In Brazil, all the fruit and vegetable producers but also all the distributors of farm products know the neem.
Since 2001, we use it frequently to cure the animals and for the agriculture.
Some examples of its action in Brazil in different sectors:
- Agriculture: caterpillars (all of them), mealy bugs, white fly, thrips, greenflies, vaquinha (variety of beetles) and beetles, fruit flies, cicadellidae (cicadelle), tomato cutworms (Tota absoluta), cutworms of the coffee tree (Perileucoptera coffeella), citrus fruit cutworms (Phyllocnistis citrella stainton) and other cutworms…millipede, earwigs…
- Meloydogine, Pratylenchus and other nematodes. Diseases of the radicular system and of the plant stem, powdery mildew of the beans, Rhizoctonia solani (rhizoctone brun), R.Oryzae, Sclerotium Rolfsii, Scletorinia sclerotiorum, Sitroga Cerearella, Fusarium oxyporum, phitophtora (tomatoes and potatoes).
- In the rearing: ticks, louses, fleas, horn flies, cowsheds and pigsty flies, scab, mites, beetles of the farms…
- In the grains storage: termites and weevils.
Source: Agromix Brésil
The “Old country”, south of the Elbe, near Hamburg in Germany, is one of the biggest arbori-cultural areas in Europe. In Jork, on their 40 ha of apple orchards, the Zum Felde family gave up the traditional methods of agriculture in 1996. “Even if we produce in biological agriculture, we do not renounce to the phytosanitary protection”, said Heinrich Zun Felde. Among the products he uses, we have to pay attention to one of them. “I have been using azadirachtin for 7 years and thanks to it, I was able to contain the invasions of the dysaphis plantaginea (Lausbefall), answered the arboriculturist, very happily. A solution coming from Asia: “the azadirachtin prevents the production of a hormone allowing the moulting of insects. The active principle is extracted from the neem’s seeds, a tree whose properties are used in India since more than two thousand years, in agriculture and in medicine”.
Source: “The Furrow”, summer 2007.
In silviculture, the neem is also well known in Canada. The potential of the neem was evaluated in the plantations of grey pine trees, on white pine trees, in plantations of pine trees, in seed orchards and plantations of dark and white spruces, plantations of occidental thuja (Ontario) and in planting of Balsam Firs in Terra-Nova.
Result: The azadirachtin extract contained in the neem’seeds was very efficient against the larva that were destroying the foliages, against 13 species of lepidopterous insects and against sawflies.