RIPM grants created benefits for western growers, agriculture report finds

The Regional Integrated Pest Management competitive grants program, which ran from 1996 to 2013, created tools, models, training information and publications that have been a tremendous benefit to growers and agriculture in the West.

That’s the finding of a retrospective of the program just released by the Western Integrated Pest Management Center, a USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture-funded program tasked with promoting IPM adoption in the West.

The Regional IPM competitive grant program, known as RIPM, promoted scientific advances in integrated pest management to reduce risks of pest and pest management practices. From 2003 to 2013, the Western IPM Center organized the grant review panel, which selected projects based in part on regional priority needs. The program was discontinued in 2014 and its funding combined into a new program administered nationally.

We wanted to look back on the 66 Western RIPM research and extension projects completed since 2003 and go beyond the usual end-of-project reports to see if we could document short-, medium- and long-term impacts,” said Jim Farrar, director of the Western IPM Center. “Even we were surprised by the incredible reach some of these projects had.”

In all, RIPM funding created 57 pest-management tools and models, 149 scientific papers, nearly 500 extension and training publications, 316 presentations and grower trainings attended by 8,000 people, and four new pest-management products on the market or in development.

The Western IPM Center’s report documents the impacts of 66 research and extension projects funded from 2003 to 2012. They involved 83 project directors and 107 collaborators in 15 universities across all 13 Western states. (Six projects in 2012 and 2013 are ongoing and not included in the report.)

The 20-page report and a four-page abstract can be downloaded from the Western IPM Center website at www.westernipm.org under the publications page.

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