Intergrated Pest Management: A New Dog with a Few Old Tricks

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HOW IPM WORKS

When a grower decides to kick the chemical habit and switch to IPM, he does have to climb back into his overalls, hop down from the air-conditioned cab of his tractor, and grub about in the dirt a bit. IPM works only if you know your crop, your land, and all the critters who live on it. And since few farmers these days have bothered to learn even a small fraction of the commonsense plant lore their ancestors once took for granted, most have to seek help from agricultural scientists !n order to set up an integrated pest management program that really works!

To get started, then, a farmer and his consultant first identify both the potential pests and the beneficial organisms present in a field or orchard .. . so they can adopt cultivation practices calculated to make life [1] miserable for the crop destroyers and [2] downright blissful for the predators and parasites which naturally attack those same bad bugs.

This is only part of the old-fashioned, down-home side of IPM ... and the system employs other tried-and-true measures that were commonly employed to outwit insects long before anyone had ever heard of DDT or its kin. These natural steps include crop rotation, careful selection of planting dates, precise management of water and fertilizer, attention to proper spacing between individual plants and adjacent rows ... and a dozen and one other obviously good ideas that were common knowledge to the grandparents of today's chemical farmers.

But this is only the beginning! For IPM merely starts with the wisdom of the past . .. and then builds on it with new tools supplied by modern technology. Tools such as computers programmed to make accurate crop forecasts . . . several differ. ent types of exotic bug traps . . . and various kinds of biological controls that replace synthetic pesticides.

An example: Insect traps-which may rely for their effect on color, shape, move. ment, noise, light, or the sexual attractants found in female bugs-have proven useful for gathering data on pest populations. The captured insects can then either be destroyed-which may be particularly effective in small gardens or fields-or sterilized for release back into the environment.

A farmer may also choose to hire trained "scouts"-often high school or college students-to monitor insect populations in his fields on a regular basis. Information supplied both by scouts and traps then enables IPM specialists-usually with the help of a nearby computer-to predict with remarkable accuracy if and when a particular pest may go on a rampage ... and how bad an outbreak is likely to be.

Such forecasts allow farmers to estimate whether or not projected damage will be severe enough to hurt them financially. If not-which is often the casethen only minimal controls-or even none at all!-may be necessary.

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