The use of tractor drawn pesticide sprayers is not practical for many smaller growers. Two alternatives are garden-sprayers or backpack sprayers. I will argue here that garden-sprayers are not suited for most commercial pesticide use. The typical garden sprayer that may be found at a garden shop or hardware store usually has a 1 or[Read More…]
Articles from 2017
123 articles found.
The following updates have been made to the Midwest Vegetable Production Guide for Commercial Growers 2017 (ID-56) since it was published in December. These updates have been made to the PDFs published on-line at mwveguide.org. If you have a hard copy of the ID-56, please note these changes. Page 59-Additional plant families and example crops[Read More…]
Small vegetable growers may find pesticide applications with a tractor driven sprayers impractical. Such growers may turn to hand sprayers. In a separate article, I argued that garden sprayers are not appropriate for most commercial pesticide applications. In this article, I will discuss the use and calibration of a backpack sprayer, an excellent alternative to[Read More…]
The Purdue Initiative for Family Firms (PIFF) is a new initiative in Purdue’s College of Agriculture, housed in the Department of Agricultural Economics. PIFF is an integrated research, outreach, and teaching program. It offers educational programs that address the major competencies needed for effective family business ownership and management. The goal of the initiative is[Read More…]
We can never emphasize too much the importance of conducting soil tests. Ideally, soil test should be conducted on a yearly basis. The reason soil testing is so important is because it provides information about the nutrient composition of the soil so that growers will know how much fertilizer to apply for the following season.[Read More…]
Effectively managing foliar diseases including late blight (LB), early blight (EB), and Septoria leaf spot (SLS), is one of the biggest challenges facing organic tomato growers. New, resistant hybrid varieties are available, but organic growers often plant heirloom varieties instead because they are perceived to have superior flavor and growers can save seed. Copper fungicides[Read More…]
Screening can be an effective measure to exclude unwanted pests from colonizing your crops. In high tunnels, one of the biggest challenges to successfully implementing exclusion screening is managing the unintended side effect: reduced airflow. In spring we are clamoring to get inside the warmth that high tunnels provide, but by mid-summer they can become[Read More…]