Like everyone, the Western Integrated Pest Management Center worked through COVID in 2021 and made adjustments to our programs and services to best serve our stakeholders in the 17 states and territories of the Western Region.

Some things didn’t change. We provided $323,000 to fund 11 new projects in our 2021 annual grants program, including biocontrol research for pests of cotton, tree fruit, grass seed and citrus crops, and work groups focused on agricultural worker protection in the Pacific Islands and on coordinating invasive plant lists across multiple states to slow the spread of invasives. The funded projects all addressed one or more of the 11 regional priorities identified by our stakeholders.

We continued our high-impact signature programs that document the economic benefits of adopting IPM practices and help Extension personnel understand and communicate the complex issue of pesticide risk as growers make pest-management decisions. We expanded our efforts to gather public comments for federal agencies proposing changes to pest management regulations to include outreach to pesticide safety education programs and farmworker organizations. We updated and reformatted our popular monthly newsletter, The Western Front, to make it easier to read on mobile devices. Subscribe here.

The Center helped the National IPM Coordinating Committee produce three issue papers highlighting the importance of integrated pest management, and continued our new IPM Hour webinar series. That live monthly webinar, held the second Wednesday of each month at noon Pacific, was created to help maintain professional connections when travel was limited during COVID but has developed into a popular way to share and gain knowledge even as travel picks up.  

Our 2022 annual grant program request for applications brought in 39 proposals requesting $1.7 million and were able to fund 11 projects for a total of $454,000—a record for the Western IPM Center (and made possible by travel savings during 2020 and 2021.)