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Funded Project |
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Funding Program:
Integrated Pest Management Competitive Grants Program |
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Project Title:
Low-cost IPM for medusahead and a cost:benefit framework to support adoption |
Project Directors (PDs):
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Lead State: CA Lead Organization: University of California Div of Ag and Natural Resources |
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Cooperating State(s):
Montana |
| Undesignated Funding: $29,136 |
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Start Date: Mar-01-2018 End Date: Mar-01-2019 |
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Pests Involved: medusahead |
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Site/Commodity: Rangeland livestock production |
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Area of Emphasis: invasive plant management |
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Summary:
Rangelands represent the largest agroecosystem in the West, serving a critical role in the US livestock industry and providing society a suite of essential ecosystem services. Medusahead, one of most serious rangeland plant pests, has progressively spread across a six state area, drastically reducing forage production and biodiversity while greatly increasing the frequency of catastrophic fires. Over the last 5 years our project team has focused on developing a novel low-cost IPM strategy for medusahead and quantifying economic relationships between pest abundance and livestock production. The goal of this proposal is to build off of these advances and develop an outreach program that catalyzes adoption of IPM programs for medusahead. To address this goal we will partner with a team of potential early-adopters and (1) establish management-scale demonstrations of our low-cost tools involving timed grazing and a novel application of a growth regulating herbicide to sterilize medusahead seed (2) develop an online calculator that allows producers to enter ranch-specific information to estimate medusahead impacts on revenues and identify when adoption of our low-cost IPM tools will allow ranchers to break even or increase profits and (3) have our early-adopter team evaluate our demonstration results and cost:benefit framework supported by the online calculator to identify regional opportunities to initiate adoption. High treatment costs and uncertainty around treatment benefits has prevented IPM from being adopted on rangeland at any measurable scale. This project overcomes these barriers providing a major opportunity to recover essential ecological an economic function of rangeland across the West.
Objectives: The overall aim of this proposed work is to integrate our previous research on pest phenology, economics of pest invasion, timed grazing, and low-cost herbicide into a targeted outreach and implementation program to catalyze adoption of IPM programs for medusahead (Fig. 4). We will achieve this overall goal by partnering with a team of potential early-adopters to complete three linked objectives: 1. Establishing replicated, management-scale field trials that demonstrate ecological and economic benefits of an IPM program that integrates timed grazing and low-rate application of aminopyralid to manage medusahead. 2. Creating an online IPM impact calculator that allows producers to enter ranch-specific information to estimate medusahead impacts on revenues and identify when adoption of our low-cost IPM tools will allow ranchers to break even or increase profits. 3. Having our early adopter team evaluate our demonstration results and cost:benefit framework supported by the online calculator to identify regional opportunities to initiate peer learning networks and adoption of these low-cost IPM strategies. |
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