Perspectives towards collective action for pest and disease management in vineyards in the western US

Abstract

An individual grower’s response to pests and diseases in their vineyard can have consequences for an entire growing region. Collective action strategies can help align grower responses to achieve better regional disease control. Ways in which we identify, approach, and address manager opinions regarding cooperative management efforts influences the success of collective action strategies. A Q-method survey was conducted to investigate the adoption obstacles of wine grape growers to regionally collective actions for managing pests and diseases. Qualitative information from the western US (n = 17 participants) was used to generate 36 statements describing opinions on collective management action and general disease management. A second set of grape producers (n = 59) were asked to rank these statements relative to each other. Participants perceived that collective management action would be worth the extra associated time or costs. Four prominent archetypal perspectives arose from the Q-method analysis explaining 66% of the variance in expressed opinions. Archetypes were termed, “The Cooperators" (14 of 59), “The Quasi-Individualists” (9 of 59), “The Mid-Level Pragmatists” (8 of 59), and “The Bottom-Line Focused” (5 of 59). These groups were split across the demographic information collected; archetypes explained more variation between responses than demographic information. Overall, participants were likely to agree that cooperation was important, but they were more concerned about their individual vineyard economic and crop health concerns. Thus, suggesting that if outreach professionals want to increase the likelihood of grape grower participate in collective pest management actions, they should emphasize the individual benefits of participation.