Studies on the Necessary Minimum of Pesticides Application in Winter Wheat in the Years 2004 to 2016

In order to provide recommendations for future cropping systems with regard to the necessary minimum of pesticide use, a long-term field trial at the field site in Dahnsdorf of the Julius Kuhn-Institute was conducted in the years 2004 to 2016 to investigate possible reduction of pesticides, taking into account the general principles of integrated pest management (Strategies to reduce the use of plant protection products). Two winter wheats (WW1 and WW2) were part of the crop rotation with six components and different quality classes (A wheat (WW1) and E wheat (WW2)) and resistance levels to important wheat pathogens. In all years, herbicides and fungicides were needed to control weeds and fungal pathogens due to the excess of the control threshold. Insecticides were only necessary in two years. When considering the treatment frequency index (TFI), the mean overall TFI varied with 2.6 in WW1 and 3.5 in WW2, but was significantly lower compared to practice. There were also differences in the mean fungicide TFI of the two crop rotation elements with 1.1 in WW1 and 1.6 in WW2 due to their different resistance level to important fungal pathogens. The same is true with regard to the herbicide TFI with of 1.1 in WW1 and 1.3 in WW2. The treatments in the strategies 2, 3 and 4 mostly resulted in significantly higher yields compared to the non-chemical strategy 1, which can be attributed to the strong weed and fungal infestations in strategy 1 and the good efficacy of the used plant protection products. The tended differences between strategy 2 with a situation-related application rate and the 25 and 50% reduced application rates in strategies 3 and 4, respectively, were not significant. A reduced application rate showed no negative long-term effects on weed emergence even after 13 years, but increased emergence numbers in strategies with reduced herbicide use. The results show that plant protection products savings are possible without significantly reducing yields. However, this requires a high level of human resources for monitoring and scoring the consistent observance of the principles of integrated pest management, such as the consideration of good crop rotation, the cultivation of resistant cultivars and the optimally coordinated treatments after the control threshold has been exceeded.