Book focuses on systems

What is a ‘systems approach’ to plant health?

{sidebar id=67}

It certainly sounds a bit complicated. To really get a lot from the concept, a simple learning curve on your part may be needed. Let us start with some background.

The concept for this book came from a monumental work titled “The U.C. System for Producing Healthy Container-Grown Plants.” This publication was edited by plant pathologist Kenneth F. Baker, who was also my most important and influential teacher. It was published in 1957 as Manual 23 of the California Agricultural Experiment Station and Extension Service. It cost $1.

The opening paragraph is as useful today as it was then. It reads, “The most urgent need of the California nursery industry, within the limits of its present market, is for lowered cost of production. This is best achieved by reducing plant losses and by lowering labor cost through mechanization. These in turn require modification of many existing practices. Production must be dependable, uniform and largely free from unpredictable failures due to diseases, salinity, insects or weather.”

True today

I call these “failures” poor plant-health situations. And there are many more of these situations than were mentioned by Dr. Baker.

But now on to the systems approach. Dr. Baker notes that the U.C. system had been developed since 1941 to practically (read: cost effectively) eliminate the principal causes of such failures with container nursery crops.

It, as does the current approach that I deal with, takes into account mechanization. It was, and still is, time tested and has advocates worldwide. I personally have been teaching it for more than 40 years.

Diseases or crop failures are luxuries that nurseries can ill afford, according to Dr. Baker and me. Diseases and other poor plant-health situations are only important in determining what a grower does, how and when he does it and why.

Find root causes

What mistakes do growers make? I particularly feel that an understanding of why growers take certain actions may be the most important part of the systems approach. Linkages come from knowing the why of the action. Learning comes from knowing why things happen. This is the motivation for my approach over the years.

Here is a great definition of the systems approach taken from Manual 23: “All nursery practices must mesh. Disease [poor plant health] in the nursery should never be viewed as an isolated phenomenon, unrelated to other phases of growing. Actually it is one of a series of interrelated problems, which must be solved simultaneously rather than piecemeal.”

This couldn’t be stated any better or clearer. A plant-health-management program must either fit into the grower’s current cultural methods, or the cultural methods must be modified before the program can be successfully adopted.

Dr. Baker spent his career, and I’m spending mine, promoting and teaching this approach. That is why I have included “systems approach” in the title of my new book.

{sidebar id=2}

As far as I can tell, this publication is the only one that carries on from the earlier works of Dr. Baker. I can only hope that I did well with my effort.

- Charles C. Powell