IPM is integrated pest management, or an approach to pest management that generally avoids chemical pesticides, often taking a life-cycle approach to trying to

IPM is integrated pest management, or an approach to pest management that generally avoids chemical pesticides, often taking a life-cycle approach to trying to deal with problematic insects, slugs, snails, etc. For me, this means mostly trying to manage three issues: aphids, powdery mildew, and tropical fruit flies. I have around 1000m2 of planted area in a mix of vegetable crops and tree crops. 5000kg of cattle manure works out to around ~220kg/ha/yr of N, which is comparable with fertility rates for nitrogen intense crops like corn. Consider how deep a layer of compost would be spread that thin. Thats about 5kg/m2 over a couple of years, say some rounding for easy math, about 1.7kg of cattle manure/ m2/ yr. Maybe 2-4 good shovels of compost or 0.5-1.5 good cow shits per meter sq/year. Its really not that much. I also live in the subtropics and can crop more or less continuously. Its a ton of work, but I hope to have enough production to feed my family, and to run a small stand at a farmers market this summer. My day job is the satellite remote sensing of forests and forested ecosystems. I use various different remote sensing platforms like landsat, sentinel, GEDI, and others, to consider questions around the carbon cycle, and biogeochemical processes in general. If you think you know me, the fact I'm particularly interested the impacts of disturbance of long term forest growth rates and carbon cycling would be an immediate tell as to my identity.