 And several years ago, I went using trap crops, official insect crops, to bring insects to an area where you can use a minimum amount of pesticides to kill the bad insects. So at that point, we do free-range chickens, so I got a concept that could we use chickens to kill the pest and bring them into that point rather than using pesticides and completely eliminate pesticides because we do an all-natural vegetable farmer's market business. So that's how we came to the concept of doing this. So our perimeter beneficial insect crop was sorghum sedan grass, buckwheat, and millet. We planted it, you can see this is the buckwheat in bloom, the millet is here, it hadn't quite come on yet, and this is sorghum sedan grass. You can use fennel, dill, yarrow, coriander, tansy, buckwheat millet, they all attract ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, parasitic mini wasp, cactiid flies, these are all beneficial to your garden. These are the good bugs that kill all the bad bugs. Dr. Pinero is going to really address the bugs because you can identify them, I can't. Prior to putting in our beneficial insect perimeter, we had two or three ladybugs here, hardly ever seen a ladybug. After we put this in, we had ladybugs everywhere. And then this is the millet, just when it was about to burst, the heads were about to burst. So this was late July. This was a drought year, so our sorghum sedan grass was really put in more as a wind buffer rather than anything else, but it was supposed to be about 70 high, so the drought really hurt this. But a really interesting thing happened, these are the parasitic mini wasp, and as I was mowing these access things at a point, I was being swarmed, and I mean swarmed to the sky was black with these little bugs, and I thought they were gnats, I didn't know what they were. So that's the back of my hand, that's a bug, I took a picture, I sent it to Jacob Wilson, which was the grad student on this project, and I said, are these good or bad, should I kill them, what should I do? And he said, no, that's fantastic, he said, if you have a few of those, how many do you have, and that's a good thing. And I said, well, I stopped counting at about a billion, should I just keep going, because I kid you not, it was a cloud. When I mowed through the grass, it was just a cloud of these bugs, so it was a, plus the lady bugs, and some other beneficial bugs that were killing potato bugs. So these perimeter beneficial insect crops were really, really successful. So how did I, I put this in, you just use what you have, because I have no money. This, these are my gardens, and at this point I had in winter rye as a cover crop, so I tried to get the beneficial insect crop in as soon as I possibly could to get it started before the gardens went in. So I used a four foot rototiller and went all the way around the garden, about 15 feet out from the gardens, and you can see here as it's going up. The way I planted mine is I have an old four strong wheat drill, which you probably won't have. But the good thing about the old four strong wheat drills, you can do four foot, you can turn four foot on and four foot off sections. And I just dumped it, I just dumped the three grains in there in piles, and it will feed itself in the proper, about two rows each. So it worked excellent for this. I'm sure that you can use just a standard drill, the only problem is you can only can shut off half of it. But I just chose four foot because I had a four foot teller, I can do that. Six foot, eight foot, yeah, I don't think there's any magic. So we moved on to the, the sacrificial insect plants. These are blue hubbards, and they are like putting up a magnet for cucumber beetles and squash bugs. So the concept that I got from Jaime is you put these in at the outside corners of your vegetable production, and they attract just literally thousands of beetles and squash bugs. So this is what a mature plant looks like, that's a bloom. That's what a small squash looks like. Looks like they get about this big if you can ever get them to maturity without spraying them. And if you've ever had Gerber baby food, our concept was we put in a couple of beds of the blue hubbards, and then we put the chicken tractor on top of that and let the squash bugs go to that point, and then have the chickens eat the squash bugs off plants rather than spray. Jaime, the research Jaime has done, you're basically doing the same thing, except you would come in here and this is where you could spray. So you're only spraying at four points in your garden to kill all your bugs. So you grossly reduce your pesticide, plus you don't have any pesticides on your vegetables. So it's really a win-win situation. Because this was a grant, I had to do a few things different. So one of which was the chicken tractors, how the chicken tractors were constructed. Our original concept is I put in two sections of the blue hubbards. But initially I thought that the chickens would scratch them out, even though we started them in the greenhouse and got them up about this high. I thought the chickens would probably destroy those. So my concept was we'll start one here, let it get established, put the chickens there, and as they kill them, we'll have this one going and then we can move the chicken tractor back and forth. The other