From Pukekohe to the UK – mobile insectaries for integrating biodiversity on farm are being used in lettuce crops in England by international fresh produce business, G’s Group.
The insectaries or biodiversity pods are one of three biodiversity components being demonstrated at the Pukekohe Research and Demonstration Farm as part of the Vegetables NZ-Onions NZ-A Lighter Touch biodiversity project.
One of G’s 9,500 employees, technical agronomist Megan-Rose Beard (Meg) visited the demonstration farm last November as part of her LSA Fellowship study tour, and saw the pods in action.
She has now implemented 60 pods, with attached insect hotels, on a 320 hectares of farmland in Ely, Cambridgeshire, where vegetables are organically and conventionally grown by G’s.
The mobile biodiversity pod with insect hotels on each side. Credit: G’s Group.
Meg is planning to integrate another 40 pods to bring the total in use up to 100, and G’s Group have contracted independent researchers to understand their impacts and benefits.
“It’s a full ecosystem services evaluation, so it’s not just necessarily positives and benefits to crop, but positives and benefits to our surrounding farm area and the conservation areas we have.”
Meg is passionate about integrated pest management (IPM) and it was a key focus for her visit to New Zealand, where she was hosted by Terranova, and Australia. Online searches relating to IPM led her to A Lighter Touch, and a meeting was arranged with New Zealand Vegetable Council research and development manager Daniel Sutton at the demonstration farm.
Ironically, the previous summer Meg had trialled a similar concept to the pods, using 10 potato boxes planted with flowers on the farm where she works.
Meg with a mobile biodiversity pod. Credit: G’s Group
“Obviously, they’re quite weighty filling a whole potato box. So I was looking for what I could potentially use instead. I happened to come across A Lighter Touch and we were using the same slogan SNAP [shelter, nectar, alternative hosts and pollen].”
After seeing the ALT mobile insectary pods at Pukekohe, she immediately saw the benefits of recycling the 1000 litre intermediate bulk container used to supply foliar feeds. “The how to guide was the first thing I printed off when I got back. It landed on the ops manager’s desk, and I said, ‘you need to build these’.”
Meg has modified the pods to suit the conditions in Ely, including filling the base with gravel to assist with irrigation, using different flower mixes and upscaling the shelter for insects by mounting insect hotels on the side of the pods.
“We’re in the driest part of the UK, so we had to modify them a little. Obviously you had natives in the pods, which are a bit more hardy. We’re using flowers which are very thirsty, so we needed to try and combat that.”
An independent UK research company is assessing the 10 different floral mixes being trialled in the pods and evaluating the benefits to the crop and the surrounding farm and conservation areas on the farm.
“We’re going to hopefully narrow it down to three mega mixes and we plan on using those mixes year after year.”
Getting the mix right for the beneficial insects is crucial and the pods are being used to test a wide range of flowers with different nectar depths.
ALT mobile biodiversity pod at the Pukekohe Research and Demonstration Farm.
“We planted marigolds a couple of years ago in the celery for slug control, but black bean aphid loved it and the celery was black. It was a terrible idea, so marigolds in crop is probably not a good one, but we’ve put them again in these [pods] to confirm that.”
Megan says rotating the pods around lettuce fields works because of how short the growing window is for lettuce. “We need something we can plug and play into each field.”
Biodiversity pods in Ely, UK. Credit: G’s Group.
Using and understanding the sequential order of IPM tools has been key to the success of the initiative.
“I was still spraying Bacillus [to help with pest control] in the lettuce for the first three weeks of those flowers going out because I know things wouldn’t be fully established… and then it’s when you choose to turn that off.”
Meg says after a couple of years of really bad aphid infestation in salads, G’s now works closely with their large supermarket customers on providing a good quality crop.
“There’s definitely a buy-in and investment in sustainable intensification from the supermarkets, but also how we bring biodiversity into that and natural organisms to help with control.”
Along with lettuce and celery which Meg specialises in, G’s grows onions, beetroot, asparagus, pumpkins, and a range of other salad vegetables.“If it’s in a salad, we’re probably growing it.”
The business has six sites in the United Kingdom, as well as farms in the Czech Republic, Poland, Spain, Senegal and a base in the United States. The businesses’ turnover is £720M and they produce >1.2 billion packs of produce annually.
Download the ALT mobile insectary guide.
Check out more of Meg’s pod photos on LinkedIn.
