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Borst Landscape & Design, Inc.'s PESP Strategy
Describe your Organization’s Five-Year Goals Related to Pesticide Risk Reduction
We offer organic lawn care along with IPM services for trees and shrubs to all of our clients. Approximately 80% of our clients use our organic program and 10% use our IPM services. Our goal is to increase our IPM base dramatically, thereby reducing the amount of pesticides used. We have been doing the organic applications for over ten years and would like to be 100% organic in five years. Our IPM service is relatively new and we wold like to have at least 50% of our clients participating within five years. We are also currently attempting to offer our IPM services to local schools but as yet we haven't gotten a lot of feedback. We will keep trying.
What do you envision doing (broadly) to try to resolve your major issues?
We have been working on our major issues for quite some time. They involve not only the use of pesticides. We are always looking for small efficiencies that add to our productivity and save fossile fuel, water and other natural resourses we use. These efforts correlate with the concept of sustainability. Our designers are using more hardy and drought tolerant plants. We are using more fescues in our seed mixes to build sturdier more resilient lawns. We are currently investigating the progress being made with biopesticides and look forward to using these new tools as they come to market.
Goal 1 and Tactics
We will use our IPM program to lessen our use of pesticides. This program replaces our system of pre-planned blanket sprays. We already keep careful track of what we use, where we use it and how much we use. In many cases we will be able to measure pesticide usage against prior yesrs. In other cases we can use comparable properties on and off our IPM system. We would welcome any input regarding measurement.
Goal 2 and Tactics
We do soil tests for all our organic users every three years. We base our soil test corrections the results. This allows us to remediate the soil properly without using excess or unneccessary nutrients. When soil test corrections are made, and good cultural practices followed, the turf becomes healthier and less prone to the pressures of disease, drought and infestation. We will measure our pesticide use on a selection of these accounts over time and compare the results of yearly soil tests.