problem I had was, because it was a grant, I had to do a daily inspection of the plants. Lincoln University people had to come out and do an inspection of the plants. So we had to be able to get to them. We had to be able to move that chicken tractor easily on and off of it and do inspections of the plants. So I did, I tested kind of two designs of the chicken tractors. You can see the two here. The main difference between them is how I did the wheels. These wheels are adjustable heights so you can raise it up a foot high and roll it over anything. In retrospect, I really didn't have to do that because it rolled so easily that my 100-pound wife couldn't push it around and push it back and forth unless it was really wet. But this chicken tractor provides shelter from the sun. There's an egg laying mask. Inside of that there's a roosting bar. The ends fold up here so that we can fold the ends up and roll it off of the plants without destroying the plants. That was the big problem is how do we get this off of it without destroying these plants? Because they get about that high. So those were the two concepts. If you're doing this, you don't necessarily need to be able to roll that back and forth a couple of times a day. And I'll show you another. If you've ever had any kind of squash, this is what you end up with. Initially I had a problem and I was very upset because this is what I was getting. I wasn't getting the pest control that I had hoped to support. What we determined, the reason you do a grant is so I can stand up here and tell you what not to do. Because that was a stupid idea. So then you won't make the same mistake. Our problem was, we have a lot of coyotes, foxes and stuff. So we have, our chicken house has a concrete foundation so they can't get into it. So we were taking the chickens, let them out, we free range. So we let them out of the chicken house in the morning, feed them. We would take two, put them in the chicken tractors, leave them in there until four or five o'clock. Then we would come out with the rest of the flock and feed them and put them back up at night. The problem with that is the squash bugs and everything come out, feed on the dew, and lay their eggs and then they go back down in the ground. So they weren't available for total control at the time of the chicken. So that ended up being my biggest mistake because I wasn't getting good pest control. So I determined that if you're going to use this method, the chickens have to be in there. You have to put the chickens in there so you can protect them. And they can be out at sunrise and stay there until sunset. We also found out, our chickens, our layers, we buy new chickens every year. We do a third of them, we rotate each year. We found out the younger chickens, they spend their whole day just going around the perimeter of the chicken tractor trying to figure out how to get out. We take a three or four year old hen, put her in there. I also couldn't see, you know, you see them peck down in the weeds. You don't know if they're pecking at a rock or are they actually getting a bug. So that was kind of a problem. I really resolved that issue at one point to see what they're eating. I went out and called the man-aged yard full of squash bugs and beetles. And I took them up on the driveway, on the concrete driveway. We were going to see it and call the chickens over there. Our chickens are like pets, pretty easy to control. And then I opened the man-aged yard and dumped it out on the concrete pavement. Before I could grab the video camera, all the bugs were gone. So I don't have a video of that, but they definitely were eating. So that was my point there. I'm hoping to reconstruct this experiment using some of the knowledge that I learned and get a little more specific data. We did do some experimentation with ghost pepper spray, which doesn't have a lot to do with this, but we had a whole bunch of ghost peppers left over from the drought here. So I made an emulsion out of them and sprayed these bugs and the ones I tested never hatched. So that's back to Jaime's original concept of this, is you have the tract crops from the beneficial crops at the corner points. So you're spraying it there and you don't have to spray it. All the information on this grant is on our website in addition to the SARA website. I have some additional stuff that I could upload to their site. I had the daily logs brought down to part one and two. I have a summary of the whole project. I have a lot of pictures. I have the original grant proposal, cost analysis of that chicken tractor and some instructions on how to build it if you wanted to use that just out in like a pasture area. That concept. I have some information on the cover crop, some links to some of the SARA information. So then initially if you go to the summary page, there's a breakdown by quarters. So you can see exactly what we ended up with each day. There's another new coverage squash. Kind of a summary is primitive tract crops are 100% successful. I actually could not believe how many beneficial insects that they brought in and how the blue hovers attracted the squash bugs. We also tried red curry, but the blue hovers are hands down better at attracting them. The red curry did, but we intermixed the red curry and the blue hovers and they totally