Inside

Spotlight on Connecticut IPM

Massachusetts IPM budget cut

Highlights from other states:
* Maine potato IPM game
* New York honeybee research
* Vermont apple website
* West Virginia weather stations

Managing house flies on Delaware dairy farms

For more information on IPM in the Northeast, visit our website at northeastipm.org or contact regional IPM facilitator, Jim VanKirk (315.787.2378; jrv1@cornell.edu), or information specialist Liz Thomas (315.787.2626; egt3@cornell.edu) NYS IPM Program Office, NYSAES, 630 W. North Street, Geneva, NY 14456. Publication supported by CSREES, USDA, special project number 99-34103-7391. Writing and design: Elizabeth Myers (315-787-2624; ebm24@cornell.edu).

In the States...

Massachusetts IPM Budget Cut

Maine
The Maine IPM Program will release a new potato IPM game on CD this spring. Players must manage a potato farm profitably while contending with random real-world obstacles and events such as hail, torrential downpours, and insect and disease outbreaks. This innovative and fun education tool teaches IPM concepts to growers and students. Look for announcement of its release this growing season on the Maine IPM website (www.umext. maine.edu/topics/pest.htm).

New York
Cornell University will be home to a new Honeybee Genetics and Integrated Pest Management Center that will study the continuing threat from deadly parasitic mites and Africanized honeybees. The center is funded by a $1.8 million grant from the USDA’s Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems. The grant will establish the largest university-based honeybee research and extension infrastructure in the country. The director is Nicholas W. Calderone, Cornell assistant professor of entomology.

Vermont
In the late 1990s, Vermont and other New England states received a grant to create the web-based Apple Information Manager (AIM; orchard.uvm.edu/aim/), a project designed to enhance apple IPM implementation. The site’s online evaluation feature solicits ongoing feedback from site users. Though it primarily benefits Northeastern growers, the site is useful to orcharists across the globe. Recently, growers from Mexico and Pakistan weighed in, praising the site for increasing their knowledge and use of IPM. This news highlights the continuing (and far-reaching!) benefits of funding IPM research and extension projects.

West Virginia
West Virginia’s IPM Program has purchased state-of-the-art weather stations that will allow tree-fruit specialists to monitor weather conditions remotely (and in real time) in the major apple-growing areas of the state. State IPM Coordinator Rakesh Chandran hopes the stations will enhance efforts to monitor and forecast apple pests in the state, which is one of the country’s major apple producers. These forecasts could help growers predict pest development more accurately and respond with appropriate management strategies. The weather stations will be up and running for the 2002 growing season.

In recent years, the Massachusetts Department of Food and Agriculture, through a contract with the UMass extension, earmarked between $250,000 and $350,000 in state funding to support its IPM program. This year, however, Governor Swift has line-item vetoed most these funds, leaving the program largely dependent on its federal Smith-Lever 3(d) IPM funds. The Massachusetts Department of Food & Agriculture did provide approximately $121,000 to continue support of the School IPM project, but the rest of the program has taken a tremendous hit.

The program will use federal base funding in an effort to maintain its basic infrastructure and continue limited support to the apple, cranberry, vegetable, and greenhouse IPM projects, but key planned activities have been halted. For example, the program was launching a response to pumpkin growers’ requests for intensive monitoring efforts to help control disease and insect pests on this high-value crop. Now these and other plans to assist producers must be curtailed or eliminated.

The program has tried to avoid layoffs by moving most IPM staffers to grant-based projects, but the limited time frame for these projects places the state’s valuable IPM personnel resources at risk in the long term. Although competitive grants have helped to keep the IPM team intact for now, state IPM Coordinator William Coli points out that grants are often more easily won by states whose programs are located at large universities that supplement the state’s support with resources that enable IPM specialists to compete more successfully for funding. Coli emphasizes that without continued federal base funding, Massachusetts likely would not have a program at all.