 Hello, welcome to eco-friendly methods of pest management. I am sure you have understood what is integrated pest management. To sum up briefly, it is the study on the insect population dynamics by studying that we have to understand all the suitable techniques and methods which are compatible to each other. By doing this, our ultimate aim is to maintain the insect population at levels below causing economic damage. This is more important. So that is the meaning of integrated pest management. You know in brief, we can say the integrated pest management includes many technologies and methods which are the components of IPM. So this is where we have to study further. I will be discussing henceforth the various components of pest management. First and foremost is legal methods or which are also referred as legislative measures. If you trace the history of the legal methods, the first act in the country was passed in 1906 under the Sea Customs Act of 1878 to stop the entry of Mexican cotton bowl we will, which is an important pest in USA. Then we see the second act of cotton pest act of 1911, particularly in Madras state. The cotton stalks has to be removed by 1st of August mainly to eliminate the incidents of pink bowlworm because the carryover of the larvae used to be there in the cotton stalks. Then came during the British regime, the first act was passed namely the destructive insects and pest act of 1914 which includes plant quarantine act also. This prevents the movement of the plant products or the plant byproducts containing the insects from one foreign country to another foreign country from one state to another state and also from one territory to another territory. So this is one of the major act which was passed. Then government of India during 1968 passed an important act called as insecticide act of 1968 which mainly regulates the import, the manufacture, sales, transport, distribution and use of insecticides. This was enforced from 1st of April 1971, later on many amendments were made to this particular act of insecticide act of 1968. Later on in between this there was one more act, the prevention of food adulteration act of 1954 which also includes the information on pesticide residues and the tolerance limits for various food commodities. Then moving on to the most important methodology that is the cultural practices or the agronomic practices. These are the practices which are mainly followed by the farmers for improving the crop productivity. They are simply the alterations or changes in the cultivation practices which have an impact on the insect population. Some of the cultural practices to list down, I have a series here, we will go one by one try to understand how exactly they influence the population, host habitat management, host in the sense it is the crop, a particular crop of the location. So here the manipulation of the crop production and management tactics are included. To quote some of the examples the planting time or the sowing time, you know in some insects have high incidence in the early stage of the crop, some insects have high incidence in the late stage of the crop. Time of sowing or sowing time particularly in case of sorghum, shoot fly is one of the economically important insect in during cubby areas in dry land situations. It causes economic damage in the form of dead art, the whole plant will be killed. A simple early sowing that is up to the end of June, you find a very negligible incidence or low incidence of the shoot fly whereas normally we see the normal sowing in between July 1st to July 15th that is the first fortnight of July, we record a medium incidence of around 10 to 20 percent dead art incidence. If it is delayed that is after July, we find the same insect causing maximum damage more than 30 percent incidence. Then we will move on to other aspects like high seed rate, you know some crops like sorghum, maize, we know normally we get around 15 to 20 percent incidence. For example, the one that I quoted sorghum shoot fly, we get around 10 to 15 percent incidence. We are increasing the seed rate, same crops which are where the seed is not the costly affair by increasing 10 to 15 percent, we can maintain the same yield level. The plant population will compensate for the yield losses due to the dead heart in case of sorghum and some of the other things like crop spacing or plant spacing or crop location, crop rotation or disrupting the crop and insect synchrony, they all divert or they all concerned to disrupting the continuity of the food sources. To understand each one, you know crop spacing, planting of the crop, host crop at higher intervals or at lower spaces mainly affects the relative growth of the plant thereby the environment of the crop canopy is affected which has a major influence on the insect population. To quote an example, you know aphids were found to be less whenever the planting is done I mean less than the space of 0.8 meters. Similarly, the flower trips and the pod borer in case of cowpea, the increased spacing of 1 to 1.5 percent reduces the incidence. I mean one thing is very clear, it is not a thumb rule that always reduced planting increases the incidence or increased population reduces the population, it varies from species to species. Then crop location, another important eco friendly method in which if the crop is shown near the unmanaged habitats, lot of population migrate from the unmanaged habitats to the main crop, thereby there will be increase in the incidence. The next eco friendly method or the good old method is crop rotation. Crop rotation not only creates a discontinuity in the life cycle, it also improves the soil structure and fertility particularly this technique works most effective when the pest population has got a narrow host range. And when the eggs are laid before the new crop is planted and most importantly the feeding stage of the insect is not very mobile. Rotations normally do well for insects like white grubs and for red-eyed hairy caterpillar. Normally the crop rotation works better in case of cereals and legumes. For example, cereal like sorghum, a legume like redgram none of the insects are common to these crops, thereby the insect carry over from one crop to another crop does not happen. So that is why automatically the population of the insects get reduced when these crop rotations are taken. Then disrupting crop and insect synchrony, normally each crop has a critical stage for infestation. That critical stage should coincide with the insect population in the, I mean heavy population of the insect. If the heavy population is there we find more economic damage. If there is less population naturally we find low economic damage. So that is why this is most important. Modifying planting dates is one of the classical example which I explained already. Then in sorghum we find the sorghum midge incidence can be reduced drastically if this crop is shown early. Whereas in case of paddy transplanted rice crop, the gal midge is one of the important problem. The incidence can be escaped if it is shown early. Then going back to the other methods, aloe cropping, aloe cropping in the sense leaving one row empty. That helps particularly in case of paddy to reduce the brown plant hopper population considerably. By leaving one row empty it reduces the microclimate to a considerable extent. Particularly the relative humidity is reduced thereby the BPH population reduces its egg laying, its egg hatching automatically those two are related to the incidence reduction. We will take other eco-friendly methods in the next class.