Western Integrated Pest Management Center

Instead of relying solely on fungicides to control powdery mildew on winegrapes, growers may one day – and one day reasonably soon – have an effective non-chemical option: light. Specifically, light in the form of spore-killing ultraviolet UV-C radiation, delivered directly to the plant by a self-driving tractor moving through vineyard rows autonomously at night.

In some pear-growing regions in the Pacific Northwest, IPM is a widely accepted, effective and economical way to manage pear psylla and codling moth, the crop’s key insect pests. In the Wenatchee Valley, however, IPM adoption has been low and the barriers to adoption high. But researchers are working to change that.

In California and throughout the West, land managers face huge challenges on huge acreage. Threats include invasive annual grasses, climate change and changing fire regimes. And those threats combine – the invasive grasses outcompete native perennial grasses and become flash fuels that exacerbate wildfires in landscapes already vulnerable because of climate change. 

To combat the combined threat, UC Davis researchers are testing a burn-and-replant method as a combined solution.

It sounds like an ad for a 1950s drive-in horror movie: Zombie plants emerge from New Jersey bogs! Can experts stop their catastrophic cross-county crawl before it’s too late?  But this is not “The Day of the Triffids” meets “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Instead, it’s the latest Western Integrated Pest Management Center-funded research, a bi-coastal project looking to keep West Coast cranberry farms safe from false blossom disease, an insect-spread pathogen that’s plaguing East Coast cranberry producers.

“If it’s so complex that it’s impossible, then no one wins.”

That was the key takeaway from a recent two-day workshop in Vancouver, Washington about implementing new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pesticide-use rules to protect endangered and threatened species.

It’s the kind of situation that can spiral downhill quickly. Beekeepers providing hives for pollination feel their bees are suffering excessive losses and fear improper insecticide use is to blame. Growers insist they are following label requirements and using necessary insecticides correctly to protect the bees. Both sides believe they are doing everything right, yet the outcomes are all wrong.

"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.