A white, powdery coating has appeared on the cucumber leaves in the next bed. I pick off a few damaged leaves, fold my pruners, and slip them into my front pocket. Thirty minutes later, I use those same pruners to pinch back the tips of my Korean zucchini. I've been told more times than I can count to disinfect my tools. My hands just keep working anyway.
Between Knowing and Doing
Researchers at the University of Vermont, working with two institutions in Australia, gathered and reexamined studies on keeping disease from spreading on livestock farms. Here's what they found: handing farmers a list of rules did little, on its own, to change how the work actually got done.
Change your boots. Keep a log of every visitor. Keep newly arrived animals apart for a while. Most farms already know this list. Yet more notices and handouts didn't bring a matching rise in practice. So the researchers concluded that the place to start is understanding when people actually make up their minds and act.
What Gets People Moving
A few patterns show up again and again on farms. When the risk is invisible, the task gets pushed aside. The disease hasn't arrived yet, and today's chores are piling up. The more effort a task takes, the easier it is to skip. If the disinfectant footbath sits ten steps from the entrance, those ten steps are reason enough to walk right past it.
What the farm next door does matters a great deal, too. When your neighbors follow a practice, you tend to follow it as well. On the flip side, where reporting an outbreak brings nothing but financial losses and sideways looks, people hide the next one. And hidden disease spreads farther. That's why the researchers looked at people's circumstances before counting up the rules.
Something to Try in Your Garden Today
A garden plot is a small farm, too. A single pair of pruners, a single pair of shoes, or a single tray of seedlings from a friend can carry disease. Instead of memorizing more rules, try moving things around so the right tool is the first thing your hand finds.
- Keep a container of alcohol wipes at the very top of your toolbox. If it isn't easy to grab, it won't get used.
- Put seedlings you've been given in one spot at the end of a bed, kept apart for 2 weeks, and check the undersides of their leaves.
- On days you've removed diseased leaves, don't walk into other beds in those shoes. Save that bed for the very end of your rounds.
- If you spot disease, tell the gardeners in the neighboring plots right away. If you keep it quiet, it will find its way back to your bed next season.
For today, settle on just one thing. Wrap some tape around a pair of pruners to mark them for diseased leaves only. One marked pair of pruners will do more for you, for longer, than ten printed notices.
Source: A review of livestock-farm biosecurity research by researchers at the University of Vermont (USA) and two Australian institutions
