The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) has awarded $500,000 in funding through the Adaptive IPM for Invasive Agricultural Pests grant program to Dr. Mark Hoddle for a three-year project titled “Proactive Development of an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Program for Cotton Seed Bug in Bt and non-Bt Cotton in California.”
This project aims to develop the first comprehensive IPM strategy in California for the cotton seed bug, an emerging pest that has recently become established in urban areas and is now expanding toward key cotton producing regions. Building on the principal investigator’s prior laboratory and field research on cotton seed bug biology and ecology, this new effort will shift toward applied, field scale evaluations.
Upon completion, the project will deliver the foundational IPM components needed by California cotton growers to manage this pest proactively and sustainably.
The goal of the Adaptive IPM for Invasive Agricultural Pests Program is to develop IPM program(s) or components that can be rapidly implemented when new invasive agricultural pests arrive and become established in California or when recently arrived invasive pests resurge or expand their range or host species. The program also supports research to refine and optimize existing IPM strategies to improve their effectiveness or exploring additional control measures against established invasive agricultural pests that drive extensive pesticide use but remain uncontrolled due to developed pesticide resistance.
Source : ca.gov