Biopesticides

Biopesticides. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

More and more ag producers are finding that biopesticides are an effective way to combat various pests in the field. Bill Stoneman, is the Executive Director of the Biopesticide Industry Alliance (BPIA) an organization of 70 member companies involved in the development and marketing of biological pesticides. He talks about the timing of appplication.

STONEMAN: If you are trying to control disease, obviously you have to have the pest present, you have to have the conditions present and you have to have the host present. Well the host is there in the crop. The conditions may or may not be present. The pest is appearing. You have to wait until conditions are right under which you might be able to control that pest.

There are a lot of people that might perceive this as old fashioned technology.

STONEMAN: No, actually not. Actually most of our technologies are quite modern. Some of them are brand new discoveries. One I can mention is a brand new organism just recently described, recently registered, previously not used for these purposes and they’ve done a heck of a job defining the timing of application. They’ve got it pretty well defined. It’s high technology.

Stoneman says these biopesticides are very flexible in usage.

STONEMAN: One of the things that’s really good about what we have in our approach is that we are often used in rotation with chemistries or in combination with chemistries so it’s not like you are going back to farming the way dad did back in 1898, you’re farming in modern methods with modern hybrids or modern varieties and you are using cutting edge technologies.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.