Tennessee Continues with Grant Focused on Integrated Pest Management

Oct 01, 2021

“It’s pest management the right way,” said Heather Kelly, plant pathologist at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, “With integrated pest management, we are managing pests with more than one tool, only when you need to and as sustainably as possible.”

Kelly is the lead investigator for a new $225,000 grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. She and nine other specialists from UTIA will spend the next three years researching integrated pest management, or IPM, and showing community members and producers how to effectively control pests.

More than half (58 percent) of the $225,000 grant will be used for implementation in agronomic crops, with 18 percent to be split evenly for implementation in specialty crops and pollinator health. The remaining 24 percent of the grant will be used to educate pesticide applicators and community stakeholders, such as school and housing administrators on IPM.
Some of the programs include the following:

Developing online resources
Training agricultural county agents, farmers, consultants, beekeepers and other stakeholders
Monitoring and managing invasive and pesticide-resistant pests
Demonstrating management strategies and their effects on crop sustainability
Educating private and commercial pesticide applicators
Training IPM decision makers in public or low-income housing facilities and in schools

“Our long term goal is to continue to provide real life solutions, specifically to provide programs that enable people to make effective, economically sustainable and environmentally sound decisions based in IPM,” Kelly said.

Click here to see more...

Video: Spring 2026 weather outlook for Wisconsin; What an early-arriving El Niño could mean

Northeast Wisconsin is a small corner of the world, but our weather is still affected by what happens across the globe.

That includes in the equatorial Pacific, where changes between El Niño and La Niña play a role in the weather here -- and boy, have there been some abrupt changes as of late.

El Niño and La Niña are the two phases of what is collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short. These are the swings back and forth from unusually warm to unusually cold sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator.

Since this past September, we have been in a weak La Niña, which means water temperatures near the Eastern Pacific equator have been cooler than usual. That's where we're at right now.

Even last fall, the long-term outlook suggested a return to neutral conditions by spring and potentially El Niño conditions by summer.

But there are some signs this may be happening faster than usual, which could accelerate the onset of El Niño.

Over the last few weeks, unusually strong bursts of westerly winds farther west in the Pacific -- where sea surface temperatures are warmer than average -- have been observed. There is a chance that this could accelerate the warming of those eastern Pacific waters and potentially push us into El Niño sooner than usual.

If we do enter El Nino by spring -- which we'll define as the period of March, April and May -- there are some long-term correlations with our weather here in Northeast Wisconsin.

Looking at a map of anomalously warm weather, most of the upper Great Lakes doesn't show a strong correlation, but in general, the northern tiers of the United States do tend to lean to that direction.

The stronger correlation is with precipitation. El Niño conditions in spring have historically come with a higher risk of very dry weather over that time frame, so this will definitely be a transition we'll have to watch closely as we move out of winter.