Friday 7 June 2019

Cereal Aphid Manager (CAM) (June 6, 2019; Wk09)

Congratulations!  The Cereal Aphid Management (CAM) Mobile Application Team was recognized with an Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Gold Harvest Award this month!  Team members included Ashraf Eid, Paul Faure, John Gavloski, François Jodoin, Elham Karimi, Eric Li, Jackson Macdonald, Nancy MacDonald, Owen Olfert, Chrystel Y. Olivier, 
Daniel Shen, Erl Svendsen, Gabriel Tobian, Tyler J. Wist.

"The app is a culmination of innovative thinking, extensive research, and most importantly collaboration in order to design a tool that met the needs of the farming community. The team’s ability to work together and build this application will result in economic savings, a greener environment, and increased crop quality in the food production industry."

The Cereal Aphid Manager is an easy-to-use mobile app that helps farmers and crop advisors control aphid populations in wheat, barley, oat or rye. It is based on Dr. Tyler Wist's (AAFC-Saskatoon) innovative Dynamic Action Threshold model. The model treats the grain field as an ecosystem and takes into account many complex biological interactions including:
  • the number of aphids observed and how quickly they reproduce
  • the number of different natural enemies of aphids in the field and how many aphids they eat or parasitize per day
  • the lifecycles of aphids and their enemies taking into account developmental stages, egg laying behaviour, population growth rate, lifespan, etc.
By taking into consideration factors like these, the app predicts what the aphid population will be in seven days and the best time to apply insecticide based on economic thresholds.
Available in iOS and Android.
To learn more and to download, go to AAFC's CAM webpage.
Note: Cereal aphids can blow up from the South at any time which cannot be predicted by the app. Therefore, farmers and crop advisors should regularly check fields during the growing season regardless of what Cereal Aphid Manager Mobile may recommend.

CAM Homepage

CAM monitoring report and recommendation

CAM icon