IPM is disrupting organic food in Australia, and it’s up to 30% cheaper

Cost-prohibitive organic food is being disrupted by an increasingly popular type of farming called integrated pest management (IPM) where natural pest killers like ladybirds and lacewings scour fruit and vegetable crops to create what advocates say is more affordable and more accessible healthy food.

The difference between organic and IPM, broccoli farmer Stuart Grigg tells SmartCompany, is that organic farming relies on only natural remedies, whereas IPM farming uses organic principles and adopts a “strategic use” of pesticides when necessary — the best of both worlds, he says.

As an IPM farmer, he only uses crop protectants when pest numbers threaten the overall health of a crop and the natural system can’t keep up, choosing low-impact products “which are as safe as possible on beneficial insects residing in the crop”. There is no change in the physical appearance of the produce in this method, he adds.

Compare that to conventional farmers, who can do “weekly spraying programs using a range of pesticides that kill any and every insect in their crops regardless of whether they are a beneficial ladybird or a pest caterpillar,” Grigg says.

From a business point of view, he’s found spraying much less regularly for pests has saved him time and associated production costs, though acknowledged the costs of scouting crops can add up.

To counter this, he recommends farmers bring in an IPM expert who understands the insects that are beneficial, and how they function.

“This is an investment but it is crucial in successfully transitioning to IPM farming,” he says.

IPM outselling organic 150%

CERES Fair Food Director Chris Ennis tells SmartCompany that IPM has come a long way from its origin in the early 2000s when Paul Horne was the only agronomist teaching farmers IPM. Ennis says, “today pretty much all working agronomists can advise farmers on how to implement IPM programs”.

One such agronomist is Toowoomba-based Matthew Holding, who says nitrogen applications in his region are at least 40% lower than the industry average thanks to timing and manure use, adding that herbicides are still in the mix, but at a far lower level.

And there’s certainly an appetite for the increasingly popular type of farming in stores, Ennis adds, which can be up to 30% cheaper than organic. He says within four weeks the IPM fruit and vegetable boxes have “become consistently one of our top three selling produce boxes — last week it was number one”.

“Individual IPM produce we sell like broccoli, cauliflower and celery are selling at a ratio of 60:40 organic to IPM,” he says, equating to about 150%, adding “We’re bringing in more IPM fruit and veg lines to meet the demand”.

Ennis chalks up this uptake among his keen, green customer base to the pressures of inflation on fresh food, saying he’s received feedback from customers about “cost-of-living and wanting more affordable sustainable produce options” driving them to IPM.

Closing the organic gap

More broadly a a rise in sustainable practices across the board in farming is seeing the gap close between the dichotomous definitions of organic and conventional farming, he adds, and it’s great news for the consumer (and the environment) as the risk of pesticides becomes more widely understood.

“Schreur & Sons in Devon Meadows, for instance, also do composting, precision ag (which reduces excess watering and fertilising), minimal tillage and some hand-weeding instead of spraying,” he says.

Not only that — IPM is being used as a form of fertility control to manage one of the apple industry’s major pests: the codling moth, which can wipe out between 50 to 90% of the fruit if left to its own devices.

For the first time in Australia, researchers at the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture (TIA) are flooding the wild population in several orchards with large numbers of sterile male moths in a bid to slash the number of fertile eggs produced.

“When this is repeated over a number of seasons, the population crashes and infestations drop below the threshold levels set for pesticide application, meaning growers no longer need to apply pesticides for codling moth, even for export markets that require pest-free shipments,” Research Fellow Dr Sally Bound says.

Woolworths, Coles yet to champion IPM

But the big supermarkets like Woolworths and Coles haven’t rushed to embrace the new middle ground between organic and conventional pesticide-impacted produce, in Ennis’s view, though Cummaudo Farms are among suppliers to the grocery duopoly who have embraced IPM.

“We all know that fresh, healthy fruit and veg are critical marketing tools for the big supermarkets (The Fresh Food People etc), however, the issue the big supermarkets have is that they buy a lot of produce from farmers who still rely heavily on chemical pesticides and having nuanced conversations about pesticides is just too difficult.”

“So they’ve just decided the easiest thing to do is not to talk about IPM farming or pesticides at all — which for customers means IPM farmers are kind of invisible.”

But farmers like Grigg are spreading the word. He’s thrilled about the new farming method, saying it’s a “good feeling for yourself knowing you are putting a product out there for consumption that has very low incidents of crop protectants applied to it in a way that is more affordable and accessible to the consumer.”

Plus, bringing in the new bug workforce doesn’t hurt his bottom line, he adds.

“The good bugs will be in your crop 24/7 helping keep your crop clean, should a weather event prevent a grower from being able to apply a crop protectant, our little friends are in there working for you free of charge!”