MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

 This is the second week of the fruit teams beginning fruit grower track. As part of Michigan Ag Ideas to Grow With, which is a month-long program, show, show-and can't talk anymore- It's Monday morning, it's okay. -sharing agricultural information with everyone. Like I said, this is the fruit track. We're happy to have you here. Part of this is possible through the support of Greenstone Farm Credit Services and Oh, no, that wasn't what I wanted, and North Central Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education. Like I've mentioned before, this is the second week of the fruit teams Back to fundamentals of growing fruit series. And this week we're focusing on pest and diseases, which is why we have the lovely Amy Irish-Brown and Mike Reinke here today to talk to you guys. That's all. And so like we did last time, if you were here with us last time, this will all culminate in a panel discussion on Friday where we bring in our lovely experts and we answer questions and a little different than last week. If you guys have any pests or diseases or questions that you might have, if you send it me or mike pictures, we can talk about them on Friday. Hopefully, there'll still be a little bit time for questions at the end of each presentation. But don't  you fret. We can talk about all your pest related woes on Friday. And with that. We'll let Mike start. Are you ready, Mike? I am ready. I said that, that didn't sound as exciting as it is, right? I am totally ready. I'm in. I'm geeked. Good call. Okay. You got my screen. My screen set up, right? Cheyenne? I can I can see you. Okay. Perfect. So as Cheyenne said, this week is our pest and disease week. So we are wanting, so the insect pass the diseases, whatever of all the different fruit crops that we can grow here in the state. But we wanted to kind of prime the conversation with a little more of the fundamentals of what it takes to manage these pests. So that when we get to talking about them over the coming days, we have a better understanding as to how to incorporate the information we're getting. So one of the core modern management strategies For under, for taking care of your pests is what's called IPM. So the question is, what is IPM? I'm not going to tell you exactly what it is, but you can kind of guess what it is based on several conversations we've had. So, but before we go into what IPM is, bear with me for a minute or two here Let's talk about a little bit of the history of farming so that we can understand what was and what we are, where we are now with dealing with pest management. Thinking about traditional agriculture, this, I'm thinking about agriculture before the industrial revolution, before we had all of these modern practices. Now what would we do? How did we manage our farms? How did we manage our pest problems? Well, it was very much a kind of, you know, it was a difficult thing, but it was done one at a time. It was done very laboriously. It was done very personally, was done by hand, it was done by the person. We had small farms because we didn't have the ability to farm- We didn't have the equipment to manage large tracks of land. It was high labor because we didn't have the machinery to run available. We didn't have that many chemical options because we didn't have modern biochemistry and modern chemistry. So it was, it was a lot of other practices. We used different types of plants, we use different types of growing situations. We used people would just pick the, the diseases and pests off the crop to protect it. So we incorporated lots of things. But once we, but we had a fundamental shift with the advent of modern techniques and tools. It was right around the, the two world wars. Some people want to say before World War II, a lot of people say after World War 2, but we had this massive modernization. People, a lot of people will call it the Green Revolution, where we incorporated mechanization into things. We, we had tractors, we had threshers, we had harvesting equipment, we had pesticide spraying options, like the airplane here. So we had this allowed for a lots of consolidation. Larger farms, large advances in breeding of resistant plants are plants that could be grown in other areas. It also increase, Increase start irrigation capabilities. But for the purpose of today, I just also want to say we really get lost A lot of those tools orkind of temporarily forgot about a lot of those tools that we did to manage our paths and all that, that and focused on using chemistry, using synthetic pesticides because it was easy, it was quick, It it allowed them to focus on other aspects of farming. The problem is we relying on one tool, created a bottleneck of, of capabilities. It, it gave us a lot of problems that were not sustainable. One was just this, the development of resistance. Insects and diseases are living organisms with populations. As they reproduce, they you know certain genetics are more resistant to certain conditions than others. And if you're putting at this chemical in the environment, you kill off the ones that are susceptible and the ones that are more capable of surviving that chemistry will keep thriving and you if that's all you're relying on to control these past, you get resistance build-up. And we had concerns for residues on, on crops all the time because these were these first, these early pesticides where you lived in the environment a long time and they were highly toxic to a wide range of organisms. We, and that also caused a problem with the non-target insects. You know, people used to rely before this point would rely on beneficial insects, natural enemies, parasitoids, other things like that to help manage their pests. And when you put out a broad spectrum pesticide, it kills not just what you're going for, but lots of other stuff. So this it very quickly prompted a retaliatory kind of movement in, in several countries, including here in the US. And it reached a tipping point in the late, in the mid to late 60s. One of which we all in this, those of us who are in this world really like to talk about the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and a lot of you may know it, but if you haven't, it was a pivotal document that really spoke to the problems of reliance on just chemistry, just chemicals for pest management. So and this movement also prompted the development of the environmental, the EPA. The development of other laws like the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, which prompted legal registration of chemicals for pest management. So we can start managing these other concerns that chemicals, the chemicals bring in. And it also prompted people to start thinking more integrated. Looking, looking back before this reliance on, on other tools. And so that's what brought us. Welcome back to this idea of integration of tool, of multiple methods for pest management. And so this definition is, there are multiple definitions on the Internet and from other sources. This is my personal favorite and I'm just breaking it down here and then I'll read it. But my integrated pest management is sustainable. That's one of its core tenets. It's also based on science. You have to understand multiple aspects objectively of the farming condition. It uses multiple tools, biological, cultural, physical, and chemical. So chemicals are part of it, but they're not only part of management. And you need to identify, manage, and reduce your risks as well. And the ultimate goal is to minimize overall economic health and environmental risks. So you put it all together. The definition is, of IPM is, sustainable, science-based decision-making process that combines biological, cultural, physical, and chemical tools to identify, manage, and reduce risk from pests. and the pest management tools and strategies in a way that minimizes overall economic health and environmental risks. So let's break that down a little more. So that we can understand what each of those little parts really means. So the three basic principles of IPM, are prevention, monitoring and suppression. So let's go into each of those just a little bit here. What is prevention? Multiple multiple methods can go into prevention. Basically, what you're doing is you're preventing whatever that pest or disease is from getting to your fruit trees, fruit bushes, fruit vines. In the first place. This could be through past exclusion, like a lot of the photos there of various screening systems for apples. In this case. People will do it for screens or some other method for lots of fruit. Sanitation is another example. That's where we talk about making sure the soil is clean or the, the plants are clean of this when you, before you even purchase them or bare roots. Shipment of plants to prevent soil concerns in the first place. Site selection, which we've gotten into a little bit in the first week, talking about resistant varieties. We talked about that a little bit when talking about varietal selection. And this isn't really a big deal in fruit crops, but it's a really big one in annual cropping systems, but it's crop rotation. Those are just some examples. Moving on to monitoring this. There are several aspects to this. This can be a very complex system. And I'm assuming the next speaker, Amy, she's going to talk about this a little more. So I'm going to kind of skip through a couple, skip over a couple of these aspects. But weather it's something that you always need to be aware of, what's happening, what the forecast is, what the history has been. Crop phenology, certain diseases or pests, are only a problem at certain times of the year. For an example, here, you see the pictures of fire blight. This all occurred during bloom of these apples because that's when one of the major infection periods occurs. And so that's the time of year that you have to be most protective of this particular disease. As an example.Ssoil and plant nutrients, we talked about that the week before. Thank you, Cheyenne. And then pest and diseases. So let me let me dig down into that pest and disease thing a little bit here. So with your, if, you know with the pest and disease monitoring the term we use is scouting primarily, but it's interchangeable. And when you're scouting for pests and diseases, you can do this through a couple different ways. One is directly scouting for the thing itself. I say thing because it could be the insect, it could be insect eggs, the adults. It could be the, the growth of the disease itself, Conidia or ascospores or something like that. You can also trap for diseases as well as insects. So you can trap, you can use netting, insect nets to catch them. Or you can visually sample them directly. You can see the picture of the European corn borer eggs there as a, as an example of direct scouting. There's also indirect scouting where you don't see the pest or disease itself, but you see what it does to the plant or to the fruit. These, these can be symptoms of diseases, are signs of infestation in that apple. You see in the bottom corner there that shows the oviposition site of plum curculio on a developing Apple. That would be a sign of indirect scouting. And when you're scouting, you're not just scouting to say, Oh, this is here. You want to think of it more holistically. How it, how bad is it? What's the, what is the potential damage level from this insect or this disease? What's the life stage? So is it an egg, are you seeing eggs? Are you seeing adults actually flying around causing the damage? What's the situation? Because that will change how you choose your management strategy. And you also want to have a good understanding of proper, uh, you need to know what it is you're looking at, not just you have a disease or you have a, an insect of some kind, you want to understand your identification. And that's where we'll talk about later this week with the other presenters. There'll be able to kinda help you go through the understanding of what are you looking at