Washington Ag Today October 15, 2009 Washington State University entomologist Bill Snyder has received a $2.05 million USDA grant to help potato farmers reduce their use of insecticides in the Pacific Northwest. Snyder says currently potato farmers are between a rock and a hard place.

Snyder: “The potato growers in the region right now are being asked to fill out sustainability audits for some of the big fast food companies and potato processing companies, where they need to justify why they are using and insecticide whenever they use and insecticide and try to encourage them to minimize the use of insecticides. Of course at the same time those same buyers want the same high quality, almost blemish free potatoes, they have always wanted. So the growers are in a tough spot where to keep their market share they are going to have to dramatically reduce their insecticide while keeping quality almost the same. That is what our project is about, to help them do that.”

Snyder and his colleagues are using a three-tiered research and education approach to deal with pest control in potatoes. The first tier involves developing a multi-state sampling network to detect aphids and leafhoppers and their associated pathogens, so farmers know precisely when their fields are at risk. The second tier will look at beneficial insects as natural pest control and then third, develop improved understanding and of how growers decide when and where to apply pesticides and creating the means for producers to analyze the economic effectiveness of low-spray technologies.

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

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