Major food distribution chains have expressed concern about the amount of residual pesticides in food. To that effect, they have set quality standards that often exceed official standards. This puts a considerable burden on local farmers. A project was started to create a user-friendly model to help the farmers comply with the standards set by legislature and industry. This project is a collaboration between the university of Ghent, 3 agricultural research facilities and a number of pesticide producing companies. Field trials have been initialized in 2013. Crops of interest are lettuce, leeks and cucumber. For each crop, a selection of fungicides and insecticides were applied and the residue level in the plants was analyzed after certain time intervals. Results of the field trials show there is considerable variability of the residues on the crop, especially on the first measurement taken 3 hours after application. For cucumber the residue level drops quickly for all but one pesticide. For leeks and lettuce, residue levels are higher than for cucumber. Residue levels drop steeply for the first days then a slower decline is observed. For lettuce, the samples were weighed immediately after excavation. This allowed us to decouple the effect of growth dilution from metabolization. For some pesticides, a certain amount of residue is not metabolized and remains in the crop.

Residue-low cropping of greenhouse lettuce, cucumber, and soil-grown leek

248th National Meeting (2014)

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