Measuring the unmeasurable? A method to quantify adoption of integrated pest management practices in temperate arable farming systems. Issue 12 (21st May 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Creissen, Henry E; Jones, Philip J; Tranter, Richard B; Girling, Robbie D; Jess, Stephen; Burnett, Fiona J; Gaffney, Michael; Thorne, Fiona S; Kildea, Steven
• Is Part Of: Pest management science. Volume 75:Issue 12(2019)
• Page Start: 3144
• Page End: 3152
• Publication Date: 2019-05-21
• Subjects: integrated pest management -- IPM metric -- IPM score -- arable farming -- farmer survey -- sustainable agriculture; Pests -- Control -- Periodicals; Pesticides -- Periodicals; 632.9
• DOI: 10.1002/ps.5428
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1526-498X

Abstract

Abstract: BACKGROUND: 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: (i) identifying a set of key activities that contribute to IPM; (ii) weighting these in terms of their importance to the achievement of IPM using panels of expert stakeholders to create the metric (scoring system from 0 to 100 indicating level of IPM practised); (iii) surveying arable farmers in the UK and Ireland about their pest management practices; and (iv) measuring level of farmer adoption of IPM using the new metric. RESULTS: This new metric was found to be based on a consistent conception of IPM between countries and professional groups. The survey results showed that, although level of adoption of IPM practices varied over the sample, all farmers had adopted IPM to some extent (minimum 27.2 points, mean score of 65.1), but only 13 of 225 farmers (5.8%) had adopted more than 85% of what is theoretically possible, as measured by the new metric. CONCLUSION: We believe that this new metric would be a viable and cost‐effective system to facilitate the benchmarking and monitoring of national IPM programmes in temperate zone countries with large‐scale arable farming systems. © 2019 Society of Chemical Industry Abstract : A new metric that could provide a viable and cost‐effective system to facilitate the benchmarking and monitoring of national integrated pest management programmes in countries with temperate arable farming systems.