Integrated Pest Management

Integrated pest management (IPM) is an approach to pest management that relies on a combination of simple and economical practices that can be applied in any agricultural or nonagricultural setting where pest management is necessary. The starting point of any IPM approach is a current and systematic understanding of the pest and its interactions with the environment, and an assumption that full eradication is impossible or unnecessary. Based on this, appropriate monitoring, action thresholds, and evaluation methods are established to control pests. In contrast to organic production methods that share many of the same practices as IPM but prohibit the use of chemical pesticides, IPM can combine limited use of pesticides with other available pest control methods that are most appropriate to the specific environment and pest life cycle. IPM is well established in agriculture, but is just beginning to enter into discussions centering on food ecolabels and certification.

IPM evolved out of supervised insect control, an approach developed after World War II by entomologists at the University of California and in the cotton-belt region of the United States. As opposed to standard scheduled applications of insecticides, supervised insect control involved monitoring of pest life cycles and populations and based insecticide applications on projections of pest and natural enemy populations. In the 1950s, University of California entomologists expanded supervised control by further articulating principles governing the compatibility of biological and chemical controls: integrated control meant that chemical controls should disrupt biological control as little as possible and should only be used if the economic loss caused by the pest in question was projected to exceed the cost of chemical control. Over time, other measures such as cultural controls—the manipulation of the plant's environment—became part of IPM as a multidisciplinary cast worked to develop the approach and legitimize IPM even into national policy in the 1970s. Recent debates surrounding IPM have focused on the question of whether IPM should be geared toward reduced pesticide use or maintaining pesticides as a viable tool.

[Page 334]IPM can be applied to any type of agriculture as well as to commercial and residential sites, lawns, and gardens. Within agriculture, IPM is highly compatible with smaller-scale organic agriculture, given its reliance on a labor-intensive cycle of observation, monitoring, and combinations of control techniques. In larger-scale agriculture, IPM can reduce negative impacts on human and environmental health by possibly lowering costs with reduced pesticide application. An IPM system works with a set of basic tools that generally include proper identification of the pest, the establishment of an action threshold, preventative cultural practices, monitoring, mechanical controls, biological controls, and chemical controls. The idea of an IPM system is to control the pest population rather than eradicate it. Eradication measures that are chosen must be less costly and less environmentally disruptive than nonaction. To lower impact and costs, preference is also given to prevention measures rather than to intervention.