Cultural practices: springboard to IPM.

Abstract

This paper highlights the potential of cultural practices in integrated management (IPM) programmes, and discusses the major cultural practices most commonly recommended for the control of weeds, plant pathogens and arthropods, including sanitation, soil tillage, management of alternative hosts, maintaining and improving plant health, timing of planting and harvest (disrupting crop-pest phenological synchrony), crop rotation (increasing and maintaining temporal diversity), interplanting or multiple cropping systems (maintaining and improving spatial diversity), trap cropping, non-crop vegetation manipulation, and other miscellaneous cultural control practices.