Pest monitoring in carrot and brassicas

Contact: Rosemary Collier

We maintain plots of carrot and brassicas (swede and cauliflower) to monitor the pests of these crops.
No insecticides are applied and we grow the swedes and carrots year-round. We monitor flies and beetles infesting the brassicas using yellow water traps (insects attracted by the colour), carrot fly using orange sticky traps (attracted by colour) and moths using pheromone traps (males attracted by the smell of the lure – female sex pheromone).

The information is used for the development and validation of weather-based forecasts and is also used in real time as part of the Pest Bulletin – which is available through the Warwick and Syngenta UK web sites.