NOT ALL BUGS ARE CREATED EQUAL
Greenhouses use Mother Nature, not pesticides, to control unwanted bugs on their crops

And you thought your office had pests.

When Jenel Melnyk sets out to rid her workplace of enemies, she’s backed by an army of wasps and ladybugs.

Inside Delta’s Gipaanda Greenhouses, the 24-year-old technical assistant helps battle the years-old problem of bad bugs eating a good tomato crop. Now with the help of researchers, she and others are using Mother Nature as the best defence.

“Nobody really understands what I do,” said Melnyk, who monitors bumblebees pollinating plants and bad bugs – like whiteflies and aphids – showing up in the crop. “They think every greenhouse blasts pesticides. We’re trying to be as environmentally-friendly as we can be.”

Melnyk is one of many B.C. vegetable greenhouse employees using the latest technologies called “biological control” or “Integrated Pest Management.” In short, she and others use good bugs to kill bad ones, rather than spraying lots of pesticides.

B.C.’s vegetable greenhouse industry is a world-leader in developing biological controls to keep consumers, workers and the crops safe.

“I don’t think the average B.C. Canadian vegetable buyer understands the profound way in which the B.C. greenhouse vegetable industry has moved forward in biological controls,” said Dave Gillespie, a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada who studies Integrated Pest Management. “It’s an absolutely tremendous story.”

The story began in 1979 when a Vancouver Island company first started marketing two natural “enemies” to be used in greenhouses. The company, Applied Bionomics, had worked closely with scientists from the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to develop their products.

Growers, anxious for an environmentally friendly alternative to pesticides, embraced the concept. By 1987, almost 100 percent of the vegetable greenhouse industry had moved to biological controls.

“By then, if they used pesticides at all, it was very rarely and only on very small parts of the crop,” he said. “Over a 10-year period, we saw a massive change.”

Gillespie works with researchers from local universities and across the globe to develop natural predators in the greenhouse. Among the products they’ve developed are a predatory mite used for Western flower thrips, another for fungus gnats and a predatory midge that attacks spider mites. All are used worldwide.

Each research project, which can last years before sending the product into the marketplace, can cost a million dollars. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of millions of dollars spent on pesticide research, Gillespie said.

“There are a number of products that have been developed as a result of collaboration between researchers and the B.C. greenhouse vegetable industry,” Gillespie said.

The research Gillespie and others have done is supported in part by grants from the BC Greenhouse Growers’ Association’s research council. The nonprofit organization represents 50 greenhouse vegetable farms.

“Our growers are constantly working to find the best practices available. Biological controls benefit not only our growers and the crop, but workers and ultimately the consumer,” said Mary-Margaret Gaye, the association’s executive director. “That’s why we support so many of these research projects. We see, on the ground, the good that comes from them.”

The goal of the network, made up of up to 40 researchers, is to reduce chemical pesticides in the greenhouse and nursery industries.

“There are people in Montreal, Saskatoon, the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser and the University of British Columbia that I can tap into,” researcher Gillespie said. “It’s a national network. It provides researchers and the greenhouse industry with an enormous amount of cross-pollination.”

Gaye agrees.

“This ability to share knowledge with everyone across the country and the world means we all grow.”

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