Jennifer Byrne, Robert Lillywhite, Henry Creissen, Fiona Thorne, Lael Walsh

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is a crop health paradigm offering a framework for sustainable pest management. To optimise adoption it is necessary to understand how growers use IPM, to identify measures lagging in uptake or suitability for uptake and to explore limitations to both. This study has quantified IPM adoption using Irish food horticulture as a case study, through the development and application of an IPM metric based on field, protected and top fruit production systems. While our results demonstrated that IPM has been adopted, it also suggested that there is room for improvement. This presentation of an IPM measurement instrument for temperate horticulture systems provides the means to benchmark IPM performance and chart cumulative progress. This is useful to policy makers and IPM stakeholders to compare performance on a national and cross-national basis with a view to refining best practice, while defining specific components of IPM for improvement.

Crop Protection. February 2025