Fight back against thrips

What does a good plan to combat thrips look like?

The best strategy is to have a multipronged approach. With thrips, this is where integrated pest management as your control strategy is critical because thrips are a really hard to control pest. Making sure that you're drawing environmental controls, mechanical controls and biological controls in addition to chemistry is what's going to give you the best chance of success. Having a well-rounded, multi-pronged approach is a must.

Aside from multiple strategies, assuming you are incorporating chemical controls, you want to make sure that you are selecting products from different modes of action — that would be how IRAC classifies products into different groups based on how they work, how they impact the target pests. Making sure that you are using different products that are going to impact the pest in different ways prevents that pest population from becoming resistant to those controls over time.

Is it important for growers to track all of this and keep detailed records? And what specific categories should be tracked?

The main things to track would be the date that you did an application and the product that you used and the rate that you applied. And anytime you do an application, particularly if you have an active insect population, it's really helpful to keep a note of efficacy, to come back a few days after you've done the application and see how well that application worked. That's something that easily gets lost in the heat of the growing season, taking the time to go back and evaluate what you did.

Why is it so important for growers to take the time to reflect on what worked with thrips or any other pest issue?

You want to make sure what you're doing works. If you are getting to a point in the season where you are shipping products and you get a complaint and it's too late to do anything about it, you want to make sure that, with your next crop, you're going back to evaluate where the weakness was. Maybe you missed an application or maybe something didn't go according to plan. Make any changes you need to prevent the problem from happening next time.

How can growers build a successful Control program?

This goes back to starting with an integrated pest management framework. Looking first at things like sanitation, making sure there's no debris, that there aren't weeds in the cracks or along the edges or in the production areas that could be alternate hosts. Also, making sure that you don't have old stock plants nearby that could harbor pests. The second part would be monitoring and scouting. This is where it's good to use sticky cards or sticky tape and evaluate that pest population as, say, thrips appear and how that changes over time.

The other thing to take into account as you're looking at chemical controls or biological controls is the pest biology. Thrips are unique in that we talk about them as piercing, sucking insects. But they don't really pierce, they scrape the service of the leaf. Depending on the chemistry that you've chosen, a lot of systemic products move in the vascular tissue of plants. So if you're going to do a drench, you have to make sure it has time to move out of the vascular tissue and into the epidermal tissue because that's where it's going to contact the thrips when they are making that rasping motion.

What can Envu do to help growers combat thrips?

Envu has two systemic insecticide products that can help: Altus® and Kontos®. Altus® insecticide is a nice option for growers for protection of foliar-feeding thrips species. And it can be used before, during and after bloom, which is a nice feature for greenhouse growers or anyone who has to work around flowering crops. It offers a lot of flexibility. It's also compatible with a lot of predatory mites, so for growers who have incorporated biocontrols, it can be a nice complement to that.

For Kontos® insecticide, it's a truly systemic product. It's both upwardly and downwardly mobile within plant tissue. And it's a unique mode of action. It's in the IRAC group 23 and that particular chemistry has no cross resistance with other insecticides. So it's a really nice part of rotation because it is a unique mode of action and fully systemic. It's also compatible with a lot of biocontrol agents. Learn more at us.envu.com/ornamentals