very true.. most leaves and plants that are not eaten by GOATS have pest repellent properties. You may collect such leaves (for example Adathoda, Calotropis, etc) (Pongamia, Neem, Lantana, also help). these do have pest repellent proerties when used as mulch. They shall serve as pest repellents for sometime, then change as manure and provide organic matter to soil. Neem cake can be mixed with these leaves before applying. This shall also help water management in the soil.

Desmodium uncinatum is used under maize as green manure in order to push busseola fusca (mais stalk borer) towards Napier grass (pennisetum purpureum) which acst as pulling plant. See publications of ICIPE Kenia concerning push-pull technique

Clearly, there are any number of potential green manures that could be beneficial. It will depend upon the crops being grown and the nature of then soil itself, as well as what insects are positive and negative in that situation. See the following references -

Use of Cover Crops and Green Manures to Attract Beneficial Insects

http://www.hort.uconn.edu/ipm/general/htms/cvercrop.htm

CONTRIBUTION OF COVER CROP MULCHES TO WEED MANAGEMENT

http://www.hort.uconn.edu/ipm/weeds/htms/cvrcrps.htm

Cover crops and control of arthropod pests of agriculture

http://www.swcs.org/documents/filelibrary/CCCW9.pdf

Managing Pests With Cover Crops

http://www.sare.org/Learning-Center/Books/Managing-Cover-Crops-Profitably-3rd-Edition/Text-Version/Managing-Pests

Brassicas: Cover Crops

http://extension.umass.edu/vegetable/articles/brassicas-cover-crops

Brassica Cover Crops: Impacts on Plant Nutrition and Pest Management

http://ucanr.org/sites/nm/files/76741.pdf

Cover Crops

http://www.covercrops.msu.edu/pdf_files/covercrop.pdf

Nectar Cover Cropping for Sustainable Pest Management

http://biocontrol.ucr.edu/irvin/research/wsare.html

Enhanced Pest Management with Cover Crop Mulches

http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/40684/PDF

Use of botanicals in plant disease management assumes special significance by being an eco-friendly and cost effective strategy, which can be used in integration with other strategies for greater levels of protection with sustained crop yields. Many plant metabolites released from debris after incorporation into soil are known to be pesticidal, such as glucosinolates, which are hydrolyzed to release antimicrobial sulfur compounds. The members of the Cruciferae plant family contain high levels of glucosinolates in their tissues. Plants in the family Compositae produce insecticidal pyrethrin compounds as metabolites, and members of the genus Artemisia produce terpenoid compounds. Antifungal volatile compounds including allylisothiocyanate are found in many Brassica spp. Volatile compounds, such as alcohols and aldehydes, released from organic matter from many plants can stimulate germination of fungal propagules and increase microbial activity in soil. Several studies have shown that organic/botanical amendments can be very effective in controlling diseases caused by pathogens such as Fusarium spp., Phytophthora spp., Pythium spp., Rhizoctonia solani, Sclerotinia spp., Sclerotium spp., Thielaviopsis basicola, Verticillium dahliae, etc.

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Green Neem Leaf.

There are many plants of medicinal value especially the leaf composts. Neem is the best one to be cited. I remember the use of Mahua (Madhuca latifolia) oil cake in fish pond preprations. It has high saponin content. Probaly there are more such plant-based pesticides.

Thank you very much for the information shared by the Scientists on this issue. The potential of the plants need to be known to use them as insect repellent and a potential mulch to the soil. This could help to minimize the use of fertilizers and pesticides applied to the soil and polluting them in a long run. I wish to receive more discussion on this to make it useful to the farming communities.

Greetings Gunasingham. Sustainable Yogic Agriculture (SYA) farmers use the following with success:

Spray of:

Filtered cow urine and cow dung

1 litre of cow milk in 15 litres of water

3 litres of coconut water in 100 litres of water

Neem leaf powder + 5 kg Cow urine (5 kg each)

Dasparni ark of Neem leaves, custard apple leaves, papaya leaves etc

Mix of 250 ml Buttermilk, 50gm Lime, 100 ml Tamarind juice, 10gm Asafetida, 10gm Camphor

Best of luck!

