Pest and disease control – reducing costs or increasing packouts?

November 2012 | Stephen Tancred, Orchard Services | Future Orchards® notes

Pest and disease control is often discussed as a cost, but the more useful business question is whether a program protects packout, fruit quality and marketable yield. In these Future Orchards® notes, Stephen Tancred challenges growers to assess crop protection decisions in terms of the value they create or protect.

The notes encourage a disciplined approach to pest and disease programs: identify the threats most likely to reduce packout, understand when the crop is vulnerable, and direct expenditure toward interventions that materially reduce risk. Cutting spray costs without considering the effect on fruit quality can be a false economy, while unnecessary applications also add cost and resistance pressure.

The resource therefore links technical crop protection with orchard economics. The objective is not simply to spend less or spray more, but to use monitoring, timing and appropriate control measures to maximise the proportion of fruit that reaches a saleable specification.

For library users, this resource is most useful as a record of the technical thinking and field evidence available at the time. Product registrations, resistance advice and regional pest pressure can change, so any present-day control decision should be checked against current labels and local recommendations while retaining the monitoring and decision-making principles described here.