Best Practices for Integrated Pest Management

Key Practices for Best IPM Management Protocols

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is a sustainable, science-based process for making decisions in the nursery and landscape that combines biological, cultural, physical, and chemical tools to identify, manage, and reduce risk from plant pests and diseases. Rather than relying on calendar-based spray schedules, IPM stresses long-term prevention measures, routing crop monitoring, and intervention thresholds to produce healthy, marketable plant products while minimizing environmental impacts and pesticide resistance development.

A successful IPM program relies on a number of practices that work together to prioritize preventative and cultural controls before resorting to chemical intervention. See the list below for more information on key management practices for IPM programs. The links will guide you to other pages with more depth overviews of each practice.

1. Prevention and Sanitation: The first step in managing pests and disease is preventing them. By eliminating the introduction of pests and disease, and eliminating harborage habitats and inoculum sources, the amount of damaging pests and diseases in a landscape or nursery can be drastically reduced. This starts with tasks such as cleaning propagation trays, ensuring weed-free gravel pads, and quarantining or destroying diseased stock.
2. Culture and Host Resistance: By optimizing plant health and choosing plants that resist environmental and biological stress, pest and disease risk can be greatly mitigated. Proper irrigation timing, balanced plant nutrition, and use of resistant cultivars are just a few cultural measures that can be taken for damage prevention and management.
3. Monitoring and Diagnostics: Early pest detection, life stage identification, and record keeping and tracking are all important information collecting mechanisms for management decision making. This can be done using beat-sheet tests, Growing Degree Day (GDD) tracking, and ethanol borer traps.
4. Non-Chemical Controls: There are a number of ways that pests and diseases can be managed without the use of chemicals, including physical barriers (like weed or insectary borders) and the use of biological control agents (such as predatory mites).
5. Targeted Intervention: The last resort in pest and disease management is the use of selective chemical controls when pest thresholds are breached. The use of reduced-risk materials including biorational oils, insect growth regulators, and targeted rotational miticides, is recommended as a first step when chemical treatment is necessary.