Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
application of pesticides, spraying for DM only when necessary. In one of
my earliest interviews with the farm advisors, in the summer of 1997, the
plant pathology advisor described the DM weather station project and
some initial results:
PlantPath:
We're trying to control diseases, in the most economic way,
and also [in a] way that is less disruptive to the environment. So, [DM] for
example . . . is an important foliar disease on lettuce. We know we can
spray for it; we're trying to fi nd ways to spray less for it, so that we can
conserve chemicals and introduce less of [them] to the environment. That
covers [several] priorities: it's an economic concern, it's a high priority for
the industry, [and] there's environmental issues.
CRH:
Is that a project that you're working on now?
PlantPath:
Mm hmm. It's kind of an interesting project. . . . We have
these new . . . weather stations that go out into the fi eld. And, by radio
telemetry, they radio . . . to us all these environmental parameters. We
have a model, that based on those parameters, can predict whether disease
will come or not. And if the weather station beams the data and the com-
puter processes it and says, yes there'll be downy mildew this week, we'll
tell the grower to go spray. If it says no, it's too warm or too dry or what-
ever, don't spray, we'll tell the grower, don't spray, your risk is light. And
we want to, again, conserve chemicals and reduce that input. So we're
trying to test that system right now.
CRH:
How's it working so far?
PlantPath:
Uh, so far ambiguous—you know, a couple cases looked prom-
ising, and others, it looked like it fl opped. The model was developed at
Davis and worked well in [the laboratory]. . . . So, that's a good start but
we want to now implement it here and see if it works commercially. So
far we're not real happy with it. We think a better-proved model is proba-
bly called for, but we're still in the middle of testing that.
Note that the plant pathology advisor emphasized, at the outset, the
importance of linking environmental and economic concerns. DM was a
good problem to work on because it was important to the industry (caused
a lot of economic damage) and required a lot of pesticides (caused potential
environmental damage). The advisor also pointed to some of the varied
groups involved in developing this system, of which there were many.
Finally, he mentioned that the initial use of the system had given mixed
