Pest Management in Horticultural Ecosystems

Pesticide usage is one of the important components in integrated pest and disease management (IPDM) programs in coffee. Being a pernneial crop, coffee is subjected to attack by several pest and diseases especially, white stem borer and leaf rust. Both this require the timely management measures to keep them under the economic threshold level. Because of the non availabilty of skilled labourers, timely operations are skipped in majority of the coffee plantations. This favours the build up of pest and diseases. Hence, to reduce the number of estate operations and to bridge the time gap, the compatibility of recommended insecticide chlorpyrifos 20EC, chlorpyrifos 50EC + cypermethrin 5EC along with a fungicide hexaconazole 5EC were evaluated in the laboratory by checking the efficacy against white stem borer and leaf rust which will appear simultaneously in the post monsoon season. Laboratory experiments revealed that the chemical mixures are physically compatible and found no changes in the efficacy against the targetted pest and disease when they sprayed together.