specifically. And they'll help you with the next step. Understanding the biology of that, of that organism, whether it's an insect or a disease. Because understanding the lifecycle, understanding what its needs are of the crop. Will-and what it needs, what its needs are of weather, humidity, temperature, light levels, whatever the condition maybe- that'll affect your, what you do once you find out that you have this organism. Because if you find some insects there, but you know that it's super early in the season. You know, you can change your timing of management versus if it's during a super susceptible period for the crop. Or in the case of a disease, if you see the disease starting to show up, but you are finishing your picking of that crop or something. It might change what your choice is for management strategies. The other one is, this is something that you do year in, year out. And so you want to know what your history is. You want to be able to go back to similar situations in the past and see what worked and what didn't. And the only way to do that is to really keep good records of what's going on. Yeah, it could just be a simple notebook you have with you, but just anytime you're out walking around and you see something, take some notes. What did you see? How how much did you see of it? Now, where did you see it? If you have a number of plants, which variety of of Apple, for instance, did you see the disease on? Or where did you see it in which corner of your field, if you have a number of trees and can identify a separation there, whatever it is, some sort of map. What are the weather conditions that you saw this under? Because certain diseases will blow up under certain weather conditions as an example. And if you did something to manage this, write it down so that you can remember. You can look back and say, oh, I did, I chose that pesticide, but it didn't work. If I had done this instead, like pruning off those those limbs to get rid of the fire blight concern, whatever. It's just it's good to write down those notes and then you can go back and say, Did it work or not work or did it cause me other problems? So that was monitoring a little bit and I know Amy is going to get into that a little bit more here in a minute. But so I'm going to just move on here to the next section. And that's suppression. Once you've done your scouting, once you've done your, you know, you've you've done the best you can in keeping things out of the field, Dealing with the ones that are there. But you finally get to a point where you say, I need to do some sort of management. Then you need to decide what kind of management do I need to do. Do I need to add to the biological options that are in the field right now? There's always in a healthy perennial cropping system that fruit, most fruit works under, There's always some sort of biological out there. There's some natural enemies, there's some parasitoids, there's something out there, how effective they are really changes based on the pest you're looking at and your particular situation, but there's always something. So the question is, is the right tool to add more biological or do you add something else? Like changing the, the way you mow your field? You know, there's, there are certain insects that, you know, if you know the field at the wrong time, you're going to push insects up into the canopy, up your fruit trees. And if that's okay at certain times of the year, but if it's during a susceptible time of year, you don't do that. So you change the timing of that. That's more of a cultural. Chemicals is always an option. But picking the right chemical, picking the right time, picking the right conditions to put it under is always smart. And then there's other mechanical methods. I've mentioned the idea of pruning branches off to manage your fire blight infection as an example. So, but the thing to remember is suppress, Suppression is just dealing with the pest or disease at the moment. It's not, it's to reduce its effect on your plants and your fruit. It's not an eradication. You're not getting rid of this. Getting rid of anything is effectively, I would say impossible. I know that there's going to be some examples that break that rule, but we but the general tenant is that you're suppressing that that pressure, not getting rid of it. So it's not a one and done practice, you see a problem. You do some sort of management. If you feel like it's something you need to do, you suppress it, and then you go back to monitoring to see, did my suppression work? Did my method have the intended consequences? And you can also incorporate some new prevention tactics potentially as well, depending on what you used for your suppression. But the key is to always remember what you, when you did the suppression method. Well, when you were thinking about using your suppression method, did you incorporate it or will you incorporate it? And there are some questions that will come into play before you decide that Yes, this is something I need to do. And you can there are there are lots of websites about IPM on the internet and they'll throw some big number, big words and terminologies at you like, economic threshold, economic injury level, and some pretty graphs and charts and tables. But yeah, those are getting into details about strategies when they really fit into these basic descriptions as well. So the big question is, is it necessary? Just because you see that problem, is it going to be a big enough problem to actually cause some real concerns? Does it make economic sense? And economic has a little harder to describe when you're talking about small fruit growth, fruit production. But the question is, is it worth, you know, think of it as lifestyle as well as money, but is it, does it make sense to do that? Are the plants big so that they can survive themselves? Or do you need to help them along because they're stressed? Bigger, healthier plants survive pressure better. There's a cost-benefit ratio. The other thing is do you have historical damage that you need to manage? So if you have historical problems, be a little more, a little more open to suppressing. The other one is thinking about those resistance concerns I mentioned earlier. And then also think about outcomes. You know, how efficacious is your suppression management and suppression method? And does it have any off-target effects and are those okay? So just some things to think about. So I'll stop there because I'm done with the talking about the theory. I know we had to walk through some theory a little bit, but I'm going to pass the torch to Amy here. But before I, to talk about how you actually do IPM. But I, what I wanted to start and finish off by saying, anytime someone has to practice IPM, you're basically putting on a lot of hats. You are a horticulturist, you're a pathologist, your meteorologist, an entomologist, little bit of everything. And so you can't be an expert at everything, but you can at least have some of that in your pocket so you think about it holistically. So I will stop here, stop sharing, and I hope that primed the discussion for you good, Amy. Okay, thank you. I'm going to just brush up against some of the things that Mike talked about. What I'm going to also expand upon, particular the management part of the IPM, Integrated Pest Management. So and just a reminder, this was a great definition. There's a lot of different definitions of integrated pest management over the years. But I like how Mike color-coded this. So we can think about things and I'm going to talk about these, mainly these topics in blue, the types of management and a little bit about identification of pests and tools that we use and things like that. So first off, we have to understand that all the different pests and when I say pests, I don't mean just insects. I oftentimes we, when we use the word pest, we think only insects, but all these organisms, groups of organisms can cause problems in our crops that were trying to grow or gardens or human health even. So, insects, nematodes, disease, vertebrates, weeds, could pry put humans on there, birds. I realize I forgot birds. There's probably some others. And today I'm going to talk mostly about insects and disease and a little bit about weeds. Nematodes, invertebrates are special cases and while they can be difficult problems, I think in the short amount of time here, I'm not going to go into that, those areas. So for insects, I think most of us learned in probably fourth-grade science class that you know, there's different types of metamorphosis of insects, a different development. But while that's important that we need to understand that, we also need to understand the individual insects, species, have different processes that they go through and develop over a season, some of whom have one generation, some have two. Some like some of the cicadas. Once every 17 years, There's all different various lifecycles. But we do need to understand them in integrated pest management because just because you find the insect, in this case I have a picture of a general seasonal history of codling moth, which is the proverbial worm in an apple pest. And it has two generations per year. And this shows you when egg-laying is occurring or when adults are out. So if you're just are finding moths here in mid May, the dark black curve, that doesn't necessarily mean that's the stage that's doing the damage. And as it says here in my text, that immatures many times in species are the ones that are doing the most feeding damage. It's not an absolute rule, but oftentimes it's the immatures. The young, and some adults, in some cases may not feed at all. With my example here of codling moth, that's true. The adults don't feed at all. And then we should be aware that a lot of them have an overwintering stage. What is that? Are they already moving into it? So why would you control codling moth way out here at the end of August and September when it's mostly done its damage, it's moving onto its overwintering stage. So I guess that's what I'm trying to get at with understanding the pest life cycle is, is that, you know, when in this life cycle you should be managing. What does your choice target for management? Oftentimes it's in the early stages. In this case, of codling moth were usually addressing the larval stage, which is this kind of darker gray bar. So we, the moths come out, they fly, they mate, they start to lay eggs. That's this white part. And then the, they hatch. This is the hatch period, and that results in the larvae, I guess this top, this lighter gray as the larvae. And that's where we want to target our efforts towards that insect- I almost said spray efforts. And it's not always just spraying. There's lots of different tools and hopefully I'll get a chance to get to some of them. So that's what I mean by understanding a life cycle and particularly on codling moths, and so I worked in the food industry, we know if we can do much of our efforts in this first lifecycle. So if we can limit the amount of larvae that make it through and infest fruit, we're going to severely limit what happens in the second-generation or maybe even completely eliminate it. So those are all pieces of the strategy of integrated pest management. So understanding the lifecycle and proper timing is very important. Also with diseases, they have a general life cycle. This is kind of an old cartoon drawing, but, and they're never this simple when it comes to diseases. So they have a resting structure of sorts in the fall, maybe on fallen leaves. And then they overwinter. They actually continue some of their development over the winter months. They might have an primary inoculant stage in the spring that when the leaves start to come out, they start to infest leaves. The, in the case of fungi in particular, and maybe some secondary inoculum that continues throughout the summer. So this is Apple scab. So as I mentioned, it's not ever as simple as that previous nice little circle, but there it is, circular