MagicTrap tackles flea beetle in high-value veg

I provide agronomy advice across vegetable and combinable crops in Kent and south Essex, and installed a Bayer MagicTrap digital yellow water trap in a four-hectare crop of pak choi near Rochester in Kent

With strict quality specifications demanded by buyers – crops showing any shot-holing damage will be rejected – good control of flea beetle is essential.

The first and main line of control is a very fine mesh crop cover, which will remain in place until the pak choi is harvested.

Pak choi is such a high-value crop that it’s routinely protected against pests, and flea beetle is a pest right through the growing season. We can’t risk not covering it; if the flea beetle have started feeding, it’s too late.

Successive crops of pak choi will be drilled throughout the season, and I set up the MagicTrap in the field after the first crop was drilled in early April. With cool, overcast conditions at the time, there was little overall insect activity.

Monitoring is an important part of flea beetle management, which I have typically done with a combination of weekly crop walking and conventional yellow water traps.

Every week I would manually log pest counts into a spreadsheet. The data I’ve been collecting over the last four years has shown we typically get a flea beetle peak in pak choi in May and then maybe another peak later in the summer.

We played about with yellow sticky traps as well a few years ago. The trouble is when it’s a warm summer’s day they fill with absolutely anything and everything and it takes a while to do a count. You’ve also definitely got to swap the traps with fresh ones every seven days – it is all a bit labour intensive.

Pest identification with MagicTrap is pretty good. When it takes a photo, I can zoom in and do a quick double check. It’s giving me an alert. If I’m in Dover and I get an alert here, almost 50 miles away, then it’s saved me a trip.