Learn about the pests bothering you and your options for controlling them. Remove clutter, fix leaky faucets, and regularly empty water-holding containers to eliminate places for pests to breed and hide.
Barriers and exclusion techniques create boundaries that pests can’t or won’t cross. They’re often cheaper than chemicals. Examples include window screens and door sweeps. Click Here to learn more
Pests are more than just nuisances; they can contaminate food and cause serious health problems. In addition, they can damage buildings, crops, and property. The best way to deal with pests is to prevent them from entering a home or business. In many cases, this is easy to do. For example, a person can keep pests at bay by regularly cleaning inside the house, sealing cracks and caulking holes, washing fabrics frequently, sanitizing food containers and keeping counters clear. Regular outside inspections should include looking for places mosquitoes can lay their eggs and other signs of unwanted insects and rodents.
Other preventive measures include modifying the environment to make it less welcoming to the pests, creating barriers to entry and using biological controls. Integrated Pest Management (IPM) uses a combination of these methods and is especially useful in the garden where it can be difficult to eliminate pests completely. This approach limits the use of pesticides and instead focuses on managing the population by changing environmental factors, crop rotation or cultural practices.
Some pests are so persistent that even the most carefully designed preventive efforts are not enough to keep them under control. In these cases, pest control becomes suppression or eradication. This is most often the case with outdoor pests like insects, nematodes, diseases or weeds that threaten human health and economic interests or displace native plants and animals.
Eradication is also an important goal for indoor pests such as roaches, rodents and ants. The key to success is to identify the source of the problem and use an appropriate method to treat it. For example, a pesticide may be used to treat the exterior of a building where the pests are entering and to use caulking to seal any openings. In this way, the pests cannot reach the food in a kitchen or the water in a bathroom.
Sanitation measures are also helpful in preventing and controlling pests. These practices can reduce pest populations by removing their food and shelter sources. In the case of agricultural pests, they can help to limit carryover of disease organisms from one field to the next. Other sanitation techniques include keeping compost piles away from the main field, reducing weed populations and storing seeds or transplants in protected areas.
Suppression
Pests like rats, cockroaches, bed bugs, and termites are very annoying to people. They can cause health problems and damage property, especially in homes, retail or food preparation environments. There are a number of ways that these creatures can be controlled to minimize their numbers and the damage they do.
The most common method of controlling pests is to use chemical sprays, baits and dusts. These control tactics are used in a wide range of settings and are effective against most types of pests. However, the chemicals can be toxic to humans and other organisms, and they may harm surfaces or nonliving environment at the treatment site. Using these controls alone can also cause the development of resistance in some pests.
A more environmentally friendly approach to pest control is to use cultural, biological or mechanical controls. These methods try to make the environment uninhabitable or inhospitable for the pests, or to alter their environment so they cannot survive or reproduce. Examples of these are physical barriers, such as fences and weed mats; devices that trap or exclude pests, such as screens and doors; and changes to the host plant, water supply or other factors, such as heat, light, and refrigeration.
Natural enemies, such as birds, fish, reptiles and mammals, prey on many pest species. They may be able to reduce pest populations on their own, depending on weather conditions and the availability of food and shelter. Other natural predators, parasites and pathogens can also suppress pest populations.
Agricultural pest control involves a variety of techniques to prevent, monitor and manage crop pests. These practices include scouting, monitoring and assessing pest population levels, stage of development, and potential damage to determine when action is needed; and selecting appropriate control tactics that are economical, safe and effective.
The most important step in pest management is prevention. Encourage customers to remove sources of food, water and shelter for pests by storing grain in covered bins, fixing leaky plumbing, and removing rubbish regularly.
Eradication
Pest control involves a variety of practices that eliminate unwanted creatures like rats, cockroaches, termites and poisonous spiders. These creatures cause health issues as well as property damage. They are often found in urban and rural environments and they are quite difficult to get rid of completely. In most cases, a combination of various pest control methods is necessary to effectively eradicate them.
Chemical
Chemical pest control solutions use chemicals that either repel or destroy pests. Some are odorless and don’t require any direct contact with the pests. These chemicals are typically the fastest way to control pests and are available in a wide range of forms. They may come in the form of a spray that you apply to your garden or in a bottle that you may squirt around areas where you think the pests are located. The use of chemicals must be done with great care since they can be dangerous to the user and the environment. Always read the product label carefully and follow the instructions.
Physical
Traps, netting and decoys are physical ways to control pests. This form of pest control is usually more effective in outdoor situations where the pests are more difficult to control. However, it is also an important part of pest control in indoor settings such as food processing and storage facilities, greenhouses and health care facilities.
Biological
The use of predators or other natural organisms to control pests is an alternative to chemicals. This method is usually more expensive than chemicals and is not always effective. Moreover, the success of this method depends on how well the predator can breed and adapt to its new environment.
Disease Eradication
When used to control disease, the term eradication means the complete reduction to zero of the worldwide incidence of infection caused by a specific agent as a result of deliberate efforts; intervention measures are no longer needed. Examples of diseases that have been successfully eradicated include smallpox caused by variola virus and rinderpest caused by rinderpest virus. However, samples of both viruses still exist in laboratories around the world and could resurface at any time.
Biological Control
Biological control involves the use of living organisms, such as parasites, predators, or disease pathogens, to disrupt or kill pests. Unlike synthetic chemical controls, biological agents are safe for humans and the environment. They are also energy self-sufficient, cost-effective, sustainable, and can be incorporated into integrated pest management (IPM) practices. However, the success of biological control relies on a complex web of interactions between the target pest and its natural enemies in the environment where the pest is found. Consequently, it can be less reliable than IPM strategies based on pesticide spraying.
Agricultural biocontrol involves introducing or conserving natural enemies to prevent or reduce pest populations. The goal is to level the playing field so that an invasive pest does not dominate its native habitat by outcompeting indigenous plants and animals for food or shelter. Biological control methods vary, but the following four major categories of techniques have been identified:
Classical or Importation Biological Control
Many pests that impact crop production in North America are foreign in origin, called exotic, introduced, or invasive species. These organisms often come to new environments without the natural enemy species that kept their population in check back home: herbivores, parasites, or diseases. Once well established, these pests can explode in number and even become a threat to their new environment.
Under the classical biocontrol approach, scientists conduct expeditions to the pest’s country or region of origin in an effort to find the organisms that naturally control it. Once these natural enemies are identified and characterized, they are sent to domestic quarantine facilities, where they are tested for host-specificity before being shipped to the site of their intended introduction.
Once the natural enemies are released, their numbers may increase rapidly in what is known as an inundative release, where large numbers of organisms are introduced at a single time to overwhelm the pest population. This is a very different approach than inoculative releases, where smaller numbers are released over the course of several years to supplement natural populations that are too low to be effective.
Biological control programs are usually evaluated by comparing the percentage reduction in pest population to the cost of collecting, rearing, and releasing the natural enemy. Other parameters, such as habitat enhancement, training workshops, and the number of organisms produced, are also important.