Registration of red list chemicals halted in Pakistan thanks to Plantwise

Farmer sprays pesticide in the cotton field at the village Khudabad Chandia in Mityari, Sindh, Pakistan.
Pakistan’s Department of Plant Protection (DPP) promotes the transition to sustainable crop protection systems. It promotes an integrated approach for crop protection policies and practices within the framework of Sustainable Food and Agriculture. Through a series of meetings with officials of DPP, CABI’s Plantwise team has urged the department to enforce the regulations to minimize…
Read Further

A new pesticide is all the buzz

Rusty patched bumble bee feeding on wild bergamot
Bees’ fuzzy yellow bodies and hairy legs are custom-built for picking up pollen. Nothing can distribute the yellow powder more efficiently—something farmers that shell out for commercial beehives every growing season know all too well. And starting with this fall’s growing season, bees may be given some cargo to carry on their outbound journey to the blossoms: pesticides.
Read Further

Test your plant health knowledge

Birdseye view of a plant clinic in Peru. A plant farmer gives advice to a farmer on a crop sample.
>> Latest quiz just added Plantwise plant doctors are at the heart of our plant clinic network providing advice and information to farmers, logging their data for the Plantwise Knowledge Bank, and always adapting to new outbreaks and technologies. Think you’ve got what it takes to be a plant doctor? Take our online plant health…
Read Further

In Thiruvaiyaru, plant clinics are “a source of inspiration to do agriculture with clarity, confidence and interest.”

Since 2012, farmers in Thiruvaiyaru block, Thanjavur district in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, have had been using Plantwise plant clinics to help solve problems with pests and diseases. The programme there is run by the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in collaboration with Plantwise. Agriculture is the primary livelihood of 70% of…
Read Further

Update: New Pest & Disease Records (09 October 2019)

Brown weevil on green leaf
We’ve selected a few of the latest new geographic, host and species records for plant pests and diseases from CAB Abstracts. Records this month include reports on a new Pseudococcidae species on Monterey cypress in Tunisia, the first record of Phenacoccus madeirensis mealybug in Algeria and two new species of weevil in the Philippines.
Read Further

Test your plant health knowledge with the plant doctor quiz

Birdseye view of a plant clinic in Peru. A plant farmer gives advice to a farmer on a crop sample.
>> Latest quiz just added Plantwise plant doctors are at the heart of our plant clinic network providing advice and information to farmers, logging their data for the Plantwise Knowledge Bank, and always adapting to new outbreaks and technologies. Think you’ve got what it takes to be a plant doctor? Take our online plant health…
Read Further

Funding boost to help CABI ensure greater global food security

CABI has today received a funding boost from the UK Department for International Development (DFID) which will help it increase its efforts to help ensure global food security by stepping up the fight against crop pests and diseases. DFID has allocated CABI a share of a £61 million package to help equip millions more smallholder farmers around…
Read Further

Improving resistance of Kenya’s cabbage and kale crops to TuMV disease

Female farmer
A team of international scientists from CABI, the Kenyan Agricultural and Livestock Research Organisation (KALRO), NIAB EMR (UK), University of Warwick (UK) and Syngenta (Netherlands) are seeking to improve the resistance of Kenya’s cabbage and kale crops to Turnip mosaic virus (TuMV). In the distantly-related Chinese cabbage (Brassica rapa), a potentially durable TuMV disease resistance trait was identified by Professor John Walsh at the…
Read Further

Indian NGO supports farmers by using greenhouse agriculture

In the south Indian region of Hyderabad, a non-profit called Kheyti has developed an affordable solution to income stability and climate-resilient crop production for smallholder farmers and SMEs (small and medium enterprises) – greenhouses. The organisation founders spent countless hours meeting with Indian farmers to understand the range of issues threatening farming communities. “When we…
Read Further

Update: New Pest & Disease Records (06 September 2019)

We’ve selected a few of the latest new geographic, host and species records for plant pests and diseases from CAB Abstracts. Records this month include a report on a new root-knot nematode parasite on coffee in Vietnam, a report on a new variant of the moth Cyana peregrina Walker in India and a report on…
Read Further