Measuring the unmeasurable? A method to quantify adoption of Integrated Pest Management practices in temperate arable farming systems

The impetus to adopt integrated pest management (IPM) practices has re‐emerged in the last decade, mainly as a result of legislative and environmental drivers. However a significant deficit exists in the ability to practically monitor and measure IPM adoption across arable farms; therefore the aim of the project reported here was to establish a universal metric for quantifying adoption of IPM in temperate arable farming. This was achieved by: (a) identifying a set of key activities that contribute to IPM; (b) weighting these in terms of their importance to the achievement of IPM using panels of expert stakeholders in order to create the metric (scoring system from 0‐100 indicating level of IPM practiced); (c) surveying arable farmers in the UK and Ireland about their pest management practices; and (d) measuring level of farmer adoption of IPM using the new metric.