Potato producers need to adopt more sophisticated integrated pest management programs, says an entomologist and private researcher from Washington state.
If they don’t, Alan Schreiber warned, current protocols will likely cause pesticide resistance and possibly public demand for pesticide-free french fries.
He told Manitoba Potato Production Days in Brandon Jan. 26 that the potato industry is well behind other high-value crops when it comes to pest management, such as cotton and tree fruit.
“In potatoes, it is just spray, spray, spray and spray,” said Schreiber, president of Agricultural Development Group, a private research company near his home in Pasco, Washington.
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“Our IPM programs … are basically spray programs.”
Fruit growers scout for and count beneficial organisms, but that rarely happens in the potato industry.
“They will actually take counts of beneficials and incorporate the number of beneficials into their thresholds,” he said.
Schreiber, who wrote potato IPM programs in Idaho, Washington and Oregon, said he supports the use of pesticides, but doesn’t want producers to lose a key class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids.
“They are really cheap … they are very broad spectrum, what’s not to like. But they are the crack of the insect world,” he said.
“Depending on where you are in the United States or Canada, the resistance is already here or it’s inevitable. And when we blow the neonicotinoids … we are going to be in very big trouble.”
As well, environmental organizations are pressuring the fast food industry to buy potatoes grown with less or no pesticides.
“There’s a push to make potatoes more sustainable and one of the measurements of them being more sustainable is the amount of pesticide use,” Schreiber said.
Potato producers will have to adapt to the new reality if companies such as McDonald’s acts on these demands, he added.
To illustrate the balance of power between potato growers and potato consumers, Schreiber referred to a quote attributed to Jeanne Debons, Potato Variety Management Institute executive director in Bend, Oregon.
“It’s a card game where McDonald’s holds nine-tenths of the cards,” she said.
Schreiber said one of the absurdities of the game is that McDonald’s and other restaurant chains created the conditions that caused the overuse of pesticides by demanding perfect potatoes so they could sell flawless french fries.
“Over half of the insecticide and maticide use on potatoes in the Pacific Northwest is for cosmetic reasons,” he said.
Haley McKinnon, a project officer with the Pest Management Regulatory Agency, said Schreiber’s observations apply to Canadian producers.
“It’s all about what the consumer wants and they don’t want surface imperfections. So it’s market driven.”
Schreiber said Manitoba probably doesn’t have the same concerns about pesticide overuse because provincial growers use one-seventh of the pesticides that producers use in the Pacific Northwest.
However, he said Manitoba’s potato industry shouldn’t tout its product at the expense of other regions.
“Manitoba potatoes have less pest pressure … than competing regions, (but) it is a dangerous game that you don’t want to play … saying our food is safer than your food,” he said in an interview following his presentation.
“It’s considered very poor form in the produce industry, using food safety as a competitive tool.”
The first step on the road to improved IPM programs is spending more money on research and development of best practices, Schreiber said.
However, it’s unlikely growers will be paid more for potatoes if they develop and adopt more environmentally friendly methods of controlling insects and disease.
As a result, he said, consumers who want to eat potatoes grown with fewer pesticides will have to pay, through tax dollars, for research, development and implementation.
