Biointensive Approaches: Application and Effectiveness in Plant Disease Management

Plant diseases are one of the major biotic factors, which destroy around 10-20% of crop produce during pre and post-harvest stages. Farmers apply high doses of pesticides to control pests and diseases, but the treatments often fail to give an economic return because of late application and/or poor quality of the pesticide. This situation warrants evolving appropriate plant protection strategies so as to minimize pesticide input in agriculture, and to make the plant protection strategies economical and eco-friendly. In this direction, bio-intensive approaches may work as an effective and alternate option to chemical pesticides, and may offer economical and sustainable solutions of plant disease problems. The book, Bio-intensive approaches: application and effectiveness in plant diseases management presents elaborated and updated information on non-chemical and integrated methods of pests and plant disease management. The volume embodies 25 chapters covering major diseases of agriculturally important crops, highlighting the application and effectiveness of bio-intensive methods of their management, especially biological and cultural methods as well as the biotechnological and nano-technological tools. The present book shall serve as an important reference source and would provide field orientated and detailed information, highly useful to students, scientists, faculties, entrepreneurs, industrialists, planners and others intend to devise and develop bio-intensive modules for management of diseases in food and medicinal crops.