Thank you Tamasin,

The information on Sustainable Yogic Agriculture ... use is encouraging to recommend the farmers to adopt. Are these combinations helps to curb the menace?

I understand the effect will not be like inorganics however we have these options to go ahead with rather dipping into the inorganic- toxic chemicals.

Hi,

In my opinnion, the effect of green manures on pest and deseases in many instances depends largelly on casuistics. However I have a very positive experience in a practice known as bio-fumigation. This is being used with high sucess as an alternative to the use of ozone depleting banned substance Methyl Bromide.

Bio-fumigation is sasically a modification of the well known solarization. Is a pre-plantation treatment consisting in adding to the soil an ammendment ideally containing winter leaf crop residues (brassicas like cabbage, mustard or legumes like broad beans or lupins, etc are good green manures bearing known allellochemical susbstances) mixed with manure. Then the soil is watered and cover with a transparent plastic film. In this way the terrain is exposed to the effect of a number of undefined substances including biocide gases (S and N containig gases) released from the decomposing ammendmend and from the soil organic matter, that together with the heat effect (in warm climates up to 70 ºC may be reached) have a positive effect on future crops planted, not only by directly reducing peest and pathogen populations (mainly soil borne) but also by many other positive effects on soil general fertility, pysic and chemical soil characteristics.

Plenty of information about this agricultural prectice is available elsewhere in the internet.

Hope this is of any help to you.

Best wishes!

Gunasingham, yes... the farmers are using these available organic products to create a 'pesticide'. It is apparently remarkably effective and they are also getting an increase in crop yield.

In addition, they are practicing meditation on the crops to repel pests. They have also installed bird perches, and for insects they swear by the use of a red and yellow flag.... farmers say insects lay their eggs in the colored cloth, keeping them away from the crops. So the SYA farmers are essentially using four methods: organic pesticide, meditation, encouraging natural predators and a colored flag. There are no disaggregated data on these so far though.

It seems you have some good answers so far.

Pyrethrum (Chrysanthemum [or Tanacetum] cinerariaefolium) is used over the years as insecticide due to an active components called pyrethrins in flowers. This is applied as a suspension in water or oil, or as a powder. The mode of action of pyrethrins is; these attack the nervous systems of the organisms and inhibit female mosquitoes from biting. hese are also used as repelling agent. These are environmentally friendly and non refractory and can be degraded easily.They are considered to be amongst the safest natural insecticides. Neem (Azadirachta indica)leaves, tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum),Rícino, castor bean (Ricinus communis),Mata ratón, cacaute, gliricidia (Gliricidia sepium),Bougainvillea (Bougainvillea spectabilis),Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba),Espinaca, spinach (Spinacea oleracea),Canavalia (Canavalia sp.)., etc. are enjoying populaity as natural insecticides.

Hello there! It has been a great pleasure to read your contributions to this discussion on botanical pesticides and soil amendments. This is highly encouraging for propagators of organic agriculture and, indeed a good start in our desire to eliminate synthetics in agriculture. For those who are really confident about the use of these alternative sources of soil fertility and pest management products could do a great service if they also added preparatory procedures and active ingredients inherent in these products. A mere mention cannot be so useful. If there are already packaged products that could be accessed on the input market would be extremely useful to the organic producers. Some areas have more problems than others. Does climate influence the efficacy of those botanical amendments?

For soil fertility improvements, almost all leguminous herbaceous plants could be used as green manure as long as they are soil-incorporated immediately before flowering. These can include both food and fodder legumes of various types. In the tropics, the most recommended soil improver is sun hemp (Crotalaria ochroleica). But its beneficial effects as pesticide is not well documented.

The discussions of Imtiaz and Akwilin are interesting. What I presume that we have plants which are not used or attended by human being however have potential in repelling or killing the pests. Those medicinal plants are not in wider use against the crop pests especially insect pests. Those unexploited plants could be considered to use against the crop pests. Here we have to define the methods also.

