The following article appeared in IPMNet News:
Are changes inevitable for current IPM practices? Several recent papers unquestionably avow that IPM change is in the wind that is drifting, albeit slowly and unevenly, across the entire globe.
Broad environmental concerns have forced all involved parties to view unfettered use of pesticides in a new light. Evolution of pesticide resistance in key pest organisms to once invisible products has become a burgeoning factor. Emergence of formerly benign organisms that have migrated to predator-free regions and evolved into major threats is triggering increased attention to invasives. Pressures for ever-increasing food and other crop production is unrelenting with no reversal in sight.
Not surprisingly, after seven decades or more, IPM has matured to a plateau that is dead center at the intersection of societal views, physical science, technological developments, economic realities, social awareness, and political impacts.
The deployment of area-wide IPM programs has challenged growers to “reconcile the additional costs and risks” inherent in these programs “with benefits that are longer term and accrue to the broader community community” as well as the grower, observe entomologists M.J. Brewer and P.B. Goodell. In their paper, Approaches and Incentives to Implement Integrated Pest Management that Addresses Regional and Environmental Issues, published in the 2012 edition of Annual Review of Entomology. These scientists–and others–contend that “successful linkage to IPM has been most apparent when risks are high, relevant IPM technologies are available, and financial incentives are flexible and reasonable.” Solutions, they note, must address local issues that resonate with growers.
“Weed science has stopped at the ‘field edge’ in assembling the components [of weed management] into a truly integrated approach.”
That is the underlying view of weed scientist S.L. Young expressed in his 2012 paper, True Integrated Weed Management, appearing in Weed Research. The goal remains eliminating weedy plants without compromising the environment nor upsetting a favorable economic outcome, and the individual components exist “for assembling a highly responsive and integrated weed management system that can transcend spatiotemporal restrictions” and effectively adjust to field variability, notes Dr. Young. However, the reality of an efficient, economic “single platform for conducting real-time integrated weed management” is still futuristic today.
Biopesticides, once a staple of a simpler agriculture, are products based on living microbes and their bioactive compounds. Their history of earlier research and usage recorded a “lack of efficacy, inconsistent field performance, and high cost,” relegating them to niche products, according to the article, Have Biopesticides Come of Age? by T.R. Glare, et al. With the advent of scientific breakthroughs biopesticides have re-emerged to now become a rapidly expanding addition to the IPM toolbox. But while there has been “progress in the areas of activity, spectra, delivery options, persistence of effect and implementation,” Dr. Glare asserts in a Trends in Biotechnology paper that “technologies that are truly transformational and result in significant uptake are still lacking.”
–excerpted, with thanks, from:
* ANN. REV. OF ENTOM., 57, 41-59, 2012;
* WEED RESRCH., 52(2), 107-111, April 2012; and,
* TRENDS IN BIOTECH., 30(5), 241-300, 2012; also, thanks to all the authors.
Filed under: Crop rotation, Insects, Invasive species, Pesticides, Resistance, Weed Control Tagged: | biopesticides, integrated weed management, invasive species, IPM, IPM toolbox, pesticide resistance