in nature. So here we are. Last fall we had leaves fall off. They develop and those spores continue to develop in those fallen leaves. And here we are right now just before spring starts. And those spores, also called ascospores, are developing inside those fallen leaves and then they'll start to emerge and they'll land on leaf tissue and they'll germinate and penetrate into the leaf and form a structure and cause scabs on our leaves and those lesions, they can also cause scab on the fruit if it's out there. And then if you don't control that or stop that, they continue to form a secondary form of spores. So when it comes to Apple scab, you know, we want to take advantage of that timing for those early management sprays with our fungicides. And then we're trying to prevent this establishment of primary infection so that this whole part of the circle is very much eliminated or reduced. We can control our hosts a little bit. That's what this part is, resistance, resistant cultivars. So if you're a backyard producer, I highly recommend you consider a cultivar that's resistant to Apple scab because half of any sprays in an orchard system, an apple orchard system is to manage this one fungal pathogen. So if you can eliminate that from your, your possible pests, I think that's a good thing. And of course than sanitation, I'm going to talk more about them a little bit later. So my point here is that we, there are just because there is this lifecycle in this disease out there doesn't mean we don't have places that we can target to control, much like the insect lifecycle. And knowing when those proper timing, when that proper timing is will help you be much more successful. And of course, weeds have a life cycle as well. There's annuals, both fall and spring annuals. So there are some they complete their life cycle in one year, but they actually start in the fall, like hen bit or chick weed. So if you've notice now that the snow is melted, you got this nice green carpet, say in your vegetable garden or in bare areas of your soil that probably as chick weed. It germinated last fall under cool, low-light conditions, it hung out under the snow and now it's going to take off. It's one of the first things. Then there are other annuals that are going to germinate when the soil warms up. Maybe like crabgrass or some of those things. And then they complete their life cycle by fall. So annuals, again have a circular pattern. They started from seed, vegetative growth, they flower. They hopefully they make seed before they actually the die, this got a little out of order there, but, but they die within one growing season. Biennials take two years to do that same process, so they might grow a little bit one year. And then the second year is when they send up a flower and produce seeds and then perennials are some of our toughest weed problems because while they can do this process of starting from seed and growing, they often have underground structures like stolons or rhizomes, or bulbs in the case of nutsedge. And they get, they start out small, and by the next year they're very well established and spread throughout the garden or down the row of your trees. And can be very difficult to manage. So knowing the proper, knowing how those plants grow and what their lifecycle is will help you be much more successful in your management program as well. So as Mike said, you don't talk to you about pest monitoring tools or resources. We have lots of things available to help you at Michigan State University Extension. There's a whole host of these pocket guides. I have us, I just had to move offices here recently, so I have these all organized now. I think we have over 20 of them for different crops. Some of them are available in Spanish as well. So check out our bulletin office and see if you can pick up one of those for the cropping area you're interested in. Of course, a lot of this information is on the internet, the internet as well. So you can search that through MSU's IPM page or various crop pages. And such as this is the fruit page here. Actually I think this is the old version. It might look a little different when you go there now. And then, you know, have some tools to help you see things. Insects and disease. Spores are small, so it's good to have a hand lens, if you're lucky enough to have access to a dissecting microscope, better yet. Course your, your phone is you're the modern-day computer, I guess everything you need is there, but take pictures. And that's why I encouraged Mike to ask you to submit some pictures for Friday when we regroup, especially after we talk about the insects and diseases in fruits and vegetables over the rest of the week. A picture, a good picture, good quality picture can really help. make sure we're giving the right diagnosis to help you. And then take notes from season to season. As Mike mentioned, write down what worked, what didn't work, or when did you first see this pest or what should you have done differently. Will all help you in this long, in this long game of managing pests. So back to the areas that Mike talked about prevention, monitoring and suppression. I actually want to spend most of my time in suppression talking about these different types of management. And some of it'll be a little bit of monitoring as well. Some of the cultural methods that we use in managing pests. So the list is long on how you can take care of any pest problems that you have. It does include pesticides, but there are a lot of other things to consider to help in that journey. I guess if you will. Living with pests that come with the plants that we're trying to grow and surround ourselves with. I mentioned choosing an apple scab resistant cultivar if you can. There are a lot of other choices for other plants, not just apples. If you grow vegetables, you know, there are lots of vegetables that are bred for resistance to some of the diseases like fusarium and vertice cilium, some of those long-term fungal pathogens that can be a real problem in our gardens, especially when we're limited in where we can't rotate too much around the yard. So choosing plants that have built-in resistance is a good idea. Also just choosing the right plant for the right place. If something requires a low pH, such as blueberries or some other plants, you, you don't want to plant that in a high pH soil, it's not going to thrive there and will be probably more of a target for some of the pests. Rotation that is a little hard to do in a backyard situation, but it's certainly something that's used very often in commercial agriculture and horticulture to prevent diseases from building up, particularly soil soil borne diseases and nematodes. The things you do about water and nutrition for your plant good, healthy care. Healthy plants, as Mike mentioned, are probably more important than we give them credit for. So keeping things watered, irrigate it as needed, not over watered And providing the proper nutrition will help plants be better defended on their own against insects and diseases. On the other side of that, too much nutrition can lead to problems as well. In particular, some of the bacterial diseases. If plants are growing too quickly and have a lot of new growth on them, they're more susceptible to say something like fire blight in our apples, which we'll talk about tomorrow. And then there's a whole host of mechanical methods for a cultural methods. So barriers, fences. At the beginning we were talking, Mike was talking, about he surrounds his garden with okra to help keep pests out. So that's kind of interesting. So that's, it's a barrier of sorts. a fence is truly a barrier. The window screens we keep on our houses are barriers. Mulching is another mechanical method of it's for weed suppression in particular, but also helps with the overall health of plants and water management. And then I mentioned briefly when we were talking about the apple scab lifecycle there about sanitation. So removing fallen leaves that are infested. Of course, hand weeding. That's the ultimate way, right? to remove your weed pests. Burning or controlled burns. Sometimes help with weeds in say prairie situations or in forage situations. Burying debris, culling out infested plants or if something is infected with say, a fungal pathogen or like fire blight in your apple trees, you want to remove that. So sanitation and tillage in general and all those things are very important cultural methods. Those are the horticultural things that you do are very much a part of integrated pest management too. And then we have biological management that's deliberately using natural enemies or things that we know help curb our pest populations. So they'll suppress, they will not eradicate pest populations, but they suppress them. It makes sense they wouldn't eradicate because they have to have a little bit of pest there too. If you're an aphid predator, let's say. If you eat all your aphids, then you move on. So they do suppress the population. And they may move on to other situations or other fields looking for more food. And hopefully they'll come back if you have a problem once again, or you can augment that as well. Most of the time, our biological management choices are very safe to humans in the environment. And we're talking about things like natural predator, prey dynamics. Hang on a second and I will cover what some of those are. And I already briefly mentioned this about releasing or augmenting your biologicals or your natural enemy. So you can purchase lady bugs from Amazon or lace wing eggs from Amazon or any other, There's lots of sources and places you can buy from and release them, say in your backyard and or even in larger scales, a field situations or greenhouses. That's wonderful as long as there's something there for them to eat, for food. So just releasing them to, to add to the environment is fine. However, if there's nothing in your yard or fields to eat, they'll move somewhere else. So just keep that in mind. They're living organisms. And I'm going to talk briefly in a couple of slides about how we conserve beneficials. And I'm not going to talk about importation or classical biological control because that's done at more of a federal level. So don't, next time you're traveling in Asia, don't go over there and start collecting things that you think are management for, say brown marmorated stink bug and bring them home because that could cause a lot more problems than it's worth. So leave the federal government to figure that one out. So we have different types of bio control. I mentioned lady bugs. So predators are those things that actually eat other bugs. Parasitoids are those that lay their eggs inside bugs or host and can manage them that way. Pathogens are actually diseases that insects can get. Then there are a few cases where we have some herbivores that feed on weeds. This is an example of a little weevil that was released to help manage purple lose strife, which is a weedy pest in our waterways. So some of the common predators are, I mentioned lady bugs, ready, lacewing. This is the adult. What is the larvae that is most aggressive at feeding on, particularly aphids and another soft bodied insects. Ground beetles. Perhaps you've seen these. They're usually pretty fast moving. They're usually black  in color. There's some tiger beetles that are really bright green and they move really fast if you happen to see those in your yard, they're good to have. And then there are some true bugs that are Cretaceous as well. So this reminds me to tell you that not all bugs are bad bugs. In fact, many of them are not. So identification of what's going on in your yard just because you might happen to see this beetle running around and there's some chunks missing out of your tomato leaves doesn't mean it's the one that caused it. You have to do a little homework and make sure you identify the cause of the disease properly before you start managing something that might have been a good pest to begin with. Just briefly about some