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Advanced IPM for Midwest Blueberry Growers: Transitioning from Research-Supported to Grower Adoption
Executive Summary
Most Midwestern US blueberry producers are dependent on calendar sprays of organophosphates and carbamates to meet the market demand for insect-free fruit, but there are IPM tools and techniques that can be utilized to reduce environmental, worker safety and consumer health risks associated with current conventional pest management programs. These alternatives provide monitoring-dependent decision making, selective and effective control of pests, and preservation of natural enemy activity, but considerable work is still needed to promote adoption of IPM by blueberry growers in the Midwestern US.
This project will produce specific outputs to address the major impediments to adoption of reduced-risk IPM practices in Midwest blueberries, as identified from recent grower surveys and discussions with commodity leaders. A pest scouting report and a Blueberry IPM Newsletter will be prepared weekly and promoted to further improve the awareness of Midwest blueberry growers regarding IPM practices. Both report and newsletter will be available in electronic and hardcopy formats.
To address the difficulty of adopting intensive scouting practices, we will formalize and demonstrate a blueberry IPM program to provide growers with clear guidance on how to monitor and scout for blueberry insect pests. This scouting-based IPM program, which will take less than 30 minutes per field per week, will focus on the major blueberry pests, and we will present this program and train growers at Blueberry IPM workshops in 2007.
To further provide IPM information to the grower community, this project will produce a guide to blueberry IPM for the Midwestern US.
To monitor the perception and adoption of reduced risk IPM practices, we will work with six blueberry growers who have spent the past four years in a Blueberry RAMP Project, and at the end of this current project, using grower questionnaires, we will compare the practices of this core group of growers to that of the general grower community.
The expected outcomes of this project are to improve access to and availability of IPM information, to increase grower scouting activity, and reduce dependence on broad-spectrum insecticides for blueberry growers in the Midwestern US.