Tips for Writing a Successful Western IPM Center Proposal

The 2025 Western IPM Center annual grants Request for Applications spells out all the requirements for our grant program and what applicants must prepare and submit. This post is simply to emphasize elements of the request because applicants occasionally overlook them – and those that overlook them rarely get funded. 

So here are a few things to keep in mind:

Regional Focus: We are the Western Integrated Pest Management Center and cover a vast area of 17 states and territories. We take that regional focus seriously and expect our grantees to as well. Proposals focused on a single state – especially when the pest or crop-pest combination of concern occurs in several states – are not viewed as favorably by our review panels as multi-state proposals. This is especially true when there are natural, nearby combinations like tree fruit in Oregon and Washington, hops in Washington and Idaho or leafy greens in California and Arizona. Whenever possible, find collaborators and look for ways to maximize the impacts of your project across the region.

Center Priorities: The Western IPM Center’s list of stakeholder-identified priorities is pretty broad and most applicants are easily able to identify a few priorities their project addresses. Occasionally, though, it’s a stretch. Generally, if you have trouble articulating how your proposed project addresses a Center priority, reviewers will have trouble as well. It might be a project better suited for another funder.

Stakeholder Buy-In: Strong proposals have clear stakeholder involvement and buy-in and detailed letters of support. Tepid or generic letters of support elicit tepid scores from reviewers. Letters that show stakeholders are clearly engaged, supportive and will benefit from the project if it’s successful are meaningful.

Clear Collaborations: In a similar vein, letters from collaborators should clearly identify who is doing what and what the relationship is between the parties. Generic “we’ll cooperate somehow” letters don’t inspire a lot of confidence. 

Work Groups: Work groups are a natural fit for Western IPM Center funding because they do what we do – bring people together to address broad-area pest problems. Work groups can be research focused or outreach and extension focused, and if the problem you’re trying to address is widespread and could use several bright people working on it, a work group might be the best approach.

One tip for funded work groups: If you are applying for an additional year of funding, you are directed to attach a two-page summary of what the work group accomplished the previous year. Don’t skip or skimp on this. It’s your chance to write sentences like, “With Western IPM Center funding last year, we accomplished these specific things and had this specific impact, and we’ll build on that next year by doing all the things we’ve spelled out in the project narrative….” While past performance may be no guarantee of future results, recent accomplishments and a natural plan for building on them is something that makes reviewers sit up and take notice.

Reframing the Concept of Pests: Pests are Thieves

by Steve Elliott

Western IPM Center

 

The gap between what the non-farming public thinks about pests and what farmers know about pests is a mile wide.

 

For those working in the public integrated pest management enterprise, that was one of the key findings of a social science research effort designed to create greater public understanding of agriculture in America. Called the Farming and Food Narrative Project, the effort took a deep dive into what experts know about farming and what the public thinks it knows about agriculture. It looked at the prisms through which the public views farming and developed reframing strategies designed to bridge those gaps when communicating to the public about agriculture. (Learn more about the Farming and Food Narrative Project)

 

And one big issue illuminated by the project is the difference between the way non-farming people see pests and the way farmers see them.

 

And it makes perfect sense. Most Americans experience pests in a fundamentally different way than farmers do, and recognizing those differences may help us talk about pests and pest management in a more productive way. 

 

At least, as the communicator for the Western IPM Center, that’s what I’m thinking and trying.

 

For individuals, pests are a usually an icky, inconvenient nuisance with occasional but limited economic impact. They’re like a stone-chipped windshield – likely to happen eventually, annoying and more expensive than you want, but never a fundamental financial threat. No one is going to dock my paycheck 30 percent if I get ants in my dog food.

 

Farmers have a completely different relationship with pests.

 

For farmers, pests are a predictable, inevitable and inescapable existential threat. Growers literally bet the farm on their ability to manage insects, diseases, weeds, nematodes and vertebrate pests – and all their possible combinations, vectors and interactions – successfully and economically over the long term.

 

And ag journalists and university communicators don’t explain that well. Too often we assume our audiences understand why pests are a problem and don’t explain their impact at all. Or we use phrases like crop damage or yield losses, which don’t clearly spell out the real economic costs those terms imply. And, if we do talk about the costs of pest control and pest damage, we usually put it in terms of growers’ profits which doesn’t connect to consumers and creates a them-vs.-us dynamic.

 

So, using the reframing principles employed by the Farming and Food Narrative Project, I’m exploring a new way of talking about pests that connects individuals’ and growers’ economic experiences:

 

Pests are thieves. Pests steal.

 

When pests destroy crops in the field, they’re stealing from farmers and consumers alike –

and from all the field workers, truck drivers, processors, wholesales and grocers in between. Pests make food less available and more expensive for all of us and we all share that economic loss. We’re all stolen from.

 

Casting pests in this light creates a common enemy for growers and consumers, connecting our interests. It gives communicators an opening to talk about the diversity and complexity of agricultural pests and the need for diverse and effective and evolving pest-management tactics equal to the challenge. By showing pests are a shared problem, it invests everyone in supporting solutions. 

 

By talking about pests as thieves, it also creates an opportunity to explain integrated pest management in a more productive way. The food narrative project found the general public thinks of pest control only as chemical pesticides, which is like thinking of theft control only as incarceration. But people do understand there is a lot that can be done to prevent theft and that planning, deterrence and monitoring up front can reduce the need for apprehension and incarceration after the fact.

 

IPM, then, is pest-theft prevention – deterring, avoiding and monitoring pests to reduce the need for biological, mechanical or chemical suppression. Thinking about it as a description to introduces people to the concept, we could try something like this:

 

Integrated pest management is the science of pest prevention, monitoring and ecologically conscious control of harmful insects, plant diseases, weeds and other crop-stealing organisms.

 

Or, more simply:

 

Pests are thieves and IPM is the science of preventing thieving pests. 

 

 

What do you think? Reply in the comments or email me directly at sfelliott@ucanr.edu.