Western Integrated Pest Management Center

"Electric mulch" uses small solar panels to charge stainless steel screens with a low-power electric current to prevent weed growth in vineyards, orchards or other high-value crops like blueberries. In early tests in New Mexico, it's working.

In an expansive field of organically grown blueberries at Humbug Farms in Independence, Oregon, the most interesting rows aren’t blueberries at all. Instead, they are carefully chosen rows of (mostly) native flowering shrubs that provide food for wild bees and habitat for beneficial insects. Hurray for the humble hedgerow.

As South Korean imports go, Ganaspis brasiliensis will never have the popular cachet of pop sensations BTS or TV dramas like Squid Game, but for small fruit growers the tiny wasp might become the biggest superstar of all. That’s because Ganaspis brasiliensis is a parasitic wasp that lays eggs into the larvae of the spotted-wing drosophila fruit fly, an invasive insect that’s been plaguing growers of small fruit and berries since it was accidentally introduced into the mainland United States in 2008.

Call it puncturevine, goatheads, devil’s thorn or whatever creative collection of expletives you mutter after sitting, kneeling or stepping barefoot onto it, Tribulus terrestris is one unpleasant plant. But with funding from the Western Integrated Pest Management Center, a researcher in New Mexico is measuring the cold-hardiness of weevils from different climactic zones to see if biocontrol efforts in cool northern climes could be boosted by importing warm-weather weevils from southern deserts.

Pesticide Educational Resources Collaborative-Medical produces educational materials and resources on pesticides,  specifically targeting health care providers so they can recognize, treat and report pesticide-related illnesses.

Recent IPM extension projects in Oregon employed an approach called Adaptive Learner-Centered Education, which experts believe is well-suited for expanding IPM understanding.

As students return to classrooms in the fall of 2020, coronavirus is very much on people’s minds. In the West, having an IPM program in place seems to be helping schools plan for reopening.

Kochia is a tumbling weed plaguing growers and ranchers from Central Canada to West Texas.

“It’s salt tolerant, heat tolerant, cold tolerant,” said Kent Davis, a crop consultant with Crop Quest in Colorado. “I want to kill the damn stuff, there’s no question about it, but you have to admire it at the same time.”

Having a clear, consistent message and speaking with one voice is helpful when it comes to educating the public about invasive species. Here's how the area around Portland, Oregon did it.

Identification of pests and beneficials is one of the first principles of integrated pest management, and the core of a train-the-trainers program that’s been successfully improving the skills of young ag professionals in rural Oregon, Washington and Idaho since 2009.

Pest managers are familiar with the concept of using degree days to predict pest outbreaks. Plants – at least in part – also develop based on temperature, so a team in Oregon is adapting a degree-day modeling system built for pest management to make a tool for vegetable growers to better plan their planting and harvesting dates.

The U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has proposed lifting the domestic quarantine designed to slow the spread of emerald ash borer, an action that could speed the destructive insect’s introduction into Western states that have so far kept it at bay.

Public housing presents unique pest-management challenges, including rapid turnover of residents, language and cultural barriers and even second-hand clothing and furniture. And those pest problems – especially when bedbugs are involved – can lead residents to resort to some pretty drastic and harmful pest control strategies.

As pests go, wild pigs are huge – and hugely effective.

A new effort in Oregon aims to provide just the right amount of pest and pest-management information to homeowners, landscapers and public agencies using a responsive website.

For growers, a fundamental element of integrated pest management is knowing what pest and beneficial species are in your fields. But what if there’s an insect and no one knows if it’s good or bad? That was the question for apple growers about earwigs.

Proper identification of a disease is the critical first step for growers to apply the correct treatment. In peonies, proper disease identification was a problem. If a plant was diseased, growers assumed that their plants were sick with Botrytis gray mold. The reality was more complex.

Throughout the West, many native grasslands have been degraded – overgrazed, overtilled, burned or overrun by invasive weeds like Medusahead or cheatgrass. While many restoration efforts only look at plant communities or endangered species, this research looked at native spider and bee communities.