Pests are organisms that damage or spoil crops, gardens, landscapes, and other desirable plants. They also annoy people and disrupt the balance of nature. Control measures aim to reduce their numbers to an acceptable level. Preventive or physical methods should be used first. Click here to Learn More.
Chemical pesticides may be necessary, but they should be applied only after exploring all other options. They should also be used by label directions and precautions to minimize exposure and disease risk.
Physical pest control, a simple yet effective method, relies on barriers to keep pests at bay. Screens, netting, and fences are all effective tools in this battle, preventing insects from invading homes and gardens. Natural barriers like mountains and large bodies of water also play a role, restricting the spread of some pests. Remember, pests thrive only as long as they have access to food and shelter. By removing sources of food and water, such as garbage and overwintering sites, their numbers can be significantly reduced.
Another key strategy in pest control is to eliminate the places where pests breed and hide. Clutter, such as stacks of paper, can provide ideal breeding grounds for rats and mice. Regularly removing garbage and keeping cans tightly closed is also crucial. Additionally, trimming back branches that hang over buildings can reduce the risk of pests dropping onto them from above. These proactive measures can significantly reduce pest populations.
Plant diseases that occur only under certain conditions are another type of control issue. Some of these can be prevented by planting disease-resistant cultivars. Disease problems can also be controlled through fungicides and other chemicals that kill the spores or fungi that cause them.
Suppression
Aims in pest control are prevention (keeping the pest from becoming a problem), suppression (reducing a population to an acceptable level), and eradication (destroying an entire pest population). Suppression strategies include cultural practices, physical barriers, biological controls, and chemicals. The choice of which tactics to use depends on the pest biology and behavior, tolerance for damage, and the costs and impacts of control measures themselves.
Certain types of plants, wood, and buildings are more resistant to pests than others. Using resistant varieties when available helps keep pest populations below damaging levels. Chemicals in a host plant, wood or building repel pests or prevent them from completing their life cycle.
Physical barriers, such as traps, screens, fences, netting and radiation, inhibit the movement of pests. This is especially useful for termite, house fly, house ant and vertebrate control. Changing the environment also can suppress pests. For example, lowering soil temperature can slow insect development and increase a crop’s resistance to pest attacks.
Natural enemies, such as predators, parasitoids and pathogens, naturally reduce the numbers of many pests. Including these organisms in a pest management program can reduce the need for pesticides.
Many natural enemies require a specific climate to thrive. For example, nematodes that are effective in controlling some insect pests need soil with a high pH and low salinity to grow and be effective. These organisms are often found in nature, but they also can be produced on a commercial scale and used in the home landscape.
Some of the factors that influence whether a pest becomes a problem are the weather, the condition of the crop or structure and its susceptibility to damage. A continuous pest is one that is persistent and requires regular control; sporadic pests are migratory or cyclical and require control on an occasional basis; and potential pests are organisms that are not pests under normal conditions, but may become a nuisance in some circumstances.
Many of the organisms that are natural enemies to pests can be sourced from other countries and used in the United States for biological control. This practice is called importation biological control. A rigorous process, involving extensive testing in quarantine, is needed to ensure that the introduced species does not have undesirable impacts on native organisms.
Eradication
Eradication involves eliminating a pest from an area to the extent that it can no longer recolonize or damage crops. In outdoor situations, where the actions of different species of plants and animals often influence each other, eradication can be extremely difficult to achieve. In such cases, prevention and/or suppression are more realistic goals. In enclosed environments, however, eradication is possible.
The goal of eradication is achieved by surveillance, containment, and treatment and control measures. The surveillance element of the programme seeks to find, identify and characterize a new pest so that it can be quickly isolated from other areas where it might have been spread. The containment element attempts to keep the pest from spreading further, and may involve quarantine, restrictions on movement of plants, plant products and equipment, or other phytosanitary interventions. The treatment element aims to destroy any remaining pest populations by use of physical or chemical methods, such as removal from the land or soil, destruction of infested equipment and facilities, spraying with biological agents, and the application of cropping practices to interrupt the life cycle of the pest (e.g., planting a crop that has high resistance to the pest).
A pest risk analysis should be conducted prior to starting an eradication program. This can help identify options that might be available, including a cost-benefit analysis of various control strategies. This should be done as early as possible in the eradication process, taking into account information about the biology of the pest, and current technology for controlling it, along with cost and availability of resources for a potential eradication programme.
Once an eradication program has been completed, it should be verified to ensure that the pest is really gone. This verification should include a full investigation of the area where the pest was found, and should be supported by documentation of programme activities. This documentation should be made available to NPPOs of importing countries, should such requests be received.
The terms exterminate, extirpate and eradicate mean to effect the extinction of a race, family, or species by destroying all the means of propagation. In practice, eradication programs do not usually reach this level of destruction, but they are designed to eliminate the pest population to a point where it is no longer able to spread or cause economic injury.
Monitoring
There’s a good chance that the facility you work at uses monitors to keep track of things like allergens, metal contaminants and even biologic samples. And, of course, there are monitors for pests too. Most facilities will have a third party pest management company that handles this part of the job for them, but some still have their own in-house team of people who manage this service.
Regardless of who is managing the monitoring process, it’s important that there is a strong commitment to it. As we mentioned above, catching pests early on is key to saving time and money in terms of the cost of controlling them. Monitoring for pests is an essential part of the integrated pest management (IPM) process and should be done on a regular basis to help ensure that a full pest infestation never occurs.
IPM is a system of practices that promotes the use of natural enemies, cropping patterns and cultural controls rather than just the use of chemicals to control pests. Monitoring is an important component of this strategy as it helps us determine when to use chemical control and what types of chemicals will be most effective. This also helps to prevent the development of resistance to pesticides.
Monitoring can be as simple as using a trap or glue board to catch the pests themselves. Traps or glue boards should be placed in the areas where the pests are most often found, such as in the attic, basement or any rooms that might have a lot of moisture like bathrooms and kitchens. The traps or glue boards should be checked regularly for the presence of pests. When the traps or glue boards become dusty or dirty or when they are crowded with pests, new ones should be put out.
The information collected from the monitoring process is then used to develop a plan for controlling the pests. This could include prevention, suppression or eradication depending on the situation and the impact of the pests. It is also important to determine thresholds – the level of pest populations at which we have to take action to prevent unacceptable damage or injury.
