Cultural Practices in Insect Management with Reference to Groundnut

Cultural operations in agriculture have well established history about their role in insect pest population management. Various cultural practices directly or indirectly are known to contribute to the insect pest control. There have been several case studies documenting their positive role as pest reducers, however quantification of their indirect effects though significant, are difficult to substantiate. Global dependence on chemical control in the past two-three decades bas contributed to the reduction of hunger to some extent, though the continuous dependence created several problems to natural resources. The awareness of the deleterious effects of chemicals led to the thinking about alternatives to chemicals. Over years we learnt how to grow high yields and now it is time to learn how to stabilize the food production with minimum effect on natural resources. In this process of thinking the role of cultural operations, with its interactions with all other control options gets high priority. In this paper we attempt to review the present status of cultural operations worldwide with some successful examples, using groundnut as a case study

G V Ranga Rao, T G Shanower, 'Cultural Practices in Insect Management with Reference to Groundnut', Indian Journal of Plant Protection, vol. 27(1/2), pp.87-108, 2011