Measure Your On-Farm Beneficial Insect Population

Beneficial insects can play many important roles on the farm. One of those roles is potentially controlling harmful pests that could jeopardize crop health and yields. To know whether practices meant to attract beneficial insects are working, you can build Texas-style insect traps and pheromone lures. Capturing bugs in such traps enables farmers to measure the number of beneficial insects in their fields.

Video Transcript

Hi everybody, this is Kent Kauffman coming to you from the research farm in Garden City. BigYield.us.

We’ve been talking about beneficial insects and some of the results of applying the sweetener to increase the effect of beneficial insects. Another thing we’re doing is we are building Texas style insect traps and pheromone lures.These are a cone shaped setup.

To know what your beneficial insects are doing, you really have to see what insects are there. You need to see your bad bugs too.

These Texas style insect lures use fine metal mesh, kind of like what you would use in a rabbit cage. We build these cages so they will draw in the insects with the pheromone lures, and this way we can actually see what beneficial insects are in your field and what harmful insects are in your field as well, depending on the lures and pheromones that you use.

So this is Kent Kauffman, BigYield.us Check us out.