Twenty Years of Apple Production 

 Under an Ecological Approach to 

 Pest Management 



Ronald Prokopy 



Tuckaway Farm, Conway Massachusetts and 



Department of Entomology, University of Massachusetts 



Since 1978, many apple growers in Massachusetts 

 have been practicing what might be termed a "top 

 down" approach to integrated pest management (EPM). 

 This approach takes as its starting point a 

 conventionally managed orchard that has been under 

 commercial operation for several years or decades and 

 aims, in stepwise fashion, at reducing the amount of 

 pesticide used while gradually advancing the influence 

 of natural ecological processes that promote buildup 

 of natural enemies of pests. Over the past 20 years or 

 so, numerous articles in Fruit Notes have reported on 

 progress toward "top-down" IPM in commercial 

 orchards. 



An alternative approach to apple IPM that might 

 be termed a "bottom-up" approach takes as its starting 

 point a newly planted orchard and aims, in stepwise 

 fashion, to add external inputs such as pesticide only 

 as needed to augment natural ecological processes in 

 overcoming biological barriers to attaining a high- 

 quality marketable crop. 



Since the 1970's, there has been an increasingly 

 intensive effort on most continents where apples are 

 grown to implement a top-down approach to integrated 

 management of apple pests. In its initial stage, this 

 effort usually has involved monitoring weather and/or 

 pest abundance in an orchard and using information 

 from monitonng, in conjunction with threshold values 

 and models, for making decisions as to whether or not 

 to apply a pesticide. Integration at this stage usually 

 has taken the form of overt consideration of natural 

 enemies of the pest in question and explicit attention 

 to choosing pesticides that minimize harm to these and 

 other beneficials. In more advanced stages, top-down 

 approaches to apple IPM have increasingly emphasized 

 integration across disciplines of entomology, pathology, 

 weed science and horticulture and substitution of 



cultural, biological, genetic and behavioral methods 

 of controlling apple pests for pesticidal methods. 



More recently, a bottom-up approach to apple IPM 

 has begun to receive attention. In its purest form, this 

 approach is perhaps best expressed within the 

 philosophy and practices of organic apple production. 

 In a modified form, it may be expressed as ecological 

 apple production that accents, prior to planting orchard 

 trees, ecosystem design, habitat manipulation, cultural 

 management, plant resistance to pests, and biological 

 pest control through natural enemies as the 

 foundational elements of IPM. 



In 1977, 1 planted a small orchard of apple trees in 

 Conway, Massachusetts specifically designed for 

 commercial production using a bottom-up ecological 

 approach to pest management. This approach has been 

 maintained throughout all 20 years (1981-2000) of 

 harvest and sale of fruit. I report here on pest 

 management practices and pest incidence across the 

 entire two decades of commercial sales. Long-term 

 studies can be highly rewarding in elucidating the 

 dynamics of pest populations comprising biological 

 communities. Toward this end, a principal objective 

 of this report is to portray long-term consequences of 

 the ecologically-based pest management approach used 

 in the Conway orchard. 



Material & Methods 



Orchard and Habitat Design 



The orchard (about 1/3 acre) consists of 50 apple 

 trees, all on dwarf (M.26) or semidwarf (M.7) 

 rootstock. Woods border the orchard on the north and 

 east, beginning 6 yards from perimeter apple trees. 

 Open field stretching for 100 yards borders the orchard 



Fruit Notes, Volume 66, 2001 



