Dr. Peter Goodell began his career with the University of California Cooperative Extension in 1981 as an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Specialist for Kern County. Later, his title became Area IPM Advisor and he moved to the Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center. Goodell’s program focused on IPM in field and row crops throughout the Southern San Joaquin Valley. Throughout his 35-year career, he was an exceptional leader with a natural ability to articulate a vision and bring people together to address pest management problems.
With Goodell’s leadership, UC IPM has developed into a well-known and respected resource for practical IPM information. During his career, IPM moved from a fringe concept for insect pest management to a central tenet of management for all pests in all situations. All the while, Goodell continued to push the boundaries of IPM.
Early in his career, Goodell focused on reducing the use of broad-spectrum insecticides and developing scouting methods that were easy to implement. For example, he was instrumental in the development and adoption of presence/absence sampling and establishing treatment thresholds for mites in cotton. Previous sampling methods required counting mites using a hand lens and were too time consuming for practical use. His easy-to-use sampling method is currently the industry standard.
Goodell has been at the forefront of innovative IPM programs throughout his career. He was one of the first IPM advisors to champion landscape-scale approaches to manage pests. His research with lygus bugs in cotton, alfalfa, safflower, and tomato in the San Joaquin Valley served as a model system of landscape-scale management for other pests. This work is the foundation for grower coordination of lygus bug control in safflower in the Tulare Lake Basin. The growers in this area share lygus bug monitoring information from their individual fields and coordinate decision making so that, if needed, lygus bug treatments occur at the same time.
Mid-career, Goodell helped to pioneer year-round IPM programs in collaboration with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Year-round IPM programs describe pest management activities important for each crop stage or season, and address key pest management practices for multiple pests. The year-round IPM programs enabled users to move from addressing one pest at a time to a more holistic program focused on multiple pests, prevention and decision making. UC IPM now has year-round IPM programs for 25 crops. Growers and pest control advisers can use these to develop an IPM plan as part of a more comprehensive resource conservation plan. The year-round IPM program concept was recently extended to urban areas with the development of the Seasonal Landscape IPM Checklist.
Goodell is a founding member of the IPM Partners, which is composed of staff from UC IPM, NRCS, California Department of Pesticide Regulation, and California Department of Food and Agriculture. The IPM Partners facilitate information sharing and collaborations among the organizations and contributed to the development of the NRCS Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) Practice Standard 595 – Integrated Pest Management. EQIP 595 provides cost-sharing support for growers to mitigate harm from pesticide application on soil, water, and air resources by using IPM methods. The IPM Partners group continues to thrive despite the loss of many founding members through either promotion or retirement. Continuation of the group is a testament to the benefits of communication and collaboration established by the leadership of Goodell and the other founding members.
More recently Goodell collaborated with NRCS staff to propose a transformation in the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. Previously EQIP 595 focused on mitigating the harm of pesticide applications on natural resources. The proposed new IPM Practice Standard will include the use of IPM practices to reduce the need for pesticide applications, therefore preventing the need for pesticide mitigation.
Later in his career, Goodell’s innovations focused on participant-centered IPM projects and assessment of the impacts of IPM projects and programs. His participant-centered work focused on growers and pest control advisers identifying pest management problems and potential solutions and then working together to shape the research and extension needed to test and implement IPM solutions.
Goodell was one of the first to incorporate social science concepts regarding human change in behavior into IPM learning and adoption and to understand the importance of assessing adoption of IPM practices. He published a survey of cotton growers’ adoption of IPM practices in California Agriculture in 2007. His impact assessment work includes leadership on the team that developed the Toolkit for Assessing IPM Outcomes and Impacts, an eight-module toolkit that is becoming the standard resource for evaluating IPM projects and programs.
More recently, Goodell has led a statewide project funded by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation to examine the critical uses of chlorpyrifos in alfalfa, almond, citrus and cotton. Chlorpyrifos was first registered in 1965 and was under intense federal and state regulatory scrutiny due to environmental concerns. His leadership was crucial to bringing together key growers and pest control advisers, who were critical to the success of the project. One output of the project is the online Chlorpyrifos Decision-Support Tool that has been enthusiastically received by pest control advisers and growers. He has continued this partnership with the Department of Pesticide Regulation by working on a new project assessing how IPM can be more effectively understood and delivered in urban and rural settings. The project covers pests, pesticides and IPM from the view of practitioners, scientists, and consumers with the goal to identify common themes and concerns. The project outcomes will be benchmarks for future assessment and, hopefully, illuminate how IPM can be better understood and more quickly adopted.
Goodell is a leader within UC IPM. He led the IPM advisors, first as IPM Advisor Coordinator for 12 years, and more recently as Associate Director for Agricultural IPM. He was Interim Director of the Program for 2.5 years from 2006 to 2009 and provided consistency during a time of budgetary challenges and a leadership vacuum. Goodell has been a mentor and coach for IPM advisors statewide for the last 25 years. He has provided informal mentoring for IPM advisors to support their career development and program growth. He consistently contributes ideas, organizational support, and coaching at the semiannual IPM Advisors meetings.
Thank you, Pete, for your leadership, support, research, extension and passion for IPM.