Join us at the Ontario Pest Management Conference on November 1st as we look at building resiliency in pest management with a great line-up of speakers. Register in advance here for early-bird pricing. Depending on availability, tickets may be purchased at door the day of the conference.
Meet Plenary Speaker #3 - Ryan Brewster & Aaron Oppenlaender
As an agricultural consultant, Ryan Brewster has been working in the Niagara area grape and tender fruit sectors since 2002. He began as summer student, monitoring and reporting on pest presence in Niagara area vineyards and
tender fruit orchards under the tutelage of Kevin Ker (KCMS Inc.). In 2019, Ryan branched out and started his own agricultural consulting company, Brewster Consulting Services Inc. (BCS), focusing primarily on pest monitoring/trapping, development of IPM based spray programs and soil/tissue sampling to optimize nutrient management programs. Ryan is a member of both the Ontario Institute of Agrologists (OIA) and the Agricultural Institute of Canada (AIC), and a proud graduate of Brock University.
Aaron Oppenlaender is the operations manager at Huebel Grapes Estates in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Huebel Grapes Estates manages both their own vineyards and custom manages multiple other vineyards throughout the Niagara Region. They believe in practicing sustainable viticulture and are an authorized dealer for Farm for Profit, a sustainable agriculture program.
Learn more about Huebel Grape Estates here.
Soft Chemistries to Manage Hard Problems in Niagara Vineyards
Grape growers are consistently faced with making a number of critical pest
management decisions and recent pesticide re-evaluations have made these
decisions more challenging. More and more, conventional growers are
turning to softer/organic chemistries to fill pest management gaps along with
investigating different cultural practices to reduce negative pest impacts.
Management of grapevine virus vectoring insects using horticultural oils and
disease management using new biological-based fungicides are some of the
use patterns of softer chemistries being adopted by grape growers in
Niagara.
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