Jeff and Larry talked about the nature of field measurements and the importance of relevant information and evaluation tools for farm-level decision making for fruit and vegetable production. These are primarily be internal indicators that track how well the IPM program is performing.

Comments in general were based on IPM projects conducted with growers, grower organizations, and industry in production agriculture. Some of the key problems were related to maintaining production while identifying/analyzing environmental problems and technically viable solutions. The projects used partnerships with groups, working from the ground up with growers. One important point is the development of a decision-making body involving stakeholders for each project to design and evaluate progress. The projects use Evaluation Loops in real time each year for each project to continuously improve the performance of the project.

The decision-making process is on a field basis, however, industry does not always operate collectively. IPM is a decision-making process. The project leaders must communicate with growers at their level. Environmental indicators must communicate with growers within the areas of their interests. Monitoring reports per crop per field must fit the context of decision-making by growers.

Measurement of grower participation included monitoring attendance in IPM meetings, frequency of reading of the newsletters and the impact of monitoring techniques and their continuous improvement; i.e., the increase in monitoring for beneficials, in frequency, in time per field/vineyard, in systematic technique, etc.

In order to get growers to change behavior, one has to get information to growers in ways that they understand and appreciate.

Larry Elworth:

• Look for specific situations when problems exist and work directly with field level personnel.
• Focus specifically on implementation as well as economics to generate profits for farmers. It was stressed that there is little use for research, i.e. he is only interested in the most "useful" information. However, there is a need to set specific objectives such as specific acreage and changes in the behavior of farmers to adopt IPM measures.

Jeff Dlott: (See Appendix I for Jeff's overheads)

• The evaluation of the project has to be from the ground up. The projects are managed by teams of participants.
• Evaluations:
• Agronomic
• Environmental
• Economic
• Social
• Environmental impacts are the result of the sum of individual decisions at the field level. Time specific information is crucially relevant to decision making. Focus of the decision process is
  1. Context specific
  2. Decision focused