went to the hovers. So if you did the red curry by themselves, I'm sure they would be somewhat effective. This is a very, very good method for alternative pest control if you're organic or all-natural. Bracelet reduces your pesticide usage. It's a great success. This is going to be my second experiment because of what I explained to you about keeping the chickens in there all the time. So what I'm going to do next time is put the chicken house in So within that perimeter, I'm going to put a chicken fence on each side of it put all my gardens in my greenhouse and everything right in the center. So at that point, then I'm going to put the buckwheat and the melon here on Tansy blue coverage and then we've been planting cherry tomatoes for the chickens to free-range on, just sacrificial for them. So that's going to be my mix. So I think this is a more effective way to do it for an actual farm production where you're not having to count the bugs every day and do a lot of research on it. It doesn't take that many chickens either. Two chickens in that chicken tractor are clean enough to put away a lot of bugs. Yes. My name is Jaime Piñero and I want to spend just five minutes providing an overview of what a trap-cropping approach is for pest management. At Lincoln University, we have been conducting research and demonstrations for five years and the goal is not just to focus on one insect. You can see that we're trying to address multiple pests using trap-cropping. Well, as part of cultural controls, as part of IPM in organic systems or in conventional systems, I will focus on trap-cropping. But you already know that there are so many things that you can do as part of cultural controls to manage the soil and bring beneficial insects or control pests. Just to the point that Bluehover has been shown to be an excellent trap-crop in research done in Massachusetts, in Missouri, in Iowa. Dr. Mark Lison, from Iowa State, he has been also in the same kind of research. Bluehover squash is very, very attractive to all these pests, especially when they're small. Because when you have these seedlings, they stay two weeks old. These plants have high concentrations of chemicals which are called kucurbitacins. Those chemicals are super attractive to kucurbitals and squash bugs. As the plants grow, what becomes very attractive are the flowers. And I have a lot of pictures to show, but I only have five minutes. So basically, it was known that they were attracted to these pests but we were also, we showed in five years in our research that it's actually attracting more than just one or two. And there is evidence that I don't have enough information because we don't have high populations of these squash by water. But there is evidence showing that it could work. Bluehover squash can be used to attract all sorts of squash by water. The key is that you have to have these seedlings in advance. So you have to have some additional planning. And I will show you how we have been doing this. One way Gary did his study was with the chicken tractors, the coordinates, etc. But in commercial farms, when you use plastic culture, for example, what we have been doing is to transplant four blue hovers squash to the ends of the grows. And at the same time, we are planting the seeds of the cash crop. So this picture was taken after more or less a week after transplanting, after seeding the seed of the cash crop. So you can see always the blue hovers are going to be bigger than the cash crop. And because they are super attractive, you will have most of the insects coming to those plants. So every row gets blue hovers. Every row gets four plants at the ends of the row. And in this particular case, in 2013, you can see the picture, the eight trap crop plants planted at the ends of the rows, they were protecting 70 squash plants, summer squash, which are also very attractive to this pest. It was very effective. For our research, we were counting insects, etc., which you don't have to do that. But if you are organic, you can kill them using organic insecticides. Yes. They were 120 feet long. That's what we did. And we have results from our own farm research, different farmers other than Gary Venick, trying these in different ways. So there is different ways in which you can implement this trap crop system. So the one that I think is working very good for commercial farmers, because these plants, they need to get fertilizer and they need to get the water. Sometimes they have been shown to work so well, but that is when you have them outside the rows and there is no water, there is no fertilizer, and the plants are very stressed and that's when they don't work. The key is that you have to kill, the key is that you have to kill the pest. Chicken tractors, organic insecticides, or conventional insecticides. If you don't kill the pest, they are going to kill the plants, and they are going to move to a different crop. This is a picture from the Lincoln University Carver farm in Jefferson City, Missouri. It shows very clearly the concept of trap crop. Every row gets blue hovard squash. Or red curie hovard squash. Gary talked about that. You can see the size of the cash crop compared to the size of the hovard. But not only that, we also have been doing, as part of the system, trying to integrate hovard crops, which