Agrotechnology

Cultural practices for management of agricultural insect pests

2^nd International Conference on Agricultural & Horticultural Sciences

Radisson Blu Plaza Hotel, Hyderabad, India February 03-05, 2014

M Jyothsna, V Vishwamitra and K Nagaswathi

Posters: Agrotechnol

Abstract:

Cultural practices include all the crop production and management techniques which are utilized by the farmers to maximize their crop productivity and farm income. It includes decisions on crops to be grown, time and manner of planting, tillage, field and crop sanitation, application of fertilizers and irrigation, harvesting times and procedures and even off-season operations in fallow/cropped fields. The manipulation of these practices for reducing or avoiding pest damage to crops is known as cultural control. Management of insect pests by cultural practices include deep ploughing during summer expose the pupa in the fields, pruning of twigs or branches to eliminate borers in mango and citrus, use of resistant varieties, manipulation of planting time helps to minimize pest damage by producing asynchrony between host plant and the pest or synchronizing insect pests with their natural enemies or crop production with available alternate host plants of the pest (early sowing of sorghum crop helps to escape the attack of sorghum shoot fly), closer spacing resulted in lower incidence of green leafhopper, rice hispa and whorl maggot, tillage (fall ploughing is often helpful in reducing the overwintering population of Helicoverpa spp. and several species of cutworms that undergo diapauses in the soil during winter), crop Rotation (cereals followed by pulses), intercropping (intercropping of cotton with black gram, green gram, cowpeas etc. is reported to divert the population of sucking pests and American bollworm from cotton), trap crop (marigold as trap crop for Helicoverpa ), clipping of tips of rice seedlings before transplanting avoids chance of stem borer to lay eggs, nutrient management (high levels of nitrogen fertilizers significantly increase the incidence of most of the insect pests including yellow stem borer, leaf folder, gall midge, green leafhopper, BPH, WBPH, earhead bug, rice hispa, whorl maggot etc.), water management (flooding of fields has been recommended for reducing the attack of cutworms, armyworms, termites, white grubs etc.), sanitation (de-trashing of dry leaves from august onwards reduces the attack of leafhopper and scale insect on sugarcane crop), harvesting practices (deep harvesting of cane fields which are to be ratooned provides protection to the crop from root borer and scale insect damage) etc. These practices are well suited for use with other approaches of an IPM.