I wish to have some more references on the green manure and green leaf manure used against managing pests of crops. If anyone did such work kindly inform me

Neem ( Azadirachta indica)

That is a quit interesting topic!

Following the answer of Dr José González-Pérez, Biofumigation is one of the integreted technics with multiple targets (soil fertility enhancement, soil pests protection, plant growth optimization and so on...). In our Experimental centre (INRA Morocco in Agadir region) we've tried this technic with only mature compost, and the T° went to 70°C last summer for 13 days along (with no chemical fumigant treatment), at the end of the experiment we had reached a production of 280T/ha of tomato with reduction of 52% of pesticide costs, 65% of fertilizers costs and 36% of water consumption.

In the other han, I tried to incorporate the vegetable residues at the end of the crop cycle as a green manure, and the organic matter content has increased to rech 2.3% instead of 1.7% in a sandy soil. Also, soil treatment with oleaginous cakes (neem, castor, argan...) have a fantastic impact on soil fertility and rootknot nematode managment with adequat rate of application.

Concerning the intervention of Dr Gunasingham Mikunthan, you can visit the following website: http://biodevas.fr/ ther're french specialist in soil/plant/animal and human care with medicinal and aromatic plant.

All the best

Khalid AZIM

Ing (M.Sc) Researcher in Organic

Farming and Organic waste Managment

INRA-CRRA Agadir

B.P.124.Inezgane,80350

Tél: 212-528.240326

Fax: 212-528.242352

Portable: 212-661.479805

[email protected]

[email protected]

www.inra.org.ma

Skype: khalid.azim5

Use mustard, details here spring mustartd http://www.hort.cornell.edu/bjorkman/lab/covercrops/spring-mustard.php; fall mustard-- http://www.hort.cornell.edu/bjorkman/lab/covercrops/fall-mustard.php

Dear Khalid Azim and Mengmeng gu,

Thank you for the information and those are valuable to go thorugh. Big thanks to you all.

It's a very interesting topic for me. In our country, we used Neem and Tobacco for natural insecticide. We flamed Neem and Tobacco around the farm that has already been infected by pests. But, I just knew Chrysanthemum can also used as insecticide. Thank you Guansingham for your interesting question and other researchers for your valuable answers.

Tin, that is an interesting answer. I am aware of the use of nee extracts as insecticides and even local farmers do use tobacco as a storage substance to keep out some post harvest insects. What I cannot understand is how burning these plants becomes active in controlling insect pests of field crops. I would appreciate receiving your/others reaction to this.

Neem Seed Extract or leaf extract usually used as biological control against insect, especially against stored grain pest. Similarly Neem extract can also be used in the field

The healthy discussion on green leaf manure is much useful to our research here and I wish to share the information we gathered and published with you all

Dear Akwilin Tarimo, this method of burning is our traditional method. So, I cannot explain you clearly. I will ask my professor and reply to you lately.

Thanks Tin, I will be waiting anxiously. Indigenous technologies usually have a reason for their practice. From these indigenous technologies we can develop interventions that are sustainable and environmentally safe. Thank you again for responding to my concern.

Dear Akwilin Tarimo,

Fumes of Neem is used to repel insects from plants. This is a traditional practice in our place especially neem leaves and seeds are kept in a container which was set fire inside and the container is kept beneath the mango tree. The fumes expel to certain extent the sucking insects especially the mango hoppers and some of the leaf beetles. During flowering the hoppers menace is a big problem here and due to this we do not get fruits. People at village produce fumes using fresh neem leaves and seeds to expel the insects. obviously neem seeds and leaves are used to produce fumes to expel mosquito

Thank you very much Gunasingham. It is a practical approach to the control of insect pests. I will try this practice in my little orchard.

Please find some info of the extract which is a combination os Neem and additional oils we use..It is easdy to be used as it is dissolved in water and sprayed easily onto the crop, It seems that when pest touched the extract mix ande sticks onto the insect a chemical reaction occurs and dissolves the cellmembranes of the insects.