Integrated Pest Management Practices for Major Insect Pests of Rice

Abstract

As we know that rice crop is prone to stress throughout the crop growth period due to the onslaught from different pests such as insects, nematodes, diseases, weeds and rats. Among the insect pests, rice stem borer, leaf folder and gundhi bug are the major one which causes maximum damage in rice crop in Bihar. Farmers are mostly relying on chemical pesticides as a result; disrupt the natural balance between insect pests and their natural enemies, secondary pest outbreak, resistance, resurgence and environmental hazard. Adoption of integrated pest management (IPM) strategies is the best solution to tackle the pest problems. Therefore, an experiment was carried out to evaluate different IPM modules for insect pest complex of rice (var. MTU 7029) at Research Farm, Bihar Agricultural College, Sabour under Bihar Agricultural University, SAbour, Bhagalpur, Bihar during Kharif season for three consecutive years i.e. 2012-13, 2013-14 and 2014-15. A total of four modules were evaluated against rice stem borer, leaf folder and gundhi bug and the modules were M1 (seedling treatment with imidacloprid 70 WS @5gm/l of water, erection of pheromone traps at 30 DAT, spraying of nimbicidine @3 ml/l at ETL), M2 (seedling treatment with chlorpyriphos 20 EC @12 ml per litre of water, spraying of cow dung 5% + cow urine 5% at ETL), M3  (first spraying with profenophos 50 EC @1.5 ml/l of water at 30 DAT and second spraying with imidacloprid 17.8 SL @1ml/ 3l of water at 60 DAT at ETL) and M4 (untreated control). Among the different modules evaluated, the module M1 was found to be the most effective in reducing the stem borer infestation. The module M2 was significantly superior in reducing the rice gundhi bug population which was at par with module M3. The module M3 was found most effective in reducing the larval population of rice leaf folder. The population of natural enemies’ viz., spiders and coccinelids were found higher in the module M1.