The history of integrated pest management (IPM) traces its first real beginnings to the late 1960s, where a number of factors came together to initiate a search for better methods of pest control than simple reliance on prophylactic pesticide use. These f

The history of integrated pest management (IPM) traces its first real beginnings to the late 1960s, where a number of factors came together to initiate a search for better methods of pest control than simple reliance on prophylactic pesticide use. These factors included not only the well known litany of pesticide misuse problems (resistance and non-target effects), but also the rapid development of technologies enabling more sophisticated approaches, primarily due to rapid advances in communication and computing, with the allied new sciences of operations research, systems analysis, and modeling. ¶

Although much of the initial push for IPM came from California researchers in sympathetic response to Rachael Carson's Silent Spring, national acceptance of IPM as a philosophy and technology can be traced to 1970 to the first symposium of agricultural scientists brought together to discuss IPM in a conference held at North Carolina State University, which was jointly funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, NSF, and USDA/CSRS.