An emergency summit aiming to find an industry-led solution to the threat of vine weevil took place on Tuesday last week.

It focused on issues surrounding the vine weevil threat and the available means of control. BASF, the UK’s only producers of nematodes, played an integral part in the discussion, which aimed to produce concrete steps for the industry to take.

Rob Storer, BASF’s marketing and value chain manager, has stressed the need for the industry to work together, “Biological pest control is possible at field scale, however it should be viewed as being part of a true IPM system” he said. “Using biological products requires different thinking to conventional pesticides – a more holistic view needs to be considered and so wide IPM approaches developed”.

Also supporting the summit were the HTA, Bayer, ICL and Fargro.

Nematodes are tiny micro-organisms which occur naturally in the soil where they hunt down and attack pests, with each different nematode having their own specific prey species

In addition to a Nemasys product formulated to deal with vine weevils, there are controls designed to control slugs, leatherjackets, ants and chafer grubs.