is, for example, bogweed as a way of bringing beneficial insects, but very importantly to bring honey bees. Because cucumbers, as you know, they require pollination. So if you can bring plants that can attract pollinators, you can increase yields. So what you see here is just sorghum, sudan grass, for wheat suppression. Every week, a person will mow these areas, leaving this strip with the flowers. So what is working well is that when you are transplanting the, when you are seeding the cash crop, you can, at the same time, seed the bogweed, because they are going to be blooming more or less at the same time. So this is just a mature, those are mature plants. It was harvest time. And then, well, it looks pretty good. Then, again, for the number of years we have been doing this research, and red cutie hovard has shown to be, in most cases, as good or better than blue hovard. The blue hovard plant grows very big. It's hard to control. One suggestion would be perhaps to use a trellis system where you can have them grow vertically, because it's also going to expose more surface area and wind to the insects. Or you can prune the plants that keep adding seeds, so you can have always more plants around. And the cash crops, we have not pruned in five years at the University, because it has not been at any need. And this is just pictures showing the different ways we have done. This is the red cutie hovard, smaller, it's like a pumpkin, it's your plant. We have done our own farm research, organic. This is an organic farmer. We have had a funding from Garden Service Trust, a private foundation from the Midwest. They are mentioning the website that they are doing trap cropping. This is the farm that, in 2012, they had to farm half an acre of squash because they couldn't harvest due to squash bugs. They couldn't harvest. After implementing trap cropping in the last three years, they have been very successful. They say that they have not grown better squash compared to what they did before without trap cropping. Jose Fonseca is a Hispanic farmer in San Peters, Missouri. He has been implementing trap cropping since 2011. He has been using trap cropping even in his seedling production. He has a hoop house. When I met him, he will spray every week to kill the insects that will get inside the hoop house. That's where he had his seedlings and zucchinis. But the suggestion was to plant blue hovers inside pots and then to bring these pots outside the hoop house when it was activity. I mean, it was early May. He will apply, not for organic farmers, but he will apply imidacloprid, a systemic insecticide, just to those blue hovers on the pots. And then he will not have to worry about anything for three or four weeks. So most of the insects that came to that area, they came to the blue hovers and they were killed by the plants, by the insecticide. And after 2011, he has not sprayed, except for one spray that he did in 2011 in the field, he didn't have to spray. But we told them that it was a few insects, which is not an economic treasure, there was no risk for the crop, that he really wanted to have a good night's sleep and he sprayed. We told him, you don't have to, well, when he told me that he did, I told him after later said, you didn't have to spray because there was no need. But he sprayed and because of that, he didn't, I cannot say that he was an insecticide free, but that was in 2011, 2012, 13, 14 and 15, four consecutive years, zero sprays to the zucchinis. So he's really happy because he's a urban farmer, he has a hospital, there is a day care and customers have been asking him, do you control pests? Do you spray the crop? So now he can say that watermelon, all cucumbers, no sprays. And this is a statement from him and also it's very difficult to have a control when you do farm research. So basically you could say, well, he controlled the pests because maybe there were not enough pests on the particular year. But on a phone call, and that was two years ago, he said, you know what, Jaime? I did trap cropping as usual, because he already adopted the approach. I forgot to plant blue hovers somewhere in the farm, in one of these sections that he had a squash, zucchini. He said, I forgot, and I was trusting that the blue hovers were working. When he went to check those plants in that section with no blue hovers, but he thought they were blue hovers, they were dead. So that's the control. So you don't have blue hovers in his case, he knows that he was going to kill the plants. There is more research supported by CER, particularly one of the largest vegetable farmers in Missouri that I know, not organic. And he also got support to scale up the use of the crop. He has the whole perimeter row in plastic with blue hovers. And those rows are large. Those are 600 feet long rows. That's why he had two rows. The perimeter rows were with blue hovers squash. He applied a systemic insecticide. It's conventional. He's an organic, but that's the flexibility. If you are organic, you can use organic insecticides. We can discuss what is the most effective. Because if you use entrust, which is spinosa, you are not going to kill a squash box, just the way they feed. Spinosa is more, well, we would describe it. I don't want to see the five minutes. So basically, Rosteli presented at the