Alternatives to Methyl bromide in Strawberry Production in the United States of America and the Mediterranean Region
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Methyl bromide (MB) is a broad-spectrum soil fumigant, which has been critical in strawberry production for forty years. Strawberry and other high-value cash crops benefit from pre-plant soil fumigation with MB and chloropicrin (Pic). Mixtures of these two fumigants work synergistically in controlling a wide range of plant pathogens and pests, including fungi, nematodes, insects, mites, rodents, weeds, and some bacteria. Methyl bromide was listed in 1993 by the Parties of the Montreal Protocol as an ozone-depleting compound. According to the Montreal Protocol, the import and manufacture of MB in the United States of America (USA) and other developed countries will be banned by 2005, after stepwise reductions in 1999, 2001, and 2003. Currently, there is no single registered alternative fumigant for all of the MB uses and there is a need for environmentally sound and economically feasible alternatives. The fumigants 1,3-dichloropropene (1,3-D) and Pic in combination with methyl isothiocyanate (MITC) generators have shown to be the most promising alternatives to methyl bromide for strawberry production. Studies with the experimental fumigants methyl iodide and propargyl bromide suggested that these compounds have higher reactivity than MB as stand-alone fumigants. This review evaluates the commercially available and experimental alternatives to MB soil fumigation for strawberry production based on relevant scientific publications, proceedings, and personal communications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".