Groundcovers Promote Water-Use Efficiency and Pest Management

Abstract

Managing one issue in the orchard might have an impact on other issues, and those impacts are not always bad. Landscape fabric groundcovers, for example, have been used for pest management in citrus production, and recently to promote the homogeneous availability of water for uptake by roots, better tree physiological development for new plantings, and even higher yields when the groundcovers are managed with proper irrigation scheduling methods such as soil-moisture sensor use. We present a 3^rd-year update on the groundcover study for water management developed at a commercial field in Fort Pierce, FL and provide an overview of the opportunities and challenges when using groundcovers for pest management.