Pest Management at the Crossroads

In June 1993, the Clinton Administration pledged to work with farmers to get 75 percent of the nation's crop acres under IPM by the year 2000. Now just three years away, much remains to be done and the route ahead is not so clear.

Indeed, pest management is at a crossroads. Hence it's a good time to dust off the compass and recheck the map. Important choices are being made, one field and one orchard at a time, and in government and corporate board rooms. These choices, and the direction they take us, will have major long-run consequences for farmers, consumers, the competitiveness of U.S. agriculture, and the environment. Only one thing is certain – most pests will find ways to survive, and a few will thrive, regardless of what we do.

Some people are confident they will be able to move through the pest management crossroads without the need to make major changes in farming or pest control systems. They pin their hopes largely on the commercialization of another generation of broad-spectrum pesticides that will work under a variety of conditions for long enough to assure acceptable levels of control.

They also expect and hope that scientists and engineers will deliver tools that make pest management simpler, less labor-intensive and more reliable. They see promise in applying the tools of precision farming to pest management, and the prospect of transgenic plants, manufacturing their own pesticides, is close to a dream come true.

Others have chosen a different path at the crossroads. Instead of matching pests blow-for-blow, they use a dual strategy to reduce pest pressure and damage. First, they do everything possible to roll out the Red Carpet for beneficial insects and organisms. Second, they leave no stone unturned in making life as hard as possible on pests. They try to eliminate as fully as possible places where pests can safely over-winter, reproduce, or hide from the elements. They cut off access to water and food, throw confusing scents in the air, disrupt their reproductive and life cycles, and when necessary, apply pesticides to bring populations down to manageable levels. They use the "many little hammers" approach, a term coined by weed ecologists at the University of Maine.

Multitactic, prevention-based pest management systems -- what some call biointensive IPM and others refer to as "ecologically based pest management" -- often require more effort, information and management attention than pesticide-based systems. But once growers work through transition periods, learning the tricks of the trade and allowing the population of beneficials to build up, biointensive, ecologically based IPM systems are often more cost-effective and reliable than chemical-intensive systems, and they surely are safer for farmers, their workers and the surrounding environment.

At the crossroads, government and industry also have key choices to make, and indeed both have been making some big ones lately. More are on the horizon. The investments, policies, strategic alliances and technologies that will serve those moving toward biointensive IPM will not do much for those wanting to stick with pesticide-based systems, and vice-versa. Both in managing pests and human diseases, the knowledge, tools and actions needed to prevent a problem differ greatly from those needed for treatment.

Choices have to be made at crossroads, and sometimes choices have consequences that are not immediately apparent. In pest management, the time has come to gradually and consciously shift from today's often excessive reliance on pesticides to more prevention-based approaches. The knowledge and tools needed to incrementally lessen reliance on broad-spectrum, high-risk pesticides through IPM implementation exists in nearly all crops and regions. We ought to use them more fully and to do so we must exercise some discipline in our choices.

Both business and government must help pave the way. It is time to stop counting on regulators to solve pesticide risk problems. The only sustainable reductions in pesticide reliance and risk will sprout from the ground up.

These are the major findings and conclusion set forth in the new book published by Consumers Union, Pest Management at the Crossroads. In PMAC, we explain many reasons, backed up by a mind-numbing flurry of numbers, why government and industry should make a conscious choice -- and a firm commitment -- to help farmers move incrementally along what we call the IPM continuum.

We show why farmers and food processors will benefit from biointensive IPM systems that help keep pest control costs down and lessen the worry over pesticide residues -- and regulation. The environment and consumers have a direct stake too -- progress along the IPM continuum is the surest way to reduce reliance on high-risk pesticides, including those that harm wildlife, impair ecosystem functions, threaten the endocrine system and are sometimes present in food and drinking water.

An enormous task lies ahead. Progress must be made incrementally. For some farmers in regions with particularly tough pest problems, it will take years to complete the transition to biointensive IPM. But there is no reason to delay the beginning of the journey and many good reasons to accelerate the rate of progress among those already moving along the continuum.

The last chapter of PMAC explains how to do both. It offers more than 75 recommendations over 26 pages. There are so many recommendations because much needs to be done by many different players. Federal and state government agencies, academia, private companies, growers and their associations, crop consultants, the food processing industry, retailers, and consumer and environmental groups have roles to play, investments to make, and public education and marketing challenges to take on.

A. Need for New Rulers

A necessary first step in changing the economic or environmental performance of complex systems is defining attributes that are measurable and which can be monitored over time. In the case of IPM, there is clear need for better methods to measure the impacts of pesticide use, to gauge progress toward biointensive IPM, and to link IPM adoption to reductions in pesticide use and risk. Both marketplace and policy initiatives are searching for such methods with a growing sense of urgency.