of the pathogens that insects can get. There's lots of different things that are, that can attack insects when it comes. They're usually fungal organisms. In this case. And these aphids, they should be brightened green like this, but these are getting kind of puffy and off colored because they're infested with them, some type of a pathogen. The thing to know about them is that they're usually very specific to the insect you're applying them to. Again, they, you need to do a little homework before you just go out and start buying. Like milky spore is the case here. With this, with these grubs, is very specific to certain species of grubs. So they're, they're often called microbials or bio rationals or bio insecticides. So they're, they're not a one size fits all pest kind of application. So you need to be do a little bit of homework before you start using them and applying them. I said I would mention conservation of natural enemies. And this is where we do things in our gardens, are in our orchards or fields to conserve native beneficials by maybe growing plants that are attracted to them. Or we try to protect and nurture these. Give refugia, places for them to hide out or, or flowering plants if they might need for their lifecycle. We would hope that avoiding broad-spectrum insecticides would help conserve natural enemies. And in today's modern agriculture, at least in the tree fruit business that I worked in. Many of our pesticides now that we use are very much so specific to a particular group of pests. They work in very specific ways. So they tend to be much more friendly towards our natural enemies because they just don't kill that particular type of insect or they don't work the same way. Use of non-chemical strategies helps conserve natural enemies. That's all those cultural things that I talked about earlier, keeping your help plants healthy. And then, as I already mentioned, learn to recognize the good guys from the bad guys so that you can conserve them if needs be. And then last but not least, and it's not always last actually, is using some type of a chemical or applied biological. So we can buy some of these biological pesticides or organisms that, are, some people refer to them as bugs in a jug, and apply them to our fields and they help us manage pests that way. So just know that when I use the term pesticide is any material, whether it's natural or synthetic, organic or not organic. that makes a claim to destroy, repel, or mitigate a pest, regulate a plant, defoliate or desiccate a plant. And most of them have to have some type of a label from the Environmental Protection Agency. So they can be herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, all different kinds of -icides. you can think of. There are use of sex pheromones in insects. We, I mentioned codling moth early on in this presentation. We do use a pheromone in commercial orchards. We basically flood the orchard with female pheromone and the males can't find the females then. They get confused, like perfume everywhere in a room and you got to find the female. So we confuse them and then they can't mate and they can't, they don't mate and they don't lay eggs, and that reduces the population that way. There are some plant growth regulators that are also used. Some of them are herbicides. There are a few that are insect growth regulators that alter, say, how the chiton forms on insects or how they develop. So you don't develop properly. There are sterilants that are used. In some situations, most of greenhouse I think situations, and then repellents and attractants. Those are also considered pesticides. We can classify pesticides and I don't want to get too far into the weeds on this. I just want to mention that there's lots of different terminology. I guess that how you decide which if you're going to go with a pesticide, how do you decide which is the best choice? So I already mentioned the groups and pest control. All the different types of -icides out there. Herbicides control weeds, insecticides control insects, fungicide control fungi, et cetera, et cetera. So make sure you're purchasing the right thing. So Captan, for instance, is a fungicide and that will control fire blight, even though you use it on an apples, It just won't control fire blight as a bacteria, so it won't control that type of organism. The other thing to be aware of is the mode of action. Some pesticides are contact, meaning they just, they, you, you apply them, they land on the insect and they or disease and kill it that way. Other things are systemic, meaning they have to get taken up by the plant or even into the insects themselves in order to work well. And then the big one that you need to probably understand our stomach poisons and nerve poisons, most of our new pesticides. But actually we're moving away from nerve poisons, which is great for us as humans, because they do affect our nervous system much like they did insects. A lot of the big organophosphates and such are, are, are no longer being used in our management systems. But I did want I mentioned stomach. Anything that needs to be ingested to be active. You need to know that so that the pest, the stage of the pest is that it, that it will be there so it's consuming the pesticide and then it could work. But if it's in the adult stage, as we mentioned early on, and you put that out there, It's not going to ingest it at all because that feeding as an adult. So knowing the modes of action and the timing and the life stage, all these things play together in helping you make a decision, making a good decision. And so that you'll get the best effort for the application that might be, you might make. I'm going to skip this other part here because I think I'm running out of time. So using pesticides in integrated pest management is certainly one of the tools in your toolbox that you have, that whole toolbox. I hope that Mike and I are able to kind of give you some things to think about. Certainly is really hard to teach everything you need know about IPM in an hour. If you do go with a pesticide, you make sure you follow the label, use the proper PPE or personal protective equipment. The label has really everything you need to know on it. And you should read it before you purchase it would be to make sure it's doing what you expect it to do. This is kind of a mock-up of a, of a label here. But any label by law has to have a brand name, what product it is, an EPA registration number course. The ingredients, both active and inactive. Important information are the specific pest control. So that you make sure that you're the course, you have to identify your hair or your disease problem first. And then there's the warning labels and manufacturing information. First Aid if you should need it, hopefully you don't. What kind of precautionary statements of protective, personal protective or PPE that you need. And then how to use it, what its label, what crops can be used on, and then how might you store and dispose of it, should you need to. Also, there'll be some information about the formulation. Is it a duster, powder or liquid? And then pre-harvest interval, how long after you apply it do you have to wait before you can consume or use the product you applied it to. Everything you need to know is on the label. Again, that's a whole class in itself. So as Mike said, this not a one and done approach. It's, it's very much circular. So you help prevent problems with healthy plants. You monitor what's going on with the insects and diseases and weather. And then you maybe try to suppress that those pest populations so that they don't overtake the plant you're trying to grow. And then it's circling and you go back and do all that over again every time. So don't forget to evaluate. Did it work? Why not? If it didn't work? What might work better next time? Make notes of dates when you applied. Could you make changes in the system, in the whole growing system to avoid the problem in the future, perhaps some fertility or some irrigation issues, things like that, that would help you manage pests more effectively. Those are parts of the things you need to ask yourself with evaluation. And I'm, that's all I have. I feel like I just blaze through that so I'm going to stop sharing and then I'll see if there's questions. I know I agree. I felt like I had to blaze through my part two. It's difficult talking about such a complex subject in such a short period of time. Look at all the question. Aha But lots of fun conversation like, I appreciate this series, this has been a good group. The first week was lots of questions and it's no different this week, which is great. Yeah. Thank you, Amy. Thank you, Mike. So I'm going to have a couple of questions I think are most pressing to talk about. One person asked about how to talk with their IPM, with someone with IPM questions. So if I had questions about IPM and grapes or apples, how would I go about doing that? You have the slide up already to, to kinda say it already. But the number one option is to always reach out to your local extension person. I know we have people here not in Michigan. So I would normally say talk to your local MSU Extension office, but there's a lot of other states have really good extension programs too, so check out. The other one is Ask Extension. It used to be called Ask an expert, but they've recently changed the naming of it to now it's called Ask Extension. And that's the website on the screen for Ask Extension. And I think all three of us that you've seen today, MSU people, we're all on that Ask Extension programs so we answer questions through that. You can upload picures. Yeah, this is really great. Yeah. Awesome. So there isn't necessarily, I know someone said something about like a dashboard or something in the chat, There isn't necessarily a place the closest that we have to that would be Ask Extension where you put a picture and your question or just your questions And then we hope you find me answer or the right person to answer. Yeah. Usually you're just asking the question and then we have a set of people that are behind the scenes that are, we're calling the question wranglers. And they get them sent to the right person. So rather than just going to the masses, they will direct them directly to Amy or myself or Cheyenne because they already know we are one of the authorities for that topic. Whatever it is. You mind me jumping in on on one or two I saw earlier on. So the next question that there was a question about Lorsban It's no longer legal on any food crop, correct? Yeah. On any yes. Any food or feed product. That's a new one as of I think it officially went into effect on February 28th, so couple of weeks ago. And that basically means any any crop period that is in the US. So I, and it fits into that pick that message that Amy was giving a little bit ago of the fact that we're getting rid of some of these nerve poisons. This belongs to the organophosphate group of pesticides and it's just, we've been losing a number of those groups of pesticides over the years because of their broad impacts on not just the targets, but on birds and reptiles and people and everything like that as well. So that's where that's coming from. Yeah. Question. Any spotted lantern fly, unless Amy has something to say, I'm so sorry. I see there was an additional question about chlorpyrifos I think. Yes, you can use the supplies that you have. You just won't be able to buy it anymore. Got it. That's typically they usually give you a year to get rid of your inventory. Yup, yup. Oh, I don't know. Maybe we're going have time for one more. Is there are there any lantern fly sightings in Michigan? There had been 4, 3, three or four sightings, but they've all been dead. No live spotted lantern fly. The closest live spotted Lantern flies sightings have been in North Eastern or North Central Ohio and then in southern Indiana. Both or both of them are isolated. They own, The closest populations are in eastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania