trum pesticides are avoided to the greatest extent 

 possible. 



Still another approach to measuring adoption 

 is the use of the commodity-specific IPM guidelines 

 first developed in Massachusetts. By Usting all valid, 

 available IPM practices, the guidelines allow a very 

 simple assessment of how many are being used on 

 an individual farm, and a characterization of adop- 

 tion along a continuum ft-om low (e.g., up to 30% of 

 total practices), to medium (e.g., 30% to 70%), and 

 to high (e.g., over 70%). Because guidelines can be 

 updated to include new, biologically-based practices 

 as they are developed and found to be viable, they 

 allow growers to be recognized for use of both first- 

 and second-level IPM adoption. We continue to be- 

 lieve that IPM guidelines represent a useful and 

 objective tool for measuring grower IPM adoption, 

 and we will continue our efforts to use them for this 

 purpose. 



Assessment of Grower Needs and IPM 

 Adoption in Massachusetts Orchards 



Attempts to measure accurately both IPM adop- 

 tion and grower research/extension needs have been 

 the long-standing policy both of the Massachusetts 

 IPM Program, and the UMass Extension Tree-fruit 

 Team. Many readers undoubtedly have responded 

 to informal surveys for this purpose conducted by 

 team members at twilight meetings or other events. 

 Others have participated directly in meetings of the 

 Tree-fi-uit Advisory Committee. The statewide sur- 

 vey reported on in this and other related articles 

 was an attempt to formalize the process of needs 

 assessment, and provide data for the Tree-fruit Team 

 and the Advisory Committee to review and respond 

 to. In addition, Massachusetts has received a small 

 USDA grant for the purpose of determining the level 

 of adoption and of needs for apples and four other 

 crops in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. 

 Here, we report on the responses to seven questions 

 ft-om the 1995 Tree-fruit Survey related to IPM. 



In summarizing results of the tree-fruit survey, 

 responses were taken on face value. That is, re- 

 spondents were allowed to self define their use of 

 IPM, and no attempt was made to determine 

 whether or not individual practices were used in 

 one small block versus the whole farm or every year 

 versus only some years. No statistical analyses were 

 conducted, so that numerical rankings should be 

 considered a guide, rather than an absolute rank- 

 ing for a category. 



Use of IPM 



A large majority {11%) of all respondents said 

 that they use IPM on their farm (Table 1). (Note 

 that percentages in some categories do not total 100 

 due to rounding and because some respondents left 

 this and other questions blank.) Although a self defi- 

 nition, we have confidence in these numbers, given 

 that 13% honestly answered "no," and an additional 

 11% left the question blank, even when the obvious 

 "right" answer (i.e., the response an intelligent 

 reader could guess the surveyor might want) was 

 yes. 



Further support for the validity of this result, 

 and confirmation of the trend evident in Table 1 

 that larger growers tended to define themselves as 

 IPM users more than smaller growers, is found in 

 answers to the next two questions. Over all farms, 

 72% of respondents reported engaging in direct ob- 

 servation of pests or beneficials, 69% selected pesti- 

 cides to conserve beneficials, 63% used insect moni- 

 toring traps, 56% calibrated their sprayer at least 

 once per season, and 54 % used action thresholds 

 and cultural controls such as summer pruning (tied). 

 Although only 23% reported that they used disease- 

 monitoring devices, this is higher than the number 

 reporting (in a subsequent question) that private 

 IPM scout/consultants do disease monitoring on the 

 farm (16% over all farms sizes). Thus it appears 

 that at least 7% of Mass. fruit growers see a value 

 in using disease monitoring devices on their own, 

 with no help from consultants. 



Results of this question are even more interest- 

 ing when looked at according to farm size. In virtu- 

 ally every case, there was a clear trend toward 

 greater use of the practice in question on larger than 

 on smaller farms. For example, 93% of respondents 



14 



Fruit Notes, Summer, 1996 



