I, too, would like to add my welcome to each of you on behalf of the 32nd annual Weed Science Society of America meeting. I would especially like to recognize our special guest this morning, Dr. C. Everett Koop. I know each of you will find the Clarion Plaza facilities and the program to be excellent due to an outstanding effort by Joe Antognini and the Program Committee and Joan Dusky and the Local Arrangements Committee. We owe all of these folks a tremendous debt of gratitude for the success of this meeting.

This “Outcomes Paper” was developed in response to one of the objectives of the First International Weed Control Congress:

A group of scientists from academia, government, and industry, along with ecologists, regulators, conservationists, and grower representatives have formed an International Organization for Resistant Pest Management (IOPRM) to review and delineate proactive and retroactive management strategies for specific cases of pesticide resistance. Within IOPRM, technical working groups were appointed to deal with each pest group. The Weed Resistance Management Working Group (WRMWG) is chaired by Drs. Jonathan Gressel and Leonard Saari, and will deal with the analysis and promoting of alternative control strategies for case studies where a high risk of herbicide resistant weeds exists. Based on our experience to date, crops such as wheat, corn, and soybeans and weeds such as kochia, annual ryegrass and blackgrass, will be used as models to develop optimum weed resistance management programs. The group is especially looking for herbicide and weed control data on negative-cross resistance, econometric models, novel management procedures, and quantitative data from weed scientists and other research and extension communities that could facilitate reaching optimal management decisions. All recommendations and experiences will be communicated through a worldwide network.

Agricultural scientists need to improve their communication with policy makers. Improving communication with federal policy makers will require new tactics by the research and extension community. A discussion on who is effectively communicating with policy makers, how agricultural policy is made, and what action is needed to improve communication is provided.

A select few of our present-day weeds are descended from much grander primeval forms. Field horsetail (Equisetum arvense L. ♯ EQUAR) and related species are “degenerate” herbaceous plants whose tree-sized ancestors dominated forests in the Carboniferous period about 300 million years ago. Indeed, early equisetums contributed significantly to the formation of coal beds (12).