Bernhard Wyler on Integrated Production

In Integrated Production one of the key components
is that one tries to work with nature.
If one has a problem in the vineyard it is important not to try to solve it quickly with a big hammer
but rather ... for example take the "damage threshold"
The damage threshold for the red spider is such that when you see you have this insect on the leaves of the vine
the insect causes a damage to the leaves - one doesn't just say "ok I saw one and now I am going to spray the vineyard"
One should rather collect 100 leaves, goes into the office and sits down with the magnifying glass and counts the red spiders
Then there is a "damage threshold" that is such that if more than 60% of the leaves have a spider, then we need to spray.
So if you find a red spider on 60 leaves then you can say that it is urgent to spray the vineyard immediately
If you only find 40, then you just continue to monitor the situation
It is often so that nature can heal itself
The grapevine has some possibilities to defend itself, it just takes a while and one should not try to fix something prematurely
In Integrated Production one also tries to protect the soil.
Earlier the soil was always ground up and was open and exposed to the elements - now it is covered with grass
Now you loose less humus and less erosion and this is a very positive development
Then we have one paracite called wine moth.
This is a butterfly that lays eggs on the berries. Out of the eggs come worms that burrow themselves into the berries
The problem is particularly bad with grapes with compact clusters. When one berry is infected it infects the rest of the cluster.
And to fight this paracite and be able to intervene in time, we have hung up some traps
The traps have a sexual scent in it that attracts the insect
and then we can count how many such butterflies are in the vineyard.
Are there so many that we need to spray. If there are too few, then we don't spray and if too many we can spray at the optimal time.
Here we see such a trap where we try to catch the butterfly
This is a paper with glue on it, and inside the trap, there is a small rubber button with attractive scent on it.
This is so called feromon trap. With it we try to capture the male insects
In other words, the attractive scent smells like the female butterflies and when the males are on the prowl at night and want to visit the females
Then they come into this small house here and they get stuck on the glue paper
and we can then count how many were there
In this way we can figure out when the swarm is most active and can then use the spraying more accurately