🌾🥬 How does strip cropping affect the effectiveness and stability of biological control?

Strokenteelt blijkt een krachtige manier om natuurlijke plaagbestrijding te versterken. In recent onderzoek van Gabriele Bolletta en collega’s is gekeken hoe verschillende vormen van strokenteelt de bestrijding van belangrijke koolplagen beïnvloeden.

🦋 Over two years and at two locations in the Netherlands, we monitored predation and parasitism of Mamestra brassicae eggs, and parasitism of Pieris brassicae and Plutella xylostella caterpillars. We compared four cropping systems: a cabbage monoculture, cabbage–oat strip cropping, a more diverse strip cropping system with six crops, and a strip cropping system combined with an “attract-and-reward” strategy using the cabbage cultivar Christmas Drumhead, which is attractive to natural enemies, together with buckwheat flowers as a nectar source.

Better and more efficient biocontrol

🐞 We found that strip cropping consistently enhanced biological control compared with monocultures, with higher parasitism levels for all tested herbivore species.

Importantly, crop diversification not only increased biological control levels, but also improved its temporal stability, with more diverse systems showing lower temporal variability and more consistent pest suppression throughout the growing season.

Diversity as key

🌼 Interestingly, the six-crop strip cropping system generally performed best, while the attract-and-reward strategy did not outperform standard strip cropping, indicating that increasing overall crop diversity may be more important than adding specific floral resources within the crop.

What does this mean in practice?

For growers, this means that strip cropping not only contributes to biodiversity, but also directly supports the natural suppression of pests. By investing in more diverse cropping systems, reliance on chemical crop protection can potentially be reduced, while the stability of production increases. here (Dutch) the publication

Tekst & drawing: Gabriele Bolletta

Photo: Hans Smid.

Scientific publication

Titel: Higher and more stable biological control of multiple herbivore species in diversified strip cropping systems

Journal: Journal of Applied Ecology

Authors: Gabriele Bolletta, Georgios Nikou, Rina H. P. Puspitasari, Felix J. J. A. Bianchi, Erik H. Poelman