Two normal looking cans of vegetables were given to me on a recent trip to Syracuse, New York, and are a glimpse of the future. One is a can of Wegmans "Sweet Peas" and he other, Wegmans "Golden Sweet Corn." Both have a catchy little blue ribbon on the label with crisp lettering inside, where you would expect to see "First Place." But instead, this ribbon says "IPM." A map of the state of New York is evident to the close observer in the corner of the blue ribbon, and signifies that these cans of vegetables have been certified as IPM-grown by the State of New York IPM program, as part of a partnership involving the Wegmans supermarket chain. As far as I know, these are the first IPM-labeled canned vegetables sold in America. Bill Poole, the force behind the Wegmans program, says that their customers have responded favorably and the line of IPM-labeled canned vegetables on their shelves will soon be expanded.

In a year or so the first Wisconsin potatoes should enter the marketplace with an "environmentally friendly, IPM-grown" label developed by the Wisconsin Potato and Vegetable Growers Association and the World Wildlife Fund. Already, the prospect of "Panda potatoes" has caught people's attention. The WWF-WPVGA project is the most ambitious of its kind in the U.S. Its goal is to move all potato growers in the state - some 270 producing 75,000 acres of potatoes annually - along the IPM continuum at a pace sufficient to markedly reduce reliance and use of high-risk pesticides. The partnership also has other goals, including consumer education, wildlife habitat protection, and securing new IPM research and education funding for the University of Wisconsin's potato IPM research.

Integral to the WWF-WPVGA project, and the credibility of the label it will lead to, is establishing a verifiable baseline of pesticide use and IPM adoption. The WWF-Consumers Union IPM Measurement methodology described in PMAC will be used to monitor progress toward biointensive IPM and attainment of mutually defined and agreed upon goals. (For more discussion of IPM measurement issues, see the Benbrook and Groth presentation at the AAAS meeting February 16, 1997, available at http://www.pmac.net).

The WWF-WPVGA partnership, the just-underway "Program for Strategic Pest Management" that Larry Elworth is running with support from the Pew Foundation, California's BIOS project, the Food Alliance in the Pacific Northwest, the Wegmans-Cornell effort, and the Core Values partnership involving apple growers, IPM experts and Mothers and Others in New England are signs of a promising new era of cooperation between consumer, environmental and agricultural groups. These partnerships have come together around a common vision, a shared hope - that by working together to promote IPM adoption, major strides can be made that will improve the quality of life on the farm, provide growers needed alternatives and a fair return from the market, and in the process, as an inevitable and welcomed outcome, pesticide use and risks will be reduced, and environmental quality enhanced. I am among a growing number that see great promise in this approach.

Yet we must recognize that measuring IPM adoption poses complex analytical challenges. Even relatively simple methodologies will require lots of field-specific data, some of it costly to obtain. Crop-pest-beneficial organism interactions are often very dynamic and directly shape the nature of IPM systems and control practices needed in a given year. Piles of data will be needed to sort these interactions out. Depending on how the data are used, they could shed light or obscure reality. Measurement methodologies must also somehow distinguish short-term changes from longer-range shifts in pest pressure and IPM system effectiveness. And we must be vigilant to assure that measurement systems passively capture - but never drive - the shape of IPM systems in the field.

The USDA's first attempt to measure IPM adoption was based on use of practices deemed "indicative of an IPM approach." With a few exceptions, any acre on which pests were scouted and pesticides applied in accord with thresholds was deemed under at least "low level" IPM. As more practices were adopted – like cultivation for weed control, assaying the soil for pathogens, rotations, and releases of beneficial organisms – field were judged to be under "medium" level (one or two additional practices) or "high" level IPM (three or more additional practices). Using this method and data from the early 1990s, the USDA concluded that about half of the nation's cropland acreage was managed using some level of IPM.

USDA deserves praise for this pioneering analysis. PMAC offers several suggestions for improving upon the ERS method, some of which USDA is now working to incorporate in future estimates of IPM adoption. Other groups have used a comparable "count the practices" approach in measuring IPPM adoption, which is a good place to start. But more sophisticated measures are needed in order to take into account variable levels of pest pressure and to capture the key linkages between IPM systems and pesticide use.

Point-based systems have now been developed by several groups and are an improvement over "count the practices" systems. These systems begin with a taxonomy of proven IPM practices for a given crop, usually in a state, and the assignment of points to each reflecting the practices' importance, cost or contribution to biointensive IPM. Still, these systems do not take into account actual levels of pesticide use of pest pressure, nor are they able to determine whether using IPM practices leads to less reliance on pesticides. Consumer surveys show that firmly establishing this linkage will be critical in selling "IPM-labeled" foods in the marketplace, and hence those who hope that IPM-labeling will lead to rewards for growers need to assure that the system of measurement and verification they use can credibly establish this linkage.

Other strategies are being explored by some organizations -- focusing on a single or few "leading indicators" of biointensive IPM systems, like coddling moth mating disruption as the "sentinel" insect pest management practice in apple production in the west. Other potential "leading indicators" of biointensive IPM include –

• rotations in conjunction with cover crops as an alternative to soil fumigation;
• habitat modification to diversify and build beneficial organism population;
• release of beneficial organisms; and
• applications of biopesticides known to limit adverse impacts on beneficials like Bt, abamectin, and soaps.