Continued
Pest and Disease Management
The integration of key data from pest and disease management tools forms part of Whole Farm Management Software and aids key decision-making and planning throughout the year, such as crop selection, rotation and understanding conditions conducive to pest and disease pressure.
The key steps to successful Integrated Pest Management are:
- Identify and monitor disease
- Assess economic damage
- Implement IPM strategy
- Evaluate success of IPM strategy
There are a number of technologies in this area that improve the accuracy and precision of each of these steps:
- Sensors and cameras equipped with diagnostic technology use machine learning and AI to assess a plant’s health and monitor disease symptoms. As more data is captured on farm to form a database of information, these technologies will continue to improve in their crop management accuracy and predictability capabilities.
- Software systems can predict yield losses and estimate a cost-benefit of taking action against pests and disease versus the underlying cost of control.
- Smartphone apps make constructing pest and disease management strategies more simply and user-friendly.
- Satellite, drones or robots can capture and evaluate images to determine plant health as well as the presence of pests and disease.
- NDVI (Normalised Difference Vegetation Index) used to assess plant health alongside other analytical tools that are used to predict yields. Once a threshold of plant health and predicted yield is passed, the implementation of pest management strategies can be decided.
- Mapping tools to determine a more timely and variable rate of application of chemicals.