at this point. This is the second week of the fruit teams beginning fruit grower track. As part of Michigan Ag Ideas to Grow With, which is a month-long program, show, show-and can't talk anymore- It's Monday morning, it's okay. -sharing agricultural information with everyone. Like I said, this is the fruit track. We're happy to have you here. Part of this is possible through the support of Greenstone Farm Credit Services and Oh, no, that wasn't what I wanted, and North Central Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education. Like I've mentioned before, this is the second week of the fruit teams Back to fundamentals of growing fruit series. And this week we're focusing on pest and diseases, which is why we have the lovely Amy Irish-Brown and Mike Reinke here today to talk to you guys. That's all. And so like we did last time, if you were here with us last time, this will all culminate in a panel discussion on Friday where we bring in our lovely experts and we answer questions and a little different than last week. If you guys have any pests or diseases or questions that you might have, if you send it me or mike pictures, we can talk about them on Friday. Hopefully, there'll still be a little bit time for questions at the end of each presentation. But don't  you fret. We can talk about all your pest related woes on Friday. And with that. We'll let Mike start. Are you ready, Mike? I am ready. I said that, that didn't sound as exciting as it is, right? I am totally ready. I'm in. I'm geeked. Good call. Okay. You got my screen. My screen set up, right? Cheyenne? I can I can see you. Okay. Perfect. So as Cheyenne said, this week is our pest and disease week. So we are wanting, so the insect pass the diseases, whatever of all the different fruit crops that we can grow here in the state. But we wanted to kind of prime the conversation with a little more of the fundamentals of what it takes to manage these pests. So that when we get to talking about them over the coming days, we have a better understanding as to how to incorporate the information we're getting. So one of the core modern management strategies For under, for taking care of your pests is what's called IPM. So the question is, what is IPM? I'm not going to tell you exactly what it is, but you can kind of guess what it is based on several conversations we've had. So, but before we go into what IPM is, bear with me for a minute or two here Let's talk about a little bit of the history of farming so that we can understand what was and what we are, where we are now with dealing with pest management. Thinking about traditional agriculture, this, I'm thinking about agriculture before the industrial revolution, before we had all of these modern practices. Now what would we do? How did we manage our farms? How did we manage our pest problems? Well, it was very much a kind of, you know, it was a difficult thing, but it was done one at a time. It was done very laboriously. It was done very personally, was done by hand, it was done by the person. We had small farms because we didn't have the ability to farm- We didn't have the equipment to manage large tracks of land. It was high labor because we didn't have the machinery to run available. We didn't have that many chemical options because we didn't have modern biochemistry and modern chemistry. So it was, it was a lot of other practices. We used different types of plants, we use different types of growing situations. We used people would just pick the, the diseases and pests off the crop to protect it. So we incorporated lots of things. But once we, but we had a fundamental shift with the advent of modern techniques and tools. It was right around the, the two world wars. Some people want to say before World War II, a lot of people say after World War 2, but we had this massive modernization. People, a lot of people will call it the Green Revolution, where we incorporated mechanization into things. We, we had tractors, we had threshers, we had harvesting equipment, we had pesticide spraying options, like the airplane here. So we had this allowed for a lots of consolidation. Larger farms, large advances in breeding of resistant plants are plants that could be grown in other areas. It also increase, Increase start irrigation capabilities. But for the purpose of today, I just also want to say we really get lost A lot of those tools orkind of temporarily forgot about a lot of those tools that we did to manage our paths and all that, that and focused on using chemistry, using synthetic pesticides because it was easy, it was quick, It it allowed them to focus on other aspects of farming. The problem is we relying on one tool, created a bottleneck of, of capabilities. It, it gave us a lot of problems that were not sustainable. One was just this, the development of resistance. Insects and diseases are living organisms with populations. As they reproduce, they you know certain genetics are more resistant to certain conditions than others. And if you're putting at this chemical in the environment, you kill off the ones that are susceptible and the ones that are more capable of surviving that chemistry will keep thriving and you if that's all you're relying on to control these past, you get resistance build-up. And we had concerns for residues on, on crops all the time because these were these first, these early pesticides where you lived in the environment a long time and they were highly toxic to a wide range of organisms. We, and that also caused a problem with the non-target insects. You know, people used to rely before this point would rely on beneficial insects, natural enemies, parasitoids, other things like that to help manage their pests. And when you put out a broad spectrum pesticide, it kills not just what you're going for, but lots of other stuff. So this it very quickly prompted a retaliatory kind of movement in, in several countries, including here in the US. And it reached a tipping point in the late, in the mid to late 60s. One of which we all in this, those of us who are in this world really like to talk about the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and a lot of you may know it, but if you haven't, it was a pivotal document that really spoke to the problems of reliance on just chemistry, just chemicals for pest management. So and this movement also prompted the development of the environmental, the EPA. The development of other laws like the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, which prompted legal registration of chemicals for pest management. So we can start managing these other concerns that chemicals, the chemicals bring in. And it also prompted people to start thinking more integrated. Looking, looking back before this reliance on, on other tools. And so that's what brought us. Welcome back to this idea of integration of tool, of multiple methods for pest management. And so this definition is, there are multiple definitions on the Internet and from other sources. This is my personal favorite and I'm just breaking it down here and then I'll read it. But my integrated pest management is sustainable. That's one of its core tenets. It's also based on science. You have to understand multiple aspects objectively of the farming condition. It uses multiple tools, biological, cultural, physical, and chemical. So chemicals are part of it, but they're not only part of management. And you need to identify, manage, and reduce your risks as well. And the ultimate goal is to minimize overall economic health and environmental risks. So you put it all together. The definition is, of IPM is, sustainable, science-based decision-making process that combines biological, cultural, physical, and chemical tools to identify, manage, and reduce risk from pests. and the pest management tools and strategies in a way that minimizes overall economic health and environmental risks. So let's break that down a little more. So that we can understand what each of those little parts really means. So the three basic principles of IPM, are prevention, monitoring and suppression. So let's go into each of those just a little bit here. What is prevention? Multiple multiple methods can go into prevention. Basically, what you're doing is you're preventing whatever that pest or disease is from getting to your fruit trees, fruit bushes, fruit vines. In the first place. This could be through past exclusion, like a lot of the photos there of various screening systems for apples. In this case. People will do it for screens or some other method for lots of fruit. Sanitation is another example. That's where we talk about making sure the soil is clean or the, the plants are clean of this when you, before you even purchase them or bare roots. Shipment of plants to prevent soil concerns in the first place. Site selection, which we've gotten into a little bit in the first week, talking about resistant varieties. We talked about that a little bit when talking about varietal selection. And this isn't really a big deal in fruit crops, but it's a really big one in annual cropping systems, but it's crop rotation. Those are just some examples. Moving on to monitoring this. There are several aspects to this. This can be a very complex system. And I'm assuming the next speaker, Amy, she's going to talk about this a little more. So I'm going to kind of skip through a couple, skip over a couple of these aspects. But weather it's something that you always need to be aware of, what's happening, what the forecast is, what the history has been. Crop phenology, certain diseases or pests, are only a problem at certain times of the year. For an example, here, you see the pictures of fire blight. This all occurred during bloom of these apples because that's when one of the major infection periods occurs. And so that's the time of year that you have to be most protective of this particular disease. As an example.Ssoil and plant nutrients, we talked about that the week before. Thank you, Cheyenne. And then pest and diseases. So let me let me dig down into that pest and disease thing a little bit here. So with your, if, you know with the pest and disease monitoring the term we use is scouting primarily, but it's interchangeable. And when you're scouting for pests and diseases, you can do this through a couple different ways. One is directly scouting for the thing itself. I say thing because it could be the insect, it could be insect eggs, the adults. It could be the, the growth of the disease itself, Conidia or ascospores or something like that. You can also trap for diseases as well as insects. So you can trap, you can use netting, insect nets to catch them. Or you can visually sample them directly. You can see the picture of the European corn borer eggs there as a, as an example of direct scouting. There's also indirect scouting where you don't see the pest or disease itself, but you see what it does to the plant or to the fruit. These, these can be symptoms of diseases, are signs of infestation in that apple. You see in the bottom corner there that shows the oviposition site of plum curculio on a developing Apple. That would be a sign of indirect scouting. And when you're scouting, you're not just scouting to say, Oh, this is here. You want to think of it more holistically. How it, how bad is it? What's the, what is the potential damage level from this insect or this disease? What's the life stage? So is it an egg, are you seeing eggs? Are you seeing adults actually flying around causing the damage? What's the situation? Because that will change how you choose your management strategy. And you also want to have a good understanding of proper, uh, you need to know what it is you're looking at, not just you have a disease or you have a, an insect of some kind, you want to understand your identification. And that's where we'll talk about later this week with the other presenters. There'll be able to kinda help you go through the understanding of what are you looking at specifically. And they'll help