Great Plains Conference in St. Joseph that was two years ago. And this statement that he made to the farmers, I thought it was very important. He said, I eliminated two field-scale sprays. And the next word that he says to me, that matters. And when I ask him, what do you mean by that? Is the cost savings? Because he didn't spray and there is less input. He said, no, Jaime, if you only cost, he's not spraying, not killing bees, not, I mean, spraying the ground, et cetera. So that's all what I have to say, five minutes, and I just don't want to see the time. The question is whether Blujovar is susceptible to bacterial wilt. Yes, for trap-cropping, you don't want to have a plant that is susceptible. There is another squash, which is the turk's turban. It's very susceptible. It's attractive to these insects, but it's so susceptible that if they feed, if they have the bacteria, they can transmit the bacteria to plants, Blujovar is not susceptible. That's why he's very, very safe. Yeah, were the blue-hubbered destroyed by the chickens? Not really. They really didn't affect them like I thought they would, because, you know, chickens get in your flowerbed, they just scratch them all out of the ground and the ground tomatoes and stuff. But they really didn't affect the blue-hubbered that much. They would scratch around a little bit. It's the squash bugs that destroyed it. Yes, what she's talking about is a system I have not tried yet, but I think this is a fantastic system. The guy that I know took cheap plywood, cut it in two-foot-wide, eight-foot strips, and you lay them out a few feet apart, and then you let the bugs build up under those, and each day you flip over a couple, depending on how many chickens you have, you flip over a couple, let them eat those bugs, and then you feed them, and then the next day you move to the next couple and you just keep working down your pattern and back, and it's amazing. You just bring in hundreds and hundreds of bugs, especially crickets, and cockroaches, chicken, lobsters, and bugs. Can you use the chickens and squash cockroaches you want to harvest? They will peck the fruit. We didn't care about the squash. We didn't care about it, so we didn't care if they pecked it apart. In fact, we were just using it as supplemental heat, but no, they'll destroy those. You're going to have to have a separate section just for the sacrificial. Well, yes, I can tell you, a pound of spinosad, the previous formulation was lost, now it's a different formulation, it's very expensive, it will be $600 a pound, but the active ingredient is 80% spinosad. When you buy the Monterrey and they're ready to apply solutions, when you check how much spinosad is in the and so on, it's 0.5%. Basically, you're spraying water, of course, you're spraying water with just a tiny amount of spinosad. So it's effective, but when you make comparison, you are paying about four or five times more, four or five times more for the value of the amount of the spinosad per gram. So you're a commercial farmer, yes, spinosad, the real formulation is if you are buying the ready to use, basically you're spending more money. But if you have a small area, of course, you're not going to buy the commercial formulation. Then spinosad, again, is not going to kill squash bugs, because squash bugs, the way they feed is they insert the mouth part into the stem. So they're not in contact with insecticide. So spinosad is more effective when you have chewing insects, like cucumber beetles. Well, byganics is expensive also, but you can buy small amounts and I will use the highest rate because it's difficult to kill. Squash bugs, as you know, is very difficult to kill. There is another insecticide which is called acera, A, C for zebra, E, R, A. The problem with that insecticide is that it's very expensive also. You need to buy one gallon, it doesn't come in less than one gallon, and one gallon is $330. It combines two active ingredients, combines byganic and also it has as a directing, which is neem. So both together is more effective. That would be a good idea, yes. If you have both, separately, you can mix them and, yes, you can apply. But always apply the high rate to kill, in particular, the squash bugs. If you're using the beneficial insect crops, like I showed you with the millet and stuff, and the blue govards, you do not spray your blue govards, you do not spray your blue govards. You really have to keep those separate and those have to be on the outside of your garden or whatever. Flowers, the blue govards or the trap crops, they're going to attract honeybees and they're going to attract the bumblebees and other pollinators. But that's when the bogweed, as you have bogweed, it's a way of diverting them to those plants. Or, if you have a small area, you can pick the flowers so that there is no blooms. But if you spray, of course, you can spray at night, just don't spray directly and the high concern will be when you apply imidacloprid, so the whole plant becomes toxic including the flowers. In that case, it's when I would suggest removing the flowers or having bogweed so that the bees can go to those plants. And the imidacloprid systemic will be effective for four or five weeks, it depends. Organic insecticides, well, you have to spray more often or microbial. And then spray at night.