Covid-19 has meant that we have all had to adapt our working practices, ensure social distancing and keep colleagues and family safe. For many of us it has seen a major increase in the use of online meetings and this has certainly been the case for Certiphyto’s world tour. The tour had barely kicked off in the French Caribbean (pictured right, a visit to an organic producer in Martinique) when France went into lockdown, bringing what should have been a 22-date tour to a rapid halt.
Since that March shutdown, ACTA, which heads up 15 different agricultural technical institutes across France, has been forced to rethink its plans for delivering ‘training to the trainers’. It was scheduled to have been the third world tour of this type, conducted at the behest of France’s Ministry of Agriculture and designed to deliver training to the trainers, in other words the personnel responsible for providing insight into alternative pest control methods to farmers and producers seeking the obligatory certification required to use pesticides in France.
The world tours are a major plank in France’s ambitious Ecophyto plan to drastically reduce pesticide use and usually offer a series of thematic days dedicated to different crops or non-agricultural uses, if possible with a site visit to an establishment employing alternative methods or a demonstration of cutting edge equipment. In the post Covid-19 world this was no longer possible so ENDURE Communication Team leader Philippe Delval and colleague Sophie Gambaro designed a stripped back version of the world tour using Microsoft Teams (other services are available!).
ENDURE joined the half-day session dedicated to viticulture in south-east France to get a flavour of the new online training the trainers sessions and to catch up with Philippe on the advantages and disadvantages of moving the sessions into a virtual world.
Central to these training sessions is bringing participants up to date with work being conducted within Ecophyto’s experimental and demonstration networks. The session we attended followed this formula with an update on the Dephy Expe Salsa project from Matthieu Arroyo of INRAE Bordeaux.
This ambitious five-year project is seeking to reduce the Treatment Frequency Index in three of France’s key wine areas by between 80% and 100%. The sites in Bordeaux, Alsace and Languedoc are taking an agroecological approach to vine protection based on a combination of levers.
Key levers include the use of varieties resistant to powdery and downy mildew, conservation biological control against pests, damage limitation, the use of cover crops and service plants and, as a last resort, the use of chemical or biological control. No herbicides are being used on these sites and efforts are being made to reduce inputs other than pesticides.
The project was launched in 2018 so is still in its early stages but the co-design between producers and those working in the industry has produced some interesting ideas. For example, the plot in Montpellier (Languedoc) is including elements of agroforestry with the inclusion of pomegranate and fig trees.
While it is too early to draw conclusions, some interesting findings have been made, including good resistance of the Artaban variety in Bordeaux, which has allowed for substantial reductions in fungicide use.
Eric L’Helgoualch provided the session with an overview of results in the Dephy Viticulture network, which comprises 570 winegrowers working in 49 groups to reduce pesticide use in their vineyards.
Within the network, the top three alternative measures for disease control are observation and technical bulletins, reduced vigour and better air circulation, and modulated doses, using the Optidose tool for example. The first two also feature in pest control, alongside the use of pheromones to disrupt mating. For weed control (more than two-thirds of the group’s vineyards do not use herbicides) mechanical or manual de-suckering (épamprage), the use of grass cover and mechanical weeding are the top three options.
The group comprises 201 different cropping systems and the overall average TFI had been falling pretty steadily from around 13 in 2011 to below 10 in 2017. The following year saw increased disease pressure cause a spike in TFI to 12.5, though there is hope that it again dropped below 10 in 2019. Maybe it comes as no surprise that those systems which had the highest TFI at the start of the exercise - showing little parsimony in their pesticide use - have seen the largest falls in TFI.
One of the features of these sessions is the fact that different approaches can be presented. Here, Romain Padilla, vineyard manager at the viticulture high school based at Chateau Mongin, provided details of their organic approach in the northern part of the famous Châteauneuf-du-Pape wine-producing area.
Finally, the group was given an insight into the work being done in the Dephy Expe DiverViti project to establish an agroecological vineyard at the Domaine de Piolenc in the Vaucluse. Pauline Garin, from the Vaucluse Chamber of Agriculture, explained that the plan is to diversify the flora in vineyards while ensuring economic cost-effectiveness. The other objectives are a 50% reduction in the fungicide TFI while reducing insecticide use to a minimum and removing herbicide use, optimal water and soil management and the introduction of a system that reduces the difficulty of vineyard work while boosting interactions with other local actors.
At Poilenc, a resistant grape variety is being grown in one area, alongside a variety of white wine varieties in another. An underground watering and irrigation system has been installed and maximum soil cover is being achieved through the planting of eight different species alongside hedging containing almost 30 species. These species have been chosen for the roles they can play in natural regulation, such as plants hosting beneficials that can control European grapevine moths, and for honey production, for example.
The vineyard is still very much in its infancy, but this year saw the first harvest of one of its innovative features, with the herb thyme being grown between vine rows to offer another crop. And last year, the vineyard attracted plenty of attention, attracting around 170 visitors, including growers, researchers, teachers, students, journalists and politicians.
Philippe’s verdict on virtual learning:
What are the advantages and disadvantages in virtual learning like this? | |
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Main disadvantages:
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What adaptations to the material presented were required? How has the format changed? | |
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