Quantifying integrated pest management adoption in food horticulture

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is a crop health paradigm offering a framework for sustainable pest management. IPM encourages the integration of control measures to minimise the risks associated with pests and pest management practices, including pesticides. To optimise adoption it is necessary to understand how growers use IPM, to identify measures lagging in uptake or suitability for uptake and to explore limitations to both. This study has quantified IPM adoption using Irish food horticulture as a case study, through the development and application of an IPM metric based on field, protected and top fruit production systems. The compound metric was developed using a Delphi-style methodology with three expert panels representing the three production systems. The results show that adoption was widespread with growers overall attaining low to mid-range scores (<70, out of a maximum 100). Field crop growers performed best with a mean score of 44.8. While these results demonstrated that IPM has been adopted, it also suggested that there is room for improvement. This presentation of an IPM measurement instrument for temperate horticulture systems provides the means to benchmark IPM performance and chart cumulative progress. This is useful to policy makers and IPM stakeholders to compare performance on a national and cross-national basis with a view to refining best practice, while defining specific components of IPM for improvement.