Pahl's Market

IPM for Premium Prices

Gary Pahl, along with his brother Brian, operates Pahl's Market, a fourth generation family operated vegetable farm, in Dakota County just south of the Twin Cities. The farm consists of 1,200 acres of vegetables which, during the 2001 season, included 515 acres of sweet corn, 125 acres of green beans, 50 acres winter squash, 3 acres tomatoes, and a few acres of cucumbers and dill. Pahl’s Market also planted 100 acres of soybeans during the 2001 season.

Handling field harvested crops is done in a cooling and packing line. The farm has temporary refrigerated storage for up to four semi loads of produce. “We ship the produce as quickly as we can,” Gary says.

Although the Pahls have long operated a retail stand, where almost all of their tomatoes, cucumbers, and dill are sold, their large markets are to grocery wholesalers and food service companies in Minnesota and the Midwest. During the 2001 season, they worked with a local non-profit on the possibility of developing an integrated pest management (IPM) label for some of their products. Gary believes produce grown using IPM may be able to obtain a premium in the market.

Integrated pest management has been adopted as a tool on the Pahl’s farm over the last decade. Gary sees IPM as a way to increase farm safety for farm workers as well as owners and to reduce inputs in a thoughtful way that doesn’t risk quality.

“My definition of IPM is somebody who goes in and scouts and sprays for a specific pest at a particular time when the threshold reaches a certain level,” he says. “By carefully observing and not spraying until you reach a threshold that could cause problems you can do the best job on the pest itself and alleviate the highest risk for everybody else.” Scouting is an essential part of the IPM at the Pahl farm. It provides regular contact with the crops and the fields allows labor and management to be closely in tune with the cycles of plant and pest development. Gary estimates scouting costs between 6 to 12 dollars per acre per season.

Effective and well timed spraying saves on increasingly expensive pesticides. But for a sweet corn grower there are other concerns as well. Guesswork and cookbook style spraying schedules just don’t cut it when you need a high quality product.

“If we let the corn borer get ahead of us, we not only lose yield but we lose clean product and we have to have clean product,” Gary says. “When we have corn for a customer three or four states away and they find a worm they aren’t going to take it. It’s pretty critical that our corn leaves the field corn borer free.”

Trial and Error

One fairly expensive fix, often recommended to IPM and organic farmers, just doesn’t work on the Pahl farm. “We tried beneficial insects and they didn’t work,” Gary says. “Maybe the scale of our farm is too big. We did try them on our cucumbers a few years ago. I don’t think they get these pests in a quick enough fashion. Here’s the problem. If you release them you have to release them at say, when your population is 25% of when you’re going to start spraying. Then they have to keep up with the hatching larvae of the pest. You need to have the growth of the beneficials match the growth of the pests and if that doesn’t work you’ve got to go in and spray anyway.”

Scouting and spraying are not the only effective tools in the Pahls’ IPM toolbox, however. Gary believes a well thought out crop rotation, based on observation and common sense, is basic to sound integrated pest management.

“If you want to be considered a good farmer your rotation practices better be pretty sharp,” Gary says.

Green manure and tillage practices are a natural extension of a well thought out crop rotation. The Pahls often follow a harvest with a late summer or early fall planning of rye. The rye will be plowed under in either the spring or the fall, depending on the crop that will be planted after it.

Trained and experienced hired labor is also an IPM tool that Gary counts on.

In addition to cultivating a couple of times each season, the Pahls have about 40 experienced people in the field with hoes. Those hoe-masters do more than decimate weeds. “They’re looking for different situations in the field. They might bring in a worm they saw out there and show it to somebody. That’s part of their job,” Gary says. “These people are experienced and they take pride in what they do. They can see the pride we take in keeping our equipment and our fields up, and it rubs off on them. If your boss isn’t a good role model the worker won’t do well either. If they can see us out there scouting and looking, and we tell them this is what we’re looking for, they welcome the opportunity to be part of that. We offer bonuses at the end of the year and that comes into play. They want to see quality and good yields because they’re part of the farm’s profitability.”

Because his land is flat and there’s very little run off, Gary doesn’t see a lot of direct environmental results from his IPM practices. He does believe that using fewer pesticides may bring him a market premium if he can successfully develop an IPM label. “Consumers who are concerned about pesticide levels have some justification for their concerns,” he says.

But the real health benefits from reduced pesticide use come to the workers and owners who use them and are exposed to them day after day during the growing season.

“My dad’s generation thought the chemicals never hurt you and they were infallible. Nobody knew any better in those days. Now we do,” Gary says. “With IPM, the safety benefit for the grower themselves is important. It’s important to the consumer too but the consumer only comes in contact with them once every blue moon. The grower comes in contact with it every day. I’ve seen too many cancer causing things in agriculture not to be concerned.”

In addition to the safety benefits of IPM the Pahls feel that the economic benefits are important.

“IPM practices put you in touch more with your costs and you inputs,” Gary says. “it allows you to make better decisions on you inputs. There’s nothing you can do about price – you’re either going to be selling it at a certain price or you’re going to start dicing it up, that’s a decision each farmer has to make – but as far as knowing the cost of your inputs, IPM allows you a better opportunity to decide where you should be placing your money.”

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This article is one in a series which can be found in "A Bountiful Harvest: Minnesota Fruit and Vegetable Growers Manage Pests," Sept., 2002. The publication was produced by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) with funding provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 5, Chicago, IL. For the entire article please go to the MDA's web site at:
http://www.mda.state.mn.us/ipm/fandvipm.html