2018/01/01 by Gard, Bruno, Henri Clerc, Clerc, Hélène +5
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Agricultural pest management studies
paper · doi:10.15454/jayoyy
In protected vegetable systems, a large range of generalist soil-borne pests and diseases cause important damages on crops leading to heavy economical losses for farmers. Considering the challenge of decrease the pesticides use without altering vegetable productions under shelter, a systemic approach is required to design suitable strategies to their local economical and technical context. The GEDUBAT project is a French network built to test sets of innovative practices for soil-borne diseases and root-knot nematodes sustainable management in protected vegetables systems. A network of six experimental sites has been implemented supporting the design and assessment of different cropping systems using few or no fungicide nor nematicide for soil-borne pests and diseases. This article presents the 19 protected vegetable cropping systems (walk-in tunnels or plastic greenhouses). They were designed to combine promising and alternative practices and were tested in farms or experimental stations from 2012 to 2017. Multivariate analyses of the collected data based on the usage frequency of each practice were performed. Thus, regardless the experimental site, four groups of similar systems were identified (clusters), suggesting four contrasted strategies. The temporal evolution of key assessment indicators such as the Frequency Treatment Index (FTI) is presented using those four clusters of systems. The first lessons regarding the tested strategies and the perspectives for further research and experiment are addressed.