you with the next step. Understanding the biology of that, of that organism, whether it's an insect or a disease. Because understanding the lifecycle, understanding what its needs are of the crop. Will-and what it needs, what its needs are of weather, humidity, temperature, light levels, whatever the condition maybe- that'll affect your, what you do once you find out that you have this organism. Because if you find some insects there, but you know that it's super early in the season. You know, you can change your timing of management versus if it's during a super susceptible period for the crop. Or in the case of a disease, if you see the disease starting to show up, but you are finishing your picking of that crop or something. It might change what your choice is for management strategies. The other one is, this is something that you do year in, year out. And so you want to know what your history is. You want to be able to go back to similar situations in the past and see what worked and what didn't. And the only way to do that is to really keep good records of what's going on. Yeah, it could just be a simple notebook you have with you, but just anytime you're out walking around and you see something, take some notes. What did you see? How how much did you see of it? Now, where did you see it? If you have a number of plants, which variety of of Apple, for instance, did you see the disease on? Or where did you see it in which corner of your field, if you have a number of trees and can identify a separation there, whatever it is, some sort of map. What are the weather conditions that you saw this under? Because certain diseases will blow up under certain weather conditions as an example. And if you did something to manage this, write it down so that you can remember. You can look back and say, oh, I did, I chose that pesticide, but it didn't work. If I had done this instead, like pruning off those those limbs to get rid of the fire blight concern, whatever. It's just it's good to write down those notes and then you can go back and say, Did it work or not work or did it cause me other problems? So that was monitoring a little bit and I know Amy is going to get into that a little bit more here in a minute. But so I'm going to just move on here to the next section. And that's suppression. Once you've done your scouting, once you've done your, you know, you've you've done the best you can in keeping things out of the field, Dealing with the ones that are there. But you finally get to a point where you say, I need to do some sort of management. Then you need to decide what kind of management do I need to do. Do I need to add to the biological options that are in the field right now? There's always in a healthy perennial cropping system that fruit, most fruit works under, There's always some sort of biological out there. There's some natural enemies, there's some parasitoids, there's something out there, how effective they are really changes based on the pest you're looking at and your particular situation, but there's always something. So the question is, is the right tool to add more biological or do you add something else? Like changing the, the way you mow your field? You know, there's, there are certain insects that, you know, if you know the field at the wrong time, you're going to push insects up into the canopy, up your fruit trees. And if that's okay at certain times of the year, but if it's during a susceptible time of year, you don't do that. So you change the timing of that. That's more of a cultural. Chemicals is always an option. But picking the right chemical, picking the right time, picking the right conditions to put it under is always smart. And then there's other mechanical methods. I've mentioned the idea of pruning branches off to manage your fire blight infection as an example. So, but the thing to remember is suppress, Suppression is just dealing with the pest or disease at the moment. It's not, it's to reduce its effect on your plants and your fruit. It's not an eradication. You're not getting rid of this. Getting rid of anything is effectively, I would say impossible. I know that there's going to be some examples that break that rule, but we but the general tenant is that you're suppressing that that pressure, not getting rid of it. So it's not a one and done practice, you see a problem. You do some sort of management. If you feel like it's something you need to do, you suppress it, and then you go back to monitoring to see, did my suppression work? Did my method have the intended consequences? And you can also incorporate some new prevention tactics potentially as well, depending on what you used for your suppression. But the key is to always remember what you, when you did the suppression method. Well, when you were thinking about using your suppression method, did you incorporate it or will you incorporate it? And there are some questions that will come into play before you decide that Yes, this is something I need to do. And you can there are there are lots of websites about IPM on the internet and they'll throw some big number, big words and terminologies at you like, economic threshold, economic injury level, and some pretty graphs and charts and tables. But yeah, those are getting into details about strategies when they really fit into these basic descriptions as well. So the big question is, is it necessary? Just because you see that problem, is it going to be a big enough problem to actually cause some real concerns? Does it make economic sense? And economic has a little harder to describe when you're talking about small fruit growth, fruit production. But the question is, is it worth, you know, think of it as lifestyle as well as money, but is it, does it make sense to do that? Are the plants big so that they can survive themselves? Or do you need to help them along because they're stressed? Bigger, healthier plants survive pressure better. There's a cost-benefit ratio. The other thing is do you have historical damage that you need to manage? So if you have historical problems, be a little more, a little more open to suppressing. The other one is thinking about those resistance concerns I mentioned earlier. And then also think about outcomes. You know, how efficacious is your suppression management and suppression method? And does it have any off-target effects and are those okay? So just some things to think about. So I'll stop there because I'm done with the talking about the theory. I know we had to walk through some theory a little bit, but I'm going to pass the torch to Amy here. But before I, to talk about how you actually do IPM. But I, what I wanted to start and finish off by saying, anytime someone has to practice IPM, you're basically putting on a lot of hats. You are a horticulturist, you're a pathologist, your meteorologist, an entomologist, little bit of everything. And so you can't be an expert at everything, but you can at least have some of that in your pocket so you think about it holistically. So I will stop here, stop sharing, and I hope that primed the discussion for you good, Amy. Okay, thank you. I'm going to just brush up against some of the things that Mike talked about. What I'm going to also expand upon, particular the management part of the IPM, Integrated Pest Management. So and just a reminder, this was a great definition. There's a lot of different definitions of integrated pest management over the years. But I like how Mike color-coded this. So we can think about things and I'm going to talk about these, mainly these topics in blue, the types of management and a little bit about identification of pests and tools that we use and things like that. So first off, we have to understand that all the different pests and when I say pests, I don't mean just insects. I oftentimes we, when we use the word pest, we think only insects, but all these organisms, groups of organisms can cause problems in our crops that were trying to grow or gardens or human health even. So, insects, nematodes, disease, vertebrates, weeds, could pry put humans on there, birds. I realize I forgot birds. There's probably some others. And today I'm going to talk mostly about insects and disease and a little bit about weeds. Nematodes, invertebrates are special cases and while they can be difficult problems, I think in the short amount of time here, I'm not going to go into that, those areas. So for insects, I think most of us learned in probably fourth-grade science class that you know, there's different types of metamorphosis of insects, a different development. But while that's important that we need to understand that, we also need to understand the individual insects, species, have different processes that they go through and develop over a season, some of whom have one generation, some have two. Some like some of the cicadas. Once every 17 years, There's all different various lifecycles. But we do need to understand them in integrated pest management because just because you find the insect, in this case I have a picture of a general seasonal history of codling moth, which is the proverbial worm in an apple pest. And it has two generations per year. And this shows you when egg-laying is occurring or when adults are out. So if you're just are finding moths here in mid May, the dark black curve, that doesn't necessarily mean that's the stage that's doing the damage. And as it says here in my text, that immatures many times in species are the ones that are doing the most feeding damage. It's not an absolute rule, but oftentimes it's the immatures. The young, and some adults, in some cases may not feed at all. With my example here of codling moth, that's true. The adults don't feed at all. And then we should be aware that a lot of them have an overwintering stage. What is that? Are they already moving into it? So why would you control codling moth way out here at the end of August and September when it's mostly done its damage, it's moving onto its overwintering stage. So I guess that's what I'm trying to get at with understanding the pest life cycle is, is that, you know, when in this life cycle you should be managing. What does your choice target for management? Oftentimes it's in the early stages. In this case, of codling moth were usually addressing the larval stage, which is this kind of darker gray bar. So we, the moths come out, they fly, they mate, they start to lay eggs. That's this white part. And then the, they hatch. This is the hatch period, and that results in the larvae, I guess this top, this lighter gray as the larvae. And that's where we want to target our efforts towards that insect- I almost said spray efforts. And it's not always just spraying. There's lots of different tools and hopefully I'll get a chance to get to some of them. So that's what I mean by understanding a life cycle and particularly on codling moths, and so I worked in the food industry, we know if we can do much of our efforts in this first lifecycle. So if we can limit the amount of larvae that make it through and infest fruit, we're going to severely limit what happens in the second-generation or maybe even completely eliminate it. So those are all pieces of the strategy of integrated pest management. So understanding the lifecycle and proper timing is very important. Also with diseases, they have a general life cycle. This is kind of an old cartoon drawing, but, and they're never this simple when it comes to diseases. So they have a resting structure of sorts in the fall, maybe on fallen leaves. And then they overwinter. They actually continue some of their development over the winter months. They might have an primary inoculant stage in the spring that when the leaves start to come out, they start to infest leaves. The, in the case of fungi in particular, and maybe some secondary inoculum that continues throughout the summer. So this is Apple scab. So as I mentioned, it's not ever as simple as that previous nice little circle, but there it is, circular in nature. So here we