Investigation of the synergism between different environmentally friendly control methods for field and vegetable crop pests

During the 36-month applicative project, whose content will be directly related to the 2nd goal of the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, we intend to study in four work packages the effectiveness of the simultaneous use of environmentally friendly methods of controlling selected economically important insect pests, which are increasingly difficult to control due to the small number of permitted synthetic insecticides or their absence, insecticide resistance, climate change and other causes. In the present project, we want to investigate the effectiveness of companion plants (intercrops and trap crops) and cover plants in combination with biological control agents (entomopathogenic nematodes and fungi) or biotechnical methods (coloured sticky boards and pyramidal traps with attractants) for controlling important potato, onion and cabbage pests. Thus, the main purpose of the research of the project team consisting of members of three domestic research organizations with extensive research experience in the fields of plant protection, analytical chemistry and plant ecology is to determine the most appropriate combinations of different environmentally acceptable methods for controlling wireworms in potato tubers, onion fly and onion thrips in onion and cabbage flea beetles, cabbage stink bugs and onion thrips on cabbage. In all cases, these are harmful insects, the control of which poses a great challenge to domestic producers using existing production methods that they often cannot cope with. Two-year field experiments will be carried out at the Laboratory Field of the Biotechnical Faculty in Ljubljana, where these pests have been appearing in large numbers for more than 20 years. The study, which will build on a number of previous studies by the current project leader and its collaborators examining the effectiveness of nonchemical or alternative methods of plant pest control using these methods alone, will use standard methods to determine the extent of pest damage and yield evaluation. An important added value of the present project will be the chemical (HPLC) analyses of cultivated plants in the experiment, the results of which will be important for determining interactions between glucosinolate content in cabbage and the extent of damage caused by different cabbage pests, between allicin content in onion and the extent of damage caused by onion fly and onion thrips, and between the content of -solanine and -chahonine in potato tubers and the number of holes caused by wireworms. In all cases, these are plant substances that have recently received much attention in the field of natural resistance of plants to harmful organisms. The results obtained in the laboratory (chemical analysis) and outdoors (field experiments) will be analysed with appropriate statistical tools and presented in professional and scientific journals and at national and international conferences. We expect that in the future, the methods of pest control that are proven to be the most effective in our research will find their place in the protection systems of stored products and/or field crops and vegetables in the open.