A new Horizon Europe Project, IPMorama, held its kick-off meeting today, Thursday, 3 October at Teagasc Ashtown Food Research Centre in Dublin. Comprising 17 partner institutions from 10 different countries, this 4 year, €5 Million project is co-ordinated by Dr Dan Milbourne of Teagasc’s Crop Science Department in Oak Park, Carlow.
IPMorama seeks to lay the foundation for the next generation of integrated pest management (IPM) approaches to make tillage agriculture more sustainable and secure, focusing initially on rust disease in wheat, late blight in potato and pests and diseases in the grain legumes pea, soy and lupin.
Current disease and pest management practices in tillage crops are over-reliant on fungicides and pesticides, and make insufficient use of varieties that are bred for high levels of pest and disease resistance. Resistant varieties have the ability to significantly reduce the need for the application of pesticides, and to help prevent pests and diseases from developing resistance to plant protection products through overuse, a major problem in disease control worldwide.
“The core idea of the IPMorama project is to develop what we call a whole “practice-ecosystem” for IPM using resistant varieties”, said co-ordinator Dr Dan Milbourne. This starts with developing the resources to breed resistant varieties more efficiently, but then focuses on how best to use these varieties for maximum effect. The project partners will do this by continuously monitoring how the diseases and pests are distributed in the landscape, developing tools and resources to track variants of these that evolve to overcome both variety resistance and plant protection products. Merging this information with variety distribution information, weather conditions and epidemiological models to develop “vulnerability maps” will allow in-season prediction of specific risk levels to the durability of IPM control strategies utilising resistant crop varieties.
The final stage of the IPMorama project will involve developing real world management practices based on these tools and resources, and scaling these all the way up from experimental plot level to farm level. “The goal is to provide a framework of real world benefits for stakeholders all along the crop value chain,” said Dr Milbourne. He continued; “Breeders will benefit by being able to better target their varieties based on an understanding of potential emerging disease threats, growers will benefit from more secure production, consumers will benefit from more sustainable food, and policy makers will have an evidence-based framework for future policy on sustainable agriculture.”