are. Last fall we had leaves fall off. They develop and those spores continue to develop in those fallen leaves. And here we are right now just before spring starts. And those spores, also called ascospores, are developing inside those fallen leaves and then they'll start to emerge and they'll land on leaf tissue and they'll germinate and penetrate into the leaf and form a structure and cause scabs on our leaves and those lesions, they can also cause scab on the fruit if it's out there. And then if you don't control that or stop that, they continue to form a secondary form of spores. So when it comes to Apple scab, you know, we want to take advantage of that timing for those early management sprays with our fungicides. And then we're trying to prevent this establishment of primary infection so that this whole part of the circle is very much eliminated or reduced. We can control our hosts a little bit. That's what this part is, resistance, resistant cultivars. So if you're a backyard producer, I highly recommend you consider a cultivar that's resistant to Apple scab because half of any sprays in an orchard system, an apple orchard system is to manage this one fungal pathogen. So if you can eliminate that from your, your possible pests, I think that's a good thing. And of course than sanitation, I'm going to talk more about them a little bit later. So my point here is that we, there are just because there is this lifecycle in this disease out there doesn't mean we don't have places that we can target to control, much like the insect lifecycle. And knowing when those proper timing, when that proper timing is will help you be much more successful. And of course, weeds have a life cycle as well. There's annuals, both fall and spring annuals. So there are some they complete their life cycle in one year, but they actually start in the fall, like hen bit or chick weed. So if you've notice now that the snow is melted, you got this nice green carpet, say in your vegetable garden or in bare areas of your soil that probably as chick weed. It germinated last fall under cool, low-light conditions, it hung out under the snow and now it's going to take off. It's one of the first things. Then there are other annuals that are going to germinate when the soil warms up. Maybe like crabgrass or some of those things. And then they complete their life cycle by fall. So annuals, again have a circular pattern. They started from seed, vegetative growth, they flower. They hopefully they make seed before they actually the die, this got a little out of order there, but, but they die within one growing season. Biennials take two years to do that same process, so they might grow a little bit one year. And then the second year is when they send up a flower and produce seeds and then perennials are some of our toughest weed problems because while they can do this process of starting from seed and growing, they often have underground structures like stolons or rhizomes, or bulbs in the case of nutsedge. And they get, they start out small, and by the next year they're very well established and spread throughout the garden or down the row of your trees. And can be very difficult to manage. So knowing the proper, knowing how those plants grow and what their lifecycle is will help you be much more successful in your management program as well. So as Mike said, you don't talk to you about pest monitoring tools or resources. We have lots of things available to help you at Michigan State University Extension. There's a whole host of these pocket guides. I have us, I just had to move offices here recently, so I have these all organized now. I think we have over 20 of them for different crops. Some of them are available in Spanish as well. So check out our bulletin office and see if you can pick up one of those for the cropping area you're interested in. Of course, a lot of this information is on the internet, the internet as well. So you can search that through MSU's IPM page or various crop pages. And such as this is the fruit page here. Actually I think this is the old version. It might look a little different when you go there now. And then, you know, have some tools to help you see things. Insects and disease. Spores are small, so it's good to have a hand lens, if you're lucky enough to have access to a dissecting microscope, better yet. Course your, your phone is you're the modern-day computer, I guess everything you need is there, but take pictures. And that's why I encouraged Mike to ask you to submit some pictures for Friday when we regroup, especially after we talk about the insects and diseases in fruits and vegetables over the rest of the week. A picture, a good picture, good quality picture can really help. make sure we're giving the right diagnosis to help you. And then take notes from season to season. As Mike mentioned, write down what worked, what didn't work, or when did you first see this pest or what should you have done differently. Will all help you in this long, in this long game of managing pests. So back to the areas that Mike talked about prevention, monitoring and suppression. I actually want to spend most of my time in suppression talking about these different types of management. And some of it'll be a little bit of monitoring as well. Some of the cultural methods that we use in managing pests. So the list is long on how you can take care of any pest problems that you have. It does include pesticides, but there are a lot of other things to consider to help in that journey. I guess if you will. Living with pests that come with the plants that we're trying to grow and surround ourselves with. I mentioned choosing an apple scab resistant cultivar if you can. There are a lot of other choices for other plants, not just apples. If you grow vegetables, you know, there are lots of vegetables that are bred for resistance to some of the diseases like fusarium and vertice cilium, some of those long-term fungal pathogens that can be a real problem in our gardens, especially when we're limited in where we can't rotate too much around the yard. So choosing plants that have built-in resistance is a good idea. Also just choosing the right plant for the right place. If something requires a low pH, such as blueberries or some other plants, you, you don't want to plant that in a high pH soil, it's not going to thrive there and will be probably more of a target for some of the pests. Rotation that is a little hard to do in a backyard situation, but it's certainly something that's used very often in commercial agriculture and horticulture to prevent diseases from building up, particularly soil soil borne diseases and nematodes. The things you do about water and nutrition for your plant good, healthy care. Healthy plants, as Mike mentioned, are probably more important than we give them credit for. So keeping things watered, irrigate it as needed, not over watered And providing the proper nutrition will help plants be better defended on their own against insects and diseases. On the other side of that, too much nutrition can lead to problems as well. In particular, some of the bacterial diseases. If plants are growing too quickly and have a lot of new growth on them, they're more susceptible to say something like fire blight in our apples, which we'll talk about tomorrow. And then there's a whole host of mechanical methods for a cultural methods. So barriers, fences. At the beginning we were talking, Mike was talking, about he surrounds his garden with okra to help keep pests out. So that's kind of interesting. So that's, it's a barrier of sorts. a fence is truly a barrier. The window screens we keep on our houses are barriers. Mulching is another mechanical method of it's for weed suppression in particular, but also helps with the overall health of plants and water management. And then I mentioned briefly when we were talking about the apple scab lifecycle there about sanitation. So removing fallen leaves that are infested. Of course, hand weeding. That's the ultimate way, right? to remove your weed pests. Burning or controlled burns. Sometimes help with weeds in say prairie situations or in forage situations. Burying debris, culling out infested plants or if something is infected with say, a fungal pathogen or like fire blight in your apple trees, you want to remove that. So sanitation and tillage in general and all those things are very important cultural methods. Those are the horticultural things that you do are very much a part of integrated pest management too. And then we have biological management that's deliberately using natural enemies or things that we know help curb our pest populations. So they'll suppress, they will not eradicate pest populations, but they suppress them. It makes sense they wouldn't eradicate because they have to have a little bit of pest there too. If you're an aphid predator, let's say. If you eat all your aphids, then you move on. So they do suppress the population. And they may move on to other situations or other fields looking for more food. And hopefully they'll come back if you have a problem once again, or you can augment that as well. Most of the time, our biological management choices are very safe to humans in the environment. And we're talking about things like natural predator, prey dynamics. Hang on a second and I will cover what some of those are. And I already briefly mentioned this about releasing or augmenting your biologicals or your natural enemy. So you can purchase lady bugs from Amazon or lace wing eggs from Amazon or any other, There's lots of sources and places you can buy from and release them, say in your backyard and or even in larger scales, a field situations or greenhouses. That's wonderful as long as there's something there for them to eat, for food. So just releasing them to, to add to the environment is fine. However, if there's nothing in your yard or fields to eat, they'll move somewhere else. So just keep that in mind. They're living organisms. And I'm going to talk briefly in a couple of slides about how we conserve beneficials. And I'm not going to talk about importation or classical biological control because that's done at more of a federal level. So don't, next time you're traveling in Asia, don't go over there and start collecting things that you think are management for, say brown marmorated stink bug and bring them home because that could cause a lot more problems than it's worth. So leave the federal government to figure that one out. So we have different types of bio control. I mentioned lady bugs. So predators are those things that actually eat other bugs. Parasitoids are those that lay their eggs inside bugs or host and can manage them that way. Pathogens are actually diseases that insects can get. Then there are a few cases where we have some herbivores that feed on weeds. This is an example of a little weevil that was released to help manage purple lose strife, which is a weedy pest in our waterways. So some of the common predators are, I mentioned lady bugs, ready, lacewing. This is the adult. What is the larvae that is most aggressive at feeding on, particularly aphids and another soft bodied insects. Ground beetles. Perhaps you've seen these. They're usually pretty fast moving. They're usually black  in color. There's some tiger beetles that are really bright green and they move really fast if you happen to see those in your yard, they're good to have. And then there are some true bugs that are Cretaceous as well. So this reminds me to tell you that not all bugs are bad bugs. In fact, many of them are not. So identification of what's going on in your yard just because you might happen to see this beetle running around and there's some chunks missing out of your tomato leaves doesn't mean it's the one that caused it. You have to do a little homework and make sure you identify the cause of the disease properly before you start managing something that might have been a good pest to begin with. Just briefly about some of the pathogens that insects