ABSTRACT
Management of agricultural systems on the farm has become increasingly difficult during the twenty first century. Low commodity prices and rising production costs are limiting farm profits. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time of great agricultural expansion in the United States, crop production and marketing were substantially different than today. From 1920 to 1950 large agricultural businesses developed and became a third information supplier to the farmer. The primary thrust of agriculture in the 1950s was the maximization of yield. Integrated pest management represented an interesting development in agricultural management philosophy. It attempted to collate biological and limited economic information across well-defined disciplinary boundaries to form packages that could be implemented for the management of pests and diseases. When completed, a production system description establishes a basic framework for interdisciplinary cooperation and a direct link between research and implementation goals and actual production systems.
