Monitoring for insects in canola | part 1

Monitoring early-season canola pests is such an important aspect of management at this time of year. There’s a range of insect pests that have actually changed since we’ve gone over to zero till and no-till systems across Australia, and those pests have had a dynamic effect on the crop. Some of the basic techniques that we use for monitoring, we might be using pitfall traps, shelter traps or bait traps to identify those ground-dwelling insects. We can use our sticky traps you know to monitor the different flying insects that would be transient to the crop. And we would use our basic visual test when we’re looking for damage.

We might not be seeing the insect 01:11 - pests themselves but we’re looking for the symptoms and the signs of those pests in the crop. For farmers and agronomists that are monitoring crops on a daily or weekly basis many of these techniques are very simple, they need to be set out probably prior to the crop going into the into the field so that we have a knowledge of what insect pests and beneficials that we can expect to see when the crop emerges. For a visual check we need some basic tools. I’m using a half square meter ring made of poly pipe. I’m also carrying my notebook and pen and using a smartphone with a macro lens that can be used to take images of any damage that we might see.

So visual checks of the plants we might be looking for chewing damage from 02:35 - some of the pests like earwigs or millipedes. We might be looking for sucking damage from some of the mites or if we see plants that have been nipped off it might be an indicator that there are caterpillars or some of the false wireworm larvae that are there causing the damage. We’re more likely only going to see the damage that that’s been caused not necessarily the pests themselves. More likely we’d see some of the beneficials like the spiders or carabid beetles. So these are sticky traps they’re very commonly used in lots of industries, horticulture and broadacre cropping.

They’re to monitor the the flying insects 03:33 - that we see. They’ll attract a whole range of different pests and beneficials as well. We’ve got two different colours here the different colours are actually attractive to different pests we need to have the sticky traps set up at perhaps two or three locations around the farm. They are easy to set up it’s just a matter of attaching them to the fence line usually, you know, close to the crop and they will last probably a month or so out in the paddock. The sticky trap will maintain its stickiness for that period.

Early in the season 04:20 - I guess it’s giving you a good idea of those aphid pests, green peach aphid, that might be a risk to the early crop but also later in the season too we can tell what aphid and beneficial natural enemies that are there in the crop as well. go to the description bar below for the latest information links and resources .