A Grower Perspective on the Modern Integrated Pest Management Paradigm

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is a well-established framework for agricultural crop protection. IPM has typically been represented as a pyramid of practices, beginning at the base with agronomic and cultural approaches and gravitating upwards towards chemical plant protection products. However, this representation is an insufficient description of IPM adoption at the farm level as it cannot incorporate the many challenges faced by farmers and growers. This paper presents an alternative approach to contextualize horticultural IPM based on a sample of commercial vegetable and fruit growers from the Republic of Ireland (N = 45), based on an existing model. This model incorporates the management, business, and sustainability aspects influencing IPM adoption. Utilization of the model on data collected from growers through a series of semi-structured interviews contributed to a. a comprehensive exploration of the type of IPM tools being used and b. contextualized analysis of the data with the intention of capturing grower perspectives. The findings highlight a crop and production system effect on the type of IPM tools used by the growers and suggest influence from a range of internal and external motivating and limiting factors. Excerpts from the grower interviews underline the complexity of IPM and draw attention to the lack of grower-centricity captured by IPM paradigms heretofore.