Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The Randall Island Project's success built on the first IPM research in
pears. During the early 1970s, pear growers in the Sacramento region
had used as many as 14 active ingredients, most of them hazardous. This
attracted the attention of early pear IPM researchers, then funded by the
US Department of Agriculture, which began funding IPM projects after
the pesticide controversies stirred up by
Silent Spring
. Pat Weddle recalls
a flood in the Sacramento River Delta during the early 1970s in an area
where some of the IPM trials were underway:
Where they were using the chemically intensive program, those orchards defoli-
ated during the flood. Where they were using the IPM program, they did not
defoliate. You could drive down the river and see it. The Farm Advisor would
say, there's a chemically intensive block and there is an IPM block. . . . Everybody
could tell. It was a real eye popper. It made a lasting impression on what
you could do if you could somehow manage pesticides in a way that was less
disruptive.
High pesticide use stimulated organophosphate resistance in codling
moth populations, but the early IPM work provoked interest in alterna-
tive practices among a network of leading growers as well. According to
Weddle, “the Delta pear growers seemed to be that progressive core of
people that were having enough trouble and were paying enough atten-
tion to the new possibilities.”
The Randall Island Project relied on professional IPM-oriented
entomologists to develop field monitoring protocols to track the behav-
ior of the insect pest. The extra work these practices entailed did require
extra compensation. According to Pat Weddle, ecological agriculture
is information intensive, site specific, and labor intensive to monitor.
Hemly was a member of the California Pear Advisory Board, a grower-
supported organization whose goals were to foster marketing and facili-
tate research, and he was able to get that organization to help offset early
additional costs of the pheromone products. In 1992 (the year Hemly,
Weddle, and Welter began testing pheromones), Jean-Marie Peltier, the
board's executive director, initiated the Pear Pest Management Research
Fund. Sponsored by growers and canners, it provided about $150,000
per year to subsidize pheromone products. Contributing canners recog-
nized that reducing the environmental and public perception risks of
high pesticide use added value to the fruit they bought from growers and
merited a higher price from their customers. Although invisible to
anyone documenting the on-farm development of pollution-prevention
