Pest Control involves managing the existence and abundance of pests to minimize negative impacts on the environment, health, and food safety. It includes prevention, suppression, and eradication.
Physical methods include traps and barriers. These are most effective when you know a pest’s habits and routes. For example, you can block outside entry by sealing cracks and repairing weatherstripping. Contact Pest Control Trophy Club TX now!
Prevention is a proactive approach to pest control that focuses on keeping pests from coming in rather than treating the problem once it has arrived. Prevention techniques focus on changing the environment in a way that is less conducive to pests, such as by removing their food, water or shelter. This is often referred to as the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approach.
Preventive pest control includes everything from cultural practices to sanitation and building maintenance. It is an essential component of any sustainable pest control strategy. These preventive measures are designed to keep pests from entering buildings and causing damage. Some preventive methods are more obvious, like using screens in windows and repairing cracks in the foundation or siding. Others require more detailed inspections and careful maintenance to keep pests from finding a way in.
Pests in the food processing environment can cause a variety of problems: physical contamination of foodstuffs by rodent droppings, insect parts and internal organs, contamination with disease-causing pathogens such as microbial pathogens and intestinal worms carried on the bodies of insects and rodents, and direct damage to facilities and equipment from gnawing on wires, destroying surfaces, and contaminating food. Routine pest control is vital in this type of facility to help avoid costly repairs, product recalls, and damage to a company’s reputation.
A pest infestation can destroy a home or business, compromise air quality, affect a family’s health and comfort, and increase the cost of maintaining a property. The chemicals used to treat the pests can also be dangerous to people and pets, especially if they are not used correctly. Preventive pest control can prevent an outbreak and reduce the need for pesticides.
In a residential setting, the best preventive strategies include keeping areas free of debris and storing items in sealed plastic or glass containers. The removal of clutter and regular trash collection can make it harder for pests to breed and hide. Caulking or filling cracks and crevices, utilizing steel wool to fill spaces around pipes and covering holes with mesh and wire, can also help to keep pests out.
Suppression
Pest control involves reducing or eliminating pests to a tolerable level. It is a continuous activity and often involves using multiple tactics in combination. The goal is to minimize or eliminate crop damage without adversely affecting the ecosystem. Suppression includes all measures that reduce a pest population below an economic injury level and prevent it from increasing to the point of damaging crops or posing a public health risk. This includes physical, biological and chemical methods.
The physical environment and weather conditions have an important impact on pest populations. The availability of food, water, shelter and overwintering sites limit pests’ ability to thrive. Weather extremes can also dramatically affect pest activity. For example, rain and freezing temperatures kill or suppress many insects. Weather conditions also influence growth and development of the host plants on which pests feed and breed.
Biological control agents, both predatory and parasitic species, help keep pest populations at subeconomic levels by attacking or feeding on them. Biological control methods can be very effective but depend on accurate identification of the pest organisms (often to the species level) and careful sampling of the environment in which they occur. They also require an understanding of pest biology and ecology.
Other factors that limit pests include cultural practices, mechanical control and natural enemies. Cultural controls include weed removal, crop rotation, planting in unfavourable locations and use of herbicides and insecticides to kill or disrupt pest eggs and larvae. Natural enemies include bird, reptile, amphibian and fish species that feed on or prey on some pests, and pathogens that infect or parasitize them.
Chemical control can be used to destroy or repel pests, but it usually results in a rapid increase in the population of other organisms that are harmful to crops, and it may have undesirable side effects. It is a difficult and time consuming technique, and pesticides must be used sparingly and carefully.
In general, a pest population can be kept below the economic or aesthetic threshold only by employing several suppression tactics together. This approach is called integrated pest management or IPM. It is an alternative to the traditional use of single-tactic suppression methods such as spraying or broadcasting chemicals.
Eradication
The goal of pest control is not to eradicate all the insects or diseases in a particular area but to reduce them to levels acceptable to humans and other organisms. In order for this to be achieved, correct identification of pests is essential. Pesticides must be used in a targeted way to achieve this. This can be done through a variety of methods such as trapping, spraying and monitoring. A number of factors can influence the effectiveness of an eradication programme such as the level of risk to human health, availability of alternatives and financial constraints.
Eradication is an extremely difficult task once a pest has established itself in a new environment. This is because the longer a pest has been allowed to develop, the higher its population is, and the more expensive it is to control. As a result, many attempts at eradication fail. This may be due to the emergence of resistance in insecticides, disruption of natural enemy populations or political obstacles (as in the case of the guinea worm eradication program).
In Washington, entomologists were able to eradicate the spotted lanternfly from the state by restricting it to a 5-mile radius and destroying all host trees with an effective treatment. This was made possible by the use of a combination of quarantine, aggressive tree removal and targeted spraying. It was also made possible by a close partnership with the industry, including a willingness to share the cost of control.
The spotted lanternfly is currently a threat to fruit and wine production in Florida, which has been using similar tactics. However, a recent outbreak has prompted the state to intensify its efforts. A spokesman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services said they would be launching a campaign to eradicate the pest by spring, 2016.
The most successful eradication programs have been those targeting communicable diseases. The eradication of malaria in the US is one such success story, although efforts to eradicate yellow fever, cholera, and other communicable diseases have been hampered by civil unrest, poor water management, and vaccine strain reversion.
Monitoring
In IPM programs, monitoring is the practice of regularly searching for pests and evaluating their damage. It is the most important aspect of any IPM strategy and consists of both visual inspections and trapping. When conducting visual inspections, you need to be able to identify and properly assess the type of pest and its level of damage. A flashlight is often useful, as pests like to live and hide in dark, secluded areas. An extendable mirror may also be helpful to allow inspection behind or beneath equipment and furniture. A magnifying glass helps to locate insect parts and frass (excrement). A swat or sweep net is useful for collecting flying insects. Sampling techniques, such as disclosing solutions and soil examinations, are also useful for assessing pest populations.
When inspecting crops, you should be aware of critical crop stages and monitor at those times to ensure that control is applied in a timely manner. This will help to prevent pest populations from escalating and causing economic damage.
The monitoring process should be documented in some way so that the data can be analyzed for trends and used to determine whether or not an IPM treatment is needed. An electronic spreadsheet or database is often the best way to store data, but a simple sheet of paper works too. Recording results from trapping and scouting is also essential. These records should include the number of pests caught or spotted, when they were captured or seen, and any other information pertinent to the trapping or scouting results.
A facility’s internal monitoring should be based on the types of pests likely to be found, and include both a weekly and monthly schedule. Weekly inspections should be conducted during warmer months when pest activity is most active. In cooler or less humid regions, the inspection schedule can be reduced to monthly during these periods.
IPM programs try to use cultural pest management methods first, rather than chemical ones. These are usually less costly and pose fewer environmental concerns. However, if monitoring and identification indicate that pests are causing an economic threat and preventive methods have failed, it is appropriate to use a more intensive control measure. This could include pheromones, which disrupt pest mating, or targeted applications of low-risk chemicals.
