Specialty Crop: Assessing the interactive effects of on-farm management in cucurbit production systems

The proposed project will incorporate ecological and molecular approaches to help guide and enhance sustainability of practices in organic cucurbit crop systems. Specifically, we will delineate the natural enemy feeding pathways for challenging high priority pests in organic cucurbit crop systems. On-farm research will be conducted in experimental organic fields to: document pest and natural enemy populations in relation to field management strategies, and test for natural enemy pressure on pests. This combined approach will benefit multiple areas of production, and tools designed during the research process can be used in Kentucky and any cucurbit production system.