IPM, integrated pest management, is a decision-making system for keeping pests and diseases below damaging levels with the least risk to people, the crop and beneficial organisms. It is not a product or a single tactic. It layers prevention, monitoring, thresholds and a ranked set of controls, with chemical options used last and chosen for selectivity.
In practice
A cannabis IPM programme usually looks like this: quarantine and inspect incoming clones; sanitise rooms and tools between runs; set the environment to discourage pests and disease; scout weekly with a hand lens and sticky traps and keep records; release beneficial organisms preventively in veg; and decide in advance what level of pest triggers each action. Any spray happens in veg, is chosen for its mode of action and compatibility with the beneficials in use, and follows its label. In flower the toolkit narrows sharply, which is why IPM in cannabis is mostly about what happens before week one of flower. Check what is registered for cannabis locally.
Don't confuse with
- Spray schedule: calendar spraying without monitoring; the opposite of IPM.
- Organic growing: a source-of-inputs standard; organic growers still need IPM.
- Biological control: one component of IPM, not the whole system.
Pest and disease prevention by changing how the crop is grown, such as humidity, airflow, spacing, watering and cultivar choice, so pests and pathogens struggle to establish.Bag appeal is how good flower looks in the bag or jar, frost, colour, density and trim, which sells cannabis but does not measure its quality.A coloured card coated in non-drying glue that catches flying insects, used mainly to monitor pest trends: yellow for gnats, whiteflies and aphids, blue for thrips.How a pesticide kills its target, grouped by IRAC into numbered classes; rotating between groups across pest generations slows resistance.Using living natural enemies, such as predators, parasitoids, nematodes and microbes, to suppress pests and diseases instead of, or before, chemical sprays.Systematic, regular inspection of plants, traps and roots to detect pests and disease early, identify them correctly and record numbers for decisions.The pest or disease level, set in advance, at which a grower takes a specific control action because waiting longer would cost more than acting.Holding incoming plants, clones or seeds apart from the main grow, under observation and sometimes treatment, until they are shown to be free of pests and disease.Cleaning and disinfecting rooms, tools, containers, irrigation and people's clothing so that pests and pathogens are not carried from plant to plant or crop to crop.
