agronomic advice comes from Hutchinson’s Ivan Velasco, who explained that the first thing in IPM is the identification of the pest, and that can be done in different ways, such as walking the crop or using technology. You then need to decide if you need to treat or do something else to reduce the population of the pest or disease susceptibility. For example, at Boxford they have Magic StarTM which is scab resistant.

As well as having fewer actives to chose from, another issue is that many newer crop protection products are much more targeted, meaning that they often only control a single pest or disease, so overall more products may be necessary through an entire season, but at the same time some retailers are now limiting the number of active ingredients that can be used, making even integrated pest and disease control difficult.