can get. There's lots of different things that are, that can attack insects when it comes. They're usually fungal organisms. In this case. And these aphids, they should be brightened green like this, but these are getting kind of puffy and off colored because they're infested with them, some type of a pathogen. The thing to know about them is that they're usually very specific to the insect you're applying them to. Again, they, you need to do a little homework before you just go out and start buying. Like milky spore is the case here. With this, with these grubs, is very specific to certain species of grubs. So they're, they're often called microbials or bio rationals or bio insecticides. So they're, they're not a one size fits all pest kind of application. So you need to be do a little bit of homework before you start using them and applying them. I said I would mention conservation of natural enemies. And this is where we do things in our gardens, are in our orchards or fields to conserve native beneficials by maybe growing plants that are attracted to them. Or we try to protect and nurture these. Give refugia, places for them to hide out or, or flowering plants if they might need for their lifecycle. We would hope that avoiding broad-spectrum insecticides would help conserve natural enemies. And in today's modern agriculture, at least in the tree fruit business that I worked in. Many of our pesticides now that we use are very much so specific to a particular group of pests. They work in very specific ways. So they tend to be much more friendly towards our natural enemies because they just don't kill that particular type of insect or they don't work the same way. Use of non-chemical strategies helps conserve natural enemies. That's all those cultural things that I talked about earlier, keeping your help plants healthy. And then, as I already mentioned, learn to recognize the good guys from the bad guys so that you can conserve them if needs be. And then last but not least, and it's not always last actually, is using some type of a chemical or applied biological. So we can buy some of these biological pesticides or organisms that, are, some people refer to them as bugs in a jug, and apply them to our fields and they help us manage pests that way. So just know that when I use the term pesticide is any material, whether it's natural or synthetic, organic or not organic. that makes a claim to destroy, repel, or mitigate a pest, regulate a plant, defoliate or desiccate a plant. And most of them have to have some type of a label from the Environmental Protection Agency. So they can be herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, all different kinds of -icides. you can think of. There are use of sex pheromones in insects. We, I mentioned codling moth early on in this presentation. We do use a pheromone in commercial orchards. We basically flood the orchard with female pheromone and the males can't find the females then. They get confused, like perfume everywhere in a room and you got to find the female. So we confuse them and then they can't mate and they can't, they don't mate and they don't lay eggs, and that reduces the population that way. There are some plant growth regulators that are also used. Some of them are herbicides. There are a few that are insect growth regulators that alter, say, how the chiton forms on insects or how they develop. So you don't develop properly. There are sterilants that are used. In some situations, most of greenhouse I think situations, and then repellents and attractants. Those are also considered pesticides. We can classify pesticides and I don't want to get too far into the weeds on this. I just want to mention that there's lots of different terminology. I guess that how you decide which if you're going to go with a pesticide, how do you decide which is the best choice? So I already mentioned the groups and pest control. All the different types of -icides out there. Herbicides control weeds, insecticides control insects, fungicide control fungi, et cetera, et cetera. So make sure you're purchasing the right thing. So Captan, for instance, is a fungicide and that will control fire blight, even though you use it on an apples, It just won't control fire blight as a bacteria, so it won't control that type of organism. The other thing to be aware of is the mode of action. Some pesticides are contact, meaning they just, they, you, you apply them, they land on the insect and they or disease and kill it that way. Other things are systemic, meaning they have to get taken up by the plant or even into the insects themselves in order to work well. And then the big one that you need to probably understand our stomach poisons and nerve poisons, most of our new pesticides. But actually we're moving away from nerve poisons, which is great for us as humans, because they do affect our nervous system much like they did insects. A lot of the big organophosphates and such are, are, are no longer being used in our management systems. But I did want I mentioned stomach. Anything that needs to be ingested to be active. You need to know that so that the pest, the stage of the pest is that it, that it will be there so it's consuming the pesticide and then it could work. But if it's in the adult stage, as we mentioned early on, and you put that out there, It's not going to ingest it at all because that feeding as an adult. So knowing the modes of action and the timing and the life stage, all these things play together in helping you make a decision, making a good decision. And so that you'll get the best effort for the application that might be, you might make. I'm going to skip this other part here because I think I'm running out of time. So using pesticides in integrated pest management is certainly one of the tools in your toolbox that you have, that whole toolbox. I hope that Mike and I are able to kind of give you some things to think about. Certainly is really hard to teach everything you need know about IPM in an hour. If you do go with a pesticide, you make sure you follow the label, use the proper PPE or personal protective equipment. The label has really everything you need to know on it. And you should read it before you purchase it would be to make sure it's doing what you expect it to do. This is kind of a mock-up of a, of a label here. But any label by law has to have a brand name, what product it is, an EPA registration number course. The ingredients, both active and inactive. Important information are the specific pest control. So that you make sure that you're the course, you have to identify your hair or your disease problem first. And then there's the warning labels and manufacturing information. First Aid if you should need it, hopefully you don't. What kind of precautionary statements of protective, personal protective or PPE that you need. And then how to use it, what its label, what crops can be used on, and then how might you store and dispose of it, should you need to. Also, there'll be some information about the formulation. Is it a duster, powder or liquid? And then pre-harvest interval, how long after you apply it do you have to wait before you can consume or use the product you applied it to. Everything you need to know is on the label. Again, that's a whole class in itself. So as Mike said, this not a one and done approach. It's, it's very much circular. So you help prevent problems with healthy plants. You monitor what's going on with the insects and diseases and weather. And then you maybe try to suppress that those pest populations so that they don't overtake the plant you're trying to grow. And then it's circling and you go back and do all that over again every time. So don't forget to evaluate. Did it work? Why not? If it didn't work? What might work better next time? Make notes of dates when you applied. Could you make changes in the system, in the whole growing system to avoid the problem in the future, perhaps some fertility or some irrigation issues, things like that, that would help you manage pests more effectively. Those are parts of the things you need to ask yourself with evaluation. And I'm, that's all I have. I feel like I just blaze through that so I'm going to stop sharing and then I'll see if there's questions. I know I agree. I felt like I had to blaze through my part two. It's difficult talking about such a complex subject in such a short period of time. Look at all the question. Aha But lots of fun conversation like, I appreciate this series, this has been a good group. The first week was lots of questions and it's no different this week, which is great. Yeah. Thank you, Amy. Thank you, Mike. So I'm going to have a couple of questions I think are most pressing to talk about. One person asked about how to talk with their IPM, with someone with IPM questions. So if I had questions about IPM and grapes or apples, how would I go about doing that? You have the slide up already to, to kinda say it already. But the number one option is to always reach out to your local extension person. I know we have people here not in Michigan. So I would normally say talk to your local MSU Extension office, but there's a lot of other states have really good extension programs too, so check out. The other one is Ask Extension. It used to be called Ask an expert, but they've recently changed the naming of it to now it's called Ask Extension. And that's the website on the screen for Ask Extension. And I think all three of us that you've seen today, MSU people, we're all on that Ask Extension programs so we answer questions through that. You can upload picures. Yeah, this is really great. Yeah. Awesome. So there isn't necessarily, I know someone said something about like a dashboard or something in the chat, There isn't necessarily a place the closest that we have to that would be Ask Extension where you put a picture and your question or just your questions And then we hope you find me answer or the right person to answer. Yeah. Usually you're just asking the question and then we have a set of people that are behind the scenes that are, we're calling the question wranglers. And they get them sent to the right person. So rather than just going to the masses, they will direct them directly to Amy or myself or Cheyenne because they already know we are one of the authorities for that topic. Whatever it is. You mind me jumping in on on one or two I saw earlier on. So the next question that there was a question about Lorsban It's no longer legal on any food crop, correct? Yeah. On any yes. Any food or feed product. That's a new one as of I think it officially went into effect on February 28th, so couple of weeks ago. And that basically means any any crop period that is in the US. So I, and it fits into that pick that message that Amy was giving a little bit ago of the fact that we're getting rid of some of these nerve poisons. This belongs to the organophosphate group of pesticides and it's just, we've been losing a number of those groups of pesticides over the years because of their broad impacts on not just the targets, but on birds and reptiles and people and everything like that as well. So that's where that's coming from. Yeah. Question. Any spotted lantern fly, unless Amy has something to say, I'm so sorry. I see there was an additional question about chlorpyrifos I think. Yes, you can use the supplies that you have. You just won't be able to buy it anymore. Got it. That's typically they usually give you a year to get rid of your inventory. Yup, yup. Oh, I don't know. Maybe we're going have time for one more. Is there are there any lantern fly sightings in Michigan? There had been 4, 3, three or four sightings, but they've all been dead. No live spotted lantern fly. The closest live spotted Lantern flies sightings have been in North Eastern or North Central Ohio and then in southern Indiana. Both or both of them are isolated. They own, The closest populations are in eastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania at this point.