News

Iowa Pest Resistance Management Plan unveiled

Iowa officials have launched a new effort to engage farmers on the issues of weed, insect and disease resistance in their crops.

The Iowa Pest Resistance Management Plan is an Iowa-specific plan to address pests—including weeds, insects and plant diseases—that can adapt and become resistant to chemical, genetic, and agronomic control practices.

“As we’ve had some conversations with farmers, with Iowa State University and with others in the industry, we realized that there a lot of resistance issues out there with some more potential issues coming down the road,” says Iowa ag secretary Bill Northey.  

“There are lots of different things each of us can do, but we’ve not necessarily been organized together,” Northey says. “This is an effort to do that—to have the conversations and work with each other, to take several of these individual issues and locally deal with them.”

The goal, according to Iowa State University’s John Lawrence is to protect the effectiveness of current and future cropping technologies.

“To keep these safe and effective pest management technologies viable well into the future,” Lawrence says. “It impacts not only sustainability, but profitability.”

Lawrence says some of the biggest concerns in Iowa are western corn rootworm and soybean aphid resistance and herbicide resistance in Palmer Amaranth and waterhemp.

Logan, Iowa farmer Larry Buss supports the effort, but says it has to make economic sense for farmers.

“We’re interested in long term profitability for Iowa farms. But we also have to ensure that whatever practices farmers implement to do this makes them short term profitable also,” Buss says. “Because you won’t get the long-term if you’re not profitable in the short-term.”

A key part of the program will be pilot projects of active pest resistance management. Lawrence says the first round of pilot projects will be selected this April and get underway in May so they can operate during the growing season this year.

The plan was announced Monday at news conference in Des Moines.

Link to web site

AUDIO: Excerpt from news conference, introduced by Bill Northey