Integrated Pesticide Management. Chemical Trespass/Herbicide, 1995

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� r - eS Prw " !b Selling an IVM Program For City Landscapes IU R V fl'1 /} C ar- Tim Rhay, Turf & Grounds Supervisor Pvi } ly y City of Eugene, OR I appreciate the title that was assigned to my talk by the program committee. It gives me the opportunity to address an important aspect of IPM /IVM that is not frequently discussed. And it is a subject that all of you need to be informed about. Properly understanding it can mean the difference between success and failure in the implementation of an IVM program. "Selling" is an interesting word. It implies that a concerted effort will be necessary to convince some party or parties (probably reluctant or skeptical) that the merchandise you offer for sale is useful to them and better than the products available from your competition. Or, in a public sector context, it could be taken as the task of convincing those responsible for financial management that this [expensive] program is justified by its benefits and worth the [extra] cost. I don't believe I'm too far off the mark in drawing such conclusions. I know for a fact that many people hold such misconceptions about IVM. I use the word "misconceptions" deliberately and purposefully. There are numerous models of what 1 term "pseudo IPM /IVM" extant in the marketplace and many of these would require considerable effort to sell to rational and realistic customers. But if your program, or the program you propose, is based solidly on the historically authentic model of integrated pest management, "selling" it should be the least of your challenges. Would your community or your board "buy" a vegetation management program that provided effective control in a professional manner, lowered net operating costs, and was environmentally sensitive? That is what the historic or authentic model consistently does. The "pseudo" forms of IVM that I mentioned rarely, if ever, duplicate such results. Let me clarify what I mean by the term "historically authentic" model of IPM. It is a reference to the work of USDA entomologists W.D. Hunter and B. R. Coad, who developed an integrated program for the control of boll weevil in cotton crops in the southem United States in 1923. This innovative methodology combined the planting of the most resistant varieties of cotton with interruption of the pest's life cycle through the destruction of crop residues, field scouting by trained monitors to locate weevil populations and identify when and where these had reached an "economic threshold ", identified as the point where the potential for loss justified the cost of treatment. Pesticide application was incidental, site - specific, and limited to over - threshold populations only. The result was effective pest control at a reasonable cost and with minimal disruption to the non - target environment. This is the historic model. Now, before we leave Hunter and Coad, let us address an obvious but often overlooked point. Why did they choose to develop a method for dealing with that pest at that time? What was their motivation? The answer is that the pest was economically significant. The cost of controlling it via comprehensive cover sprays laid down at very short intervals had become prohibitive. Weevil control costs threatened the economic viability of regional and national cotton production. In other words, what Hunter and Coad set out to do, and ultimately accomplished, was to develop a workable cost control strategy. There also were significant environmental advantages inherent to their methods, but it would be decades before this became the motivation for interest in IPM. Its continued and greatly expanded use in agricultural crop protection from 1923 through the present was largely related to a single significant fact. The integrated strategy saved money. It still does. Controlled experiments by the University of Maryland in 1983 showed a reduction in the total costs of pest control of 22% with a 83% reduction in pesticide use after converting a