Identifying the drivers and constraints to adoption of IPM among arable farmers in the UK and Ireland.

Background: Arable crops in temperate climatic regions such as the UK and Ireland are subject to a multitude of pests (weeds, diseases and vertebrate/invertebrate pests) that can negatively impact productivity if not properly managed. Integrated pest management (IPM) is widely promoted as a sustainable approach to pest management, yet there are few recent studies assessing adoption levels and factors influencing this in arable cropping systems in the UK and Ireland. This study used an extensive farmer survey to address both these issues.

Measuring the unmeasurable? A method to quantify adoption of integrated pest management practices in temperate arable farming systems.

Background: The impetus to adopt integrated pest management (IPM) practices has re-emerged in the last decade, mainly as a result of legislative and environmental drivers. However, a significant deficit exists in the ability to practically monitor and measure IPM adoption across arable farms; therefore, the aim of the project reported here was to establish a universal metric for quantifying adoption of IPM in temperate arable farming. This was achieved by: (i) identifying a set of key activities that contribute to IPM; (ii) weighting these in terms of their importance to the achievement of IPM using panels of expert stakeholders to create the metric (scoring system from 0 to 100 indicating level of IPM practised); (iii) surveying arable farmers in the UK and Ireland about their pest management practices; and (iv) measuring level of farmer adoption of IPM using the new metric.

Impact of disease on diversity and productivity of plant populations.

Experiments were conducted on the role of intra- and inter-genotypic competition in ecological processes operating at the population scale in diseased plant populations.Combinations of genotypes showing variation for phenotypic traits relating to competitive ability and pathogen compatibility were infected with the oomycete and in separate experiments. Plant fitness and competitive ability were estimated from phenotypic measurements.

Stabilization of yield in plant genotype mixtures through compensation rather than complementation.

Background And Aims: Plant genotypic mixtures have the potential to increase yield stability in variable, often unpredictable environments, yet knowledge of the specific mechanisms underlying enhanced yield stability remains limited. Field studies are constrained by environmental conditions which cannot be fully controlled and thus reproduced. A suitable model system would allow reproducible experiments on processes operating within crop genetic mixtures.