Making Red Wine Green: Using biodiversity to reduce pesticide use in vineyards

Over the past 6 years, the Altieri lab at UC Berkeley has been collaborating with commercial wine grape growers in Napa and Sonoma County to develop ecologically-based pest management practices. These are methods by which growers can reduce pesticide use by planting habitat that attracts beneficial insects who then keep pest populations in check. But this isn't as straight forward as you might think. There is so much we still don't know about the ecology of these insects, much less how to utilize that information to manipulate them into doing the things we humans want, like specifically attacking the pests we're concerned about. Now layer onto that the many challenges of conducting this work almost exclusively in commercial vineyards in direct collaboration with 20+ wine grape growers and you've got a research project that involves far more than just counting insects. I'll provide an overview of the progress we've made to date as well as highlight a number of the challenges and opportunities of conducting participatory on-farm research - from learning how to handle one of the world's smallest known parasitoids to kicking clods around with grape growers.

Speaker: Huston Wilson, UC Berkeley