Interest in Area Wide Management is increasing within the Australian Cotton industry. The increasing costs of chemical control, coupled with increasing levels of resistance to conventional chemistry and an awareness of the potential impacts of sprays on the neighbouring environment have led many growers to consider new approaches to pest management. Area Wide Management (AWM) is an approach that acknowledges that pest and beneficial insects are mobile, and that the management regimes to control pests imposed on a given field are likely to alter the abundance of beneficial organisms and levels of insecticide resistance in the surrounding locality. By communicating and coordinating strategies, growers within an AWM group have better opportunities to implement PM strategies like those outlined in the Integrated Pest management Guidelines for Australian Cotton (Mensah and Wilson 1999). To assess the benefits of IPM implemented within an AWM group, we undertook an economic evaluation of cotton field productivity and profitability in relation to pest pressure. The work reported here examines the interaction between pest pressure and the associated spray programs. It provides supporting material for the economic evaluation presented in a separate paper in these proceedings by Ziaul Hoque et al (2000).