A Comment on Biological Solutions for Central Coast Agriculture

With a large event concerning biological solutions for agriculture taking place this week in Salinas, I feel it is a good time to make a comment regarding the research taking place here.  I started working with these materials in 2012, and have off and on tested them since, for the most part in strawberries.

To open, I will state that while these technologies in theory offer a lot of promise, we don't want to get over our skis with this because that promise has not yet been realized.

Most of my work with biological solutions has been with biological fungicides, so I will make the following points:

1. The biological fungicides should not be seen as replacements for preplant treatments such as soil fumigation. I have yet to see any one product come even close in efficacy to soil fumigation and would be quite comfortable betting very serious amounts of money with anyone who feels otherwise.   They could be an interesting element of an Integrated Pest Management program, but not as a stand-alone replacement for soil treatments such as fumigation.  
2. People need to be realistic about how long it's going to take to really learn how to use these biological materials.  I am working on a farm in Santa Cruz County with USDA microbiologist Nick LeBlanc and UCCE Plant Pathologist Yu-Chen Wang studying two promising biological materials to understand not only what these materials do, but also how they do it (in other words what are they doing to the plant and the surrounding soil) and for our team of three to run more than the one trial a year we are currently doing would be a real strain for us; remember that it's not just the regular injections of material and data collection, but also preparation for each task and getting to and from the test site.  All of us are very busy with other things.  If there is a big push from the state or a major agency to work more on biologicals, maybe that would change; it's certainly interesting work and we three would get good publications out of it, but I doubt that the deliverables to the farmer would be very large.
3. Time and time again, my colleagues and I have seen, with certain products and not others, a boost in plant performance (like fruit size and yield), especially early, but never anything like a defense against a disease.  It's remarkable that products that are completely different, as in a bacterium or a fungus, have the same outcome on the plant.  This common thread in effect on the plant is something we are thinking about and looking at closer; at this point we aren't really interested in enhancement in disease resistance because that has not actually shown itself in the field.

What I have written above is a summary of where we stand currently our research with them on the Central Coast.  The principle that these biological solutions should work is very compelling and we are not going to give up anytime soon, but it will take time and effort to really understand them and how they will fit into our farming here.

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