IPM plan: What exactly is it and why is it important?

MPS offers MPS-ABC participants a help form that they can fill in without much effort

More and more growers are consciously working on making their company more sustainable. MPS-ABC helps them with this by means of secured digital environmental record-keeping and certification. MPS-ABC has been benchmarked with the FSI ‘Environmental basket’. In order to meet the market requirements from FSI, it is mandatory to draw up an IPM plan. When an audit takes place, it is necessary to have this form ready. However, you do not need to send it to us or the auditor in advance. But what exactly is an IPM plan and how do you set up an IPM plan?

Sustainable crop protection approach
IPM stands for Integrated Pest Management and means that you can anticipate any diseases and pests in your crop in advance. It helps you to think ahead about how you can coordinate things as best as possible in different situations, such as diseases, fungi and pests. This concerns biology, limited substance use, but also something like opening your windows. The ultimate goal of IPM is a sustainable crop protection approach. This means, among other things, that a grower uses as few crop protection agents as possible, only when there is no other option.

Effective IPM plan
In order to draw up an effective IPM plan, it is important to monitor what can influence the development of the crop. This way you can decide better which crop protection strategy to apply; this mainly concerns non-chemical methods. It is also important to alternate with agents with different effects. In this way, one time individuals with one trait and another time individuals with another trait are addressed. You can also choose to take preventive measures. This way you are ahead of any diseases or pests. Moreover, prevention is better than cure.

Unique approach
Is there a standard approach for the IPM plan? This question often reaches us. Every company is unique and every situation is different. That is why the IPM plan also differs per situation. Drawing up an IPM plan provides growers with tools to think about their own IPM strategy in a structured way. To help growers with this, we have developed a help form in which you can also add photos. In this way, the IPM plan is still unique for everyone, but we are making it a bit easier.

You can find this help document here.