By Erin Lizotte
IPM, or integrated pest management, is a method of insect and disease management that considers all aspects of the pest, pathogen, host and environment in a holistic approach to crop production.
Growers utilizing IPM make management decisions based on a foundation of pest and disease research, as well as careful monitoring to achieve more effective, economical, environmentally responsible and socially acceptable outcomes.
To better explain the concept of IPM, we should consider how and why IPM was developed. From the dawn of modern agriculture, growers faced challenges of pest and disease pressure that occur when crop plants are grown at higher densities relative to their natural distribution. Over time, growers learned how to cultivate crops despite increased pest and disease pressure through cultural control methods such as crop rotation, removal of alternate hosts and the propagation of less susceptible cultivars.
But as mechanization and industrial agriculture expanded, planting size increased and many pests and diseases could no longer be controlled by cultural methods alone. The search for a quick and relatively inexpensive solution was on, and one can only imagine the concoctions tested before scientists discovered the first pesticides in the late 1880s.
Over the next 75 years, agriculture relied on chemical pesticides and the limited use of alternative control strategies, but that all changed during the 1960s. The public became aware of the adverse effects of some pesticides on the environment and human health and growers faced the development of pesticide resistance, rendering some of the most effective pesticides useless.
In response to insect and disease resistance and public outcry over excessive pesticide use, the concept of integrated control was introduced by the University of California. Integrated control was based on monitoring pest populations to determine the need for pesticide applications, a clear departure from the traditional scheduled pesticide applications based on a set interval, regardless of pest or disease pressure. This integrated strategy proved that pests could be successfully monitored to determine when the damage caused by a pest was more costly than the treatment, effectively justifying the use of a control strategy. This premise remains a fundamental concept of modern IPM.
Over time IPM has reintroduced, expanded and refined cultural control methods, ushered in the concept of biological control and now includes a holistic approach to crop management that requires expertise from entomologists, plant pathologists, nematologists, horticulturalists, as well as soil and weed scientists. In Michigan, growers who produce everything from potatoes to cherries utilize integrated pest management strategies. Among the most widely utilized IPM tools are the weather-based pest and disease behavioral models that collect information from weather stations across Michigan.
These models help forecast pest and disease pressure, and can reduce or eliminate the need for pesticide applications. There are many definitions and ideas of what IPM is or should be, but to me IPM is the belief that our ability to safely and successfully produce food is limited only by our drive for knowledge, our understanding of the system we are cultivating and our ability to work symbiotically within it.
About the author: Erin Lizotte is a plant pathologist and the Michigan State University Extension integrated fruit practice and pest management district educator, located at the Northwest Michigan Horticulture Research Station. She works with fruit growers throughout northwest Lower Michigan in research and outreach capacities.
