INTEGRATED PLANT PROTECTION CENTER

This project was initiated in 1996 with an invitation from the Annual Review of Entomology to write a paper on the history of IPM.  The Annual review article was published in 1998 with the title “Integrated Pest Management: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Developments” (Annual Review of Entomology, volume 43, pages 243-270).

Considerably more information was gathered for the project than could be condensed within the page limitations of Annual Reviews. After retiring in 2003 I have devoted my time to expand the scope of the project on the history of IPM.  The project is based primarily on what probably is the most complete set of documents on the early development of integrated control any where in the world. The origin of that collection of documents is worth recording.

The Consortium for International Crop Protection (CICP) was established in 1978 by Ray Smith, at the University of California, Berkeley. When Ray Smith retired in 1982, he donated his extensive collection of entomology books, pest control reprints, and a variety of documents, letters, and manuscripts to the CICP library. The headquarters of CICP then moved from Berkeley, California to College Park, Maryland, in 1985 when Ray Smith stepped down and Al Steinhauer assumed as CICP’s Executive Director. The CICP Library also was moved to College Park, at great expense to the Consortium.

When the directorship changed again in 1991 and the headquarters were about to be transferred to Geneva, New York, I was just starting my tenure as director of the Integrated Plant Protection Center (IPPC), at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, Oregon. Oregon State University was a CICP member institution and IPPC has had a long history of collaboration with CICP, as both were initially funded by the United States Agency for International Development (US-AID), and both overlapped in their international programs in crop protection – CICP mostly in the safe use of pesticides, and IPPC mostly in the cultural and chemical methods to control weeds. IPPC had a good plant protection library with emphasis on weed science. It just made good sense to merge the CICP and IPPC libraries at a permanent site on the Oregon State University campus, rather than move the CICP library each time there was a change in executive directorship. Consequently, with the merger of the two libraries, a wealth of rare and unique documents on plant protection became housed under one roof and I became the lucky custodian and avid user of that collection. Access to this valuable resource was one of the incentives to pursue this project.

The combined CICP/IPPC library was named in 2001 the ”R.F. Smith IPM Library,” in recognition of the many contributions Ray Smith made to IPM and to acknowledge the value of the collection he donated to public use. This library has since been incorporated into the Oregon State University library system and its holdings are cataloged and cross-listed in the catalog of that library, thus being accessible on-line. The project, since 2003, has received financial support from the USDA/SCREES - IPM Program, for which I am grateful. Upon completion of the project I expect it to be published in book format and the key references made available on the Web.