1995 Tree-fruit Survey: 

 Integrated Pest Management 



William M. Coli, Roberta Szala, Wesley R. Autio, Daniel R. Cooley, 

 Karen I. Hauschild and Ronald J. Prokopy 

 University of Massachusetts 



Identifying Research and Extension 

 Needed to Enhance IPM Adoption 



In September, 1993, the federal administration 

 announced a joint USDA, EPA, and FDA policy en- 

 dorsing the use of IPM by agriculture and related 

 industries and setting a goal of 75% of U.S. crop 

 acreage under IPM by 2000. In response to setting 

 of this goal, the USDA announced a national IPM 

 initiative "based on the premise that: 1.) involving 

 farmers and practitioners in the development and 

 assessment of IPM programs increases implemen- 

 tation of IPM practices; and 2) increasing the use of 

 IPM systems enables farmers to achieve both eco- 

 nomic and environmental benefits." As part of the 

 USDA National IPM Initiative, university research 

 and extension staff nationwide have been asked to 

 better understand grower needs in the area of IPM. 

 It is hoped, that, by showing the US Congress that 

 the needs of constituents (voters) are being ad- 

 dressed by the Land Grant University System, cur- 

 rent levels of federal support can be maintained or 

 even increased. Another important component of 

 efforts to identify and prioritize key research, ex- 

 tension, or training needs is also to characterize IPM 

 systems that are now ready for adoption, as well as 

 current levels of actual adoption by the end user. 



Assessing Current Levels of 

 IPM Adop tion 



The whole question of how one measures IPM 

 adoption currently is a subject of intense discus- 

 sion and debate nationally. While measuring adop- 

 tion would seem relatively easy to accomplish given 

 a large enough sample size, in practice it turns out 

 to be much more difficult. For example, a study 

 conducted by MacDonald and Glynn of Cornell Uni- 

 versity, which allowed growers to "self define" 

 whether or not they used IPM, found large differ- 

 ences between the percent of growers who said they 

 practiced IPM, and the percent actually using such 



key elements of IPM as pest monitoring and valid 

 action thresholds. Hence, some less subjective mea- 

 sure is probably needed. 



Another way of measuring adoption was used 

 by the USDA Economic Research Service in a 1994 

 study of field crops, fruits and nuts, and vegetables. 

 For this study, which looked at cropping practices 

 for the years 1990-1993, USDA considered acreage 

 as under "low-level IPM" if decisions were based on 

 scouting and the use of thresholds. To be classified 

 as "medium-level IPM," USDA required that scout- 

 ing and adherence to thresholds be used plus an 

 additional one to two IPM practices from a list con- 

 sidered by USDA to be "indicative of an IPM ap- 

 proach." "High-level IPM" meant that scouting and 

 thresholds were used plus three or more other prac- 

 tices indicative of an IPM approach. Cle£u"ly, this 

 method is imperfect, given that IPM systems for 

 some crops can involve dozens of practices. 



At a recent National IPM Symposium, Dr. Polly 

 Hoppin of the World Wildlife Fund suggested a very 

 different approach to determining adoption. The 

 World Wildlife Fund's approach is based largely on 

 the ratio of practices which rely on "...treatment- 

 oriented interventions with synthetic pesticides.. " 

 and "...prevention-based practices that reduce pest 

 pressure, increase plant competitiveness, and/or 

 enhance biological control processes..." According 

 to their model, simply monitoring pests and apply- 

 ing pesticides according to thresholds constitutes 

 "no IPM," given that it relies exclusively on a treat- 

 ment-based rather than prevention-based strategy. 

 A key difficulty with this approach is that growers 

 would get no recognition for use of what we in Mas- 

 sachusetts call "first-level IPM" (i.e., systems based 

 on monitoring and use of thresholds which take into 

 account all classes of pests, but which rely largely 

 on chemical pesticides). In order to be a "high-level 

 IPM" user according to the World Wildlife Fund, the 

 farmer would need to be functioning at Prokopys 

 "second stage" of IPM where behavioral, cultural, 

 and biological controls predominate, and broad-spec- 



Fruit Notes, Summer, 1996 



13 



