Vegetable IPM Working Group: Reports, Links and Communications

Reports:

Veggie Group Finds Fertile Common Ground
This is a report on the first meeting, 3/14/02. For more detailed notes, click here.

NE PMC's Vegetable Commodity Working Group (CWG) held its first meeting in March to address the concerns and challenges of the northeastern vegetable industry. The group, led by Ruth Hazzard (University of Massachusetts) and Curt Petzoldt (Cornell University), discussed how it can best contribute to successful vegetable IPM in the region. The group's members come from 10 of the 12 northeastern states and represent diverse stakeholders including growers with a range of types of markets, processors, consultants, environmental groups, marketers, regulators, and researchers. These participants are working to ensure that the Center is responsive to the needs of all those concerned with integrated pest management for vegetables throughout the region.

The vegetable CWG had a very positive discussion, during which the group identified several common goals and discussed what its role should be. . The group sees a need for incentives that would encourage growers to adopt IPM and integrated crop management (ICM) tactics. These incentives might include the availability of on-farm scouts, who could bring time-saving expertise that would help growers plan effective pest management strategies. They decided to collect and document the existence of IPM "elements" or " growing protocols" that define IPM methods and can thus help producers assess their practice of IPM. The CWG will identify elements in each northeastern state and examine how these elements can be used to help vegetable farmers in the northeast improve their economic return and environmental stewardship. The vegetable CWG also sees a need to inform growers about available IPM resources and determine what other types of information resources would be useful.

Finally, the group recognized the importance of pest management strategic plans (PMSP), which can be used to establish future goals for research, education, and regulation in specific crops. As a region-wide group, they are in a unique position to look for common issues across all the northeastern states. The Vegetable CWG decided that it would like to participate in the development of a PMSP for a crop grown throughout the northeastern region. They identified several criteria that could help determine which crop(s) would be their focus, and intend to work with other groups in the region to find the most appropriate crop for a PMSP.

Links

Links here

Communications

Communication text here...