Context is everything

Dr Francesco Porcelli of the University of Bari offered a masterclass in why IPM tools can’t be evaluated in isolation. The same pheromone trap, for example, performs very differently depending on planting density, and its effectiveness increases further when the pheromone is combined with the insect’s food source. Pest lifecycle, environmental tolerances, movement patterns, feeding behaviour: all of these shape where, when, and how any intervention will perform.

The broader message was clear: IPM isn’t a product. It’s a framework for thinking – one that demands genuine understanding of the target pest before a control strategy can be designed.

Know your enemy – at a biological level

Two of our speakers approached crop protection from opposite ends of the same question: what actually happens when a pathogen meets a plant?

Dr Marisela Garduno-Rosales of The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL) works on rice blast fungus, mapping the precise steps a fungal spore must complete to establish infection. The implication is powerful: understand those steps in enough detail, and you identify points where the process can be interrupted, stopping the infection before it takes hold.

Dr Jesús Mercado Blanco of CSIC Granada approaches the same question from the host’s perspective, researching why some olive varieties resist or tolerate Verticillium wilt while others don’t. His team has found significant differences in root architecture, lignin content, and lignin chemical structure between susceptible and tolerant varieties. He also introduced us to the concept of the holobiont – the plant understood not as an isolated organism, but as a system, complete with the entire community of microorganisms living on and within it.

Together, these two perspectives point in the same direction: durable crop protection will come from working with plant biology, not around it.

The banana industry’s compounding challenge

Two sessions focused on bananas, and between them they illustrated just how complex the threat landscape can be for a single crop.

Professor Altus Viljoen, from Stellenbosch University, took us through the history and biology of Fusarium Tr4 (the pandemic strain of Fusarium known colloquially as “Panama Disease”). The factors that make it so difficult to contain include decades of soil persistence, multiple spread pathways, delayed symptom expression, and the cost of strict biocontrol and containment options that remain out of reach for many smallholder farmers.

The second, from Professor Luis Pocosangre (Director General of CATIE and a member of our Advisory Board), focused on Latin America, where banana growers manage Fusarium alongside nematodes, Black Sigatoka, and Moko simultaneously. The growing adoption of Trichoderma as a biocontrol agent offers an encouraging proof point for the integrated approach.

From the lab to the field – and the farm

These sessions were perhaps the most grounding. Solveig Haukeland (our Advisory Board colleague from NIBIO in Norway) was candid about the limits of controlled research: companion planting strategies that showed real promise in the lab don’t always translate to field conditions. On top of this, intercropping with companion plants – while scientifically sound – creates practical harvesting challenges at commercial scale. Crop rotation, she argued, is often the more realistic and accessible solution for managing nematode populations.

She also shared a striking example of low-tech innovation from her work in Africa: simple banana fibre papers have been used to intercept the chemical signals that potato plants release into the soil – signals that stimulate Potato Cyst Nematode eggs to hatch. By absorbing those signals, the papers suppress hatching remarkably effectively, even without any additional nematicide. Ecologically informed, low cost, and deployable without specialist equipment.

Our final speaker, Leo Hidalgo from BioTor in Nicaragua, brought the commercialisation perspective – sharing his experience taking Pochonia chlamydosporia, a beneficial fungus that parasitises nematode eggs, from lab research to commercial product. His most important lesson wasn’t scientific. It was that transitioning farmers from familiar chemical inputs to living biocontrol agents requires sustained, on-the-ground support – not just a good product. Trust is built in the field, not in the brochure.