Towards more responsible agriculture

Insect pest detection and traps that are harmless to human health are being used more and more, in both public and domestic orchards. They have proven their worth.

TRANSCRIPT

[Brief view of a branch of an apple tree in bloom. Guy Langlais is standing next to an apple tree in bloom and provides the following explanations.]

In what might be called conventional management, orchard fruit production is one of the areas that requires the most insecticides.

[Various views of an apple orchard bearing lots of ripe fruit.]

It’s not uncommon to apply 15 treatments a year, and sometimes more, to obtain the impeccably beautiful fruit that most people expect on the market.

[Back to Guy Langlais near an apple tree]

Today, however, we can see that growers are making a real effort to reduce the use of these pesticides.

[Close-up of a ball-shaped trap covered in glue and trapped insects.]

So, among other things, traps will be installed in orchards. With these traps, we’ll try to determine if insects are present. We calculate the number of insects; this will give us an indicator, an intervention threshold. And then, if that threshold is exceeded, we’ll apply the treatment. If it hasn’t been reached, then we won’t treat. That way we save on treatments in the orchard, which is good for the environment and the grower because it’s nonetheless expensive. Each treatment has a cost.

And while this is not to say that we’re moving towards truly organic production, we really are moving towards a much more reasonable form of agriculture.

[View of rows of apple trees and their fruit]

Pesticides can easily be reduced from 30 to 50% in a conventionally managed orchard by using screening.

[Music]