Plant pro­tec­tion –
Plant dis­eases and the suit­able choice of plant pro­tec­tion prod­ucts (PSM)

Inte­grat­ed plant protection –
as much as nec­es­sary, as lit­tle as possible

Suc­cess­ful plant pro­tec­tion begins with a thor­ough till­ing of the soil to make the require­ment for the use of chem­i­cal means as low as pos­si­ble. For exam­ple, this means that the use of her­bi­cides in mulch drilling can be min­imised if the roots of the weeds are moved to the sur­face of the soil before sow­ing, where they dry out. How­ev­er, pests such as the Euro­pean corn bor­er can also be fought by mechan­i­cal means, which reduces the need for plant pro­tec­tion prod­ucts even further.

Since mechan­i­cal plant pro­tec­tion is real­ly not pos­si­ble on crops that have already began grow­ing, both con­ven­tion­al and organ­ic farms rely on mea­sures using field sprayers at this stage. While a range of chem­i­cal plant pro­tec­tion prod­ucts is avail­able for con­ven­tion­al farms for this, organ­ic farms are lim­it­ed to com­par­a­tive­ly few bio­log­i­cal products.

How­ev­er, both types of farm­ing oper­ate accord­ing to the max­im of the most eco­nom­i­cal use pos­si­ble. In this case, there is often a dif­fi­cult degree of bal­anc­ing inter­ests between cost-sav­ing appli­ca­tion quan­ti­ties and com­pre­hen­sive con­trol, dur­ing which cre­ation of resis­tance is to be avoided.

Use of plant pro­tec­tion prod­ucts in com­pli­ance with the Plant Pro­tec­tion Act in Germany

To meet the demands of law­mak­ers, act­ing accord­ing to good pro­fes­sion­al prac­tice is of great impor­tance, par­tic­u­lar­ly when deal­ing with chem­i­cal plant pro­tec­tion prod­ucts. This com­pli­ance must be ver­i­fied by an expert cer­tifi­cate which is renewed by reg­u­lar re-train­ing, among oth­er things. Com­po­nents of this are com­prised of pro­fes­sion­al plan­ning and imple­men­ta­tion of a plant pro­tec­tion mea­sure as well as exact documentation.

The Plant Pro­tec­tion Act reg­u­lates the appli­ca­tion and the intro­duc­tion onto the mar­ket of plant pro­tec­tion prod­ucts, plant pro­tec­tion devices and plant strength­en­ing agents. In the process, one of the great­est chal­lenges for the farmer is to keep an overview and to pro­vide the author­i­ties with sub­stan­ti­at­ed records.