Pest Control Basics: Keeping Your Home Pest-Free
Pests can cause damage to property, spread diseases and contaminate food sources. They also interfere with agricultural production.
Physical pest control methods include traps and bait stations, and regular clearing of potential nesting sites like fallen branches. There are also biological pest control methods such as nematodes, including the roach-eating Steinernema carpocapsae. For professional help, contact Treasure Valley Pest Control.
Correct pest identification is the first step in any successful pest control program. Pest identification focuses on recognizing the type of organism and its life stage. This information is important, because different organisms have a variety of damage-causing behaviors and require different controls. Using the wrong control tactic for a pest can result in expensive failures and unnecessary risk to people or the environment.
A pest can be a plant, animal, microbe or other organism that damages crops or gardens. Pests can also include diseases and weeds. In agriculture, pests are often characterized by their impact on crop production and/or quality. Some pests may not be a problem at all if the right control strategy is used.
Pests are identified by their morphological features (size, shape, color of body parts, wings, antennae, etc.) or by the damage they cause to plants. The most common pests are insects and rodents.
For most pests, proper identification requires a knowledge of their damage to plants and structures, the location where they are found, what time of year they are active, how long they live, where they go in order to feed or breed, their life cycle stages, habits and habitats, what other species they interact with, and any known threats or interactions with the ecosystem.
There are many resources available to help with pest identification. You can check your local library or Cooperative Extension office for books or field guides on the topic, or use online resources such as a pest guide. These sites have photos, descriptions of pest characteristics, habits, habitats, damage, and preventative and control tactics.
An additional benefit of knowing exactly what you are dealing with is that it makes prevention easier. If you can tell that there are boxelder bugs in the house, for example, caulking cracks or tightening window screens will be a much cheaper and less toxic measure than using a pesticide to kill them. In addition, if you can identify the pests that are present in a garden or landscape, you can determine whether there are natural enemies in the area, which might be beneficial and could replace the need for chemical controls.
Prevention
Generally, preventive pest control uses less toxic chemicals than treatments for an existing infestation. This type of treatment is usually more environmentally friendly, and it can be much more cost effective than dealing with a severe pest problem. Preventive pest control can also reduce the risks associated with some pests, such as rodents chewing through electrical wiring or contaminating food sources.
A preventive program includes a series of practices designed to discourage pests from taking up residence in a home or business. This can include proper sanitation (removing crumbs and other food sources from indoor areas) and repairing leaky faucets and pipes. In addition, it’s important to keep outdoor spaces free of debris such as stacks of wood or piles of hay that pests may use as shelter.
Some pests, such as termites and cockroaches, carry bacteria on their bodies that can make people sick when they come in contact with them. Pests can also contaminate food, reducing its quality and making it unfit for consumption. Professional preventive pest control services help protect the health and safety of people, pets and plants by eliminating pests before they pose a threat.
Prevention programs should be implemented in conjunction with other control strategies to minimize reliance on, and risk from, chemical pesticides. This is known as integrated pest management or IPM. This strategy combines preventive tactics, such as proper sanitation and repair of entry points, with reduced-risk treatment methods, such as baits or traps.
It’s important to follow product labels when applying pesticides. Applying more than recommended can be dangerous and will not improve results. In addition, it’s a good idea to keep children and pets out of the area while a pesticide is in effect.
Plant, facility and QA managers should work with their service providers to establish a pest prevention program. This will help them meet FSMA requirements and avoid product recalls or having their product shipments rejected by clients due to pest-related issues. It will take a greater commitment of time and resources on the front end, but it will save money and reputation in the long run.
Suppression
The goal of pest control is to keep pest numbers below a threshold that you find acceptable. To achieve this, you use a mix of prevention, suppression and eradication tactics. You also try to cause as little harm as possible to living organisms and non-living surroundings (surfaces and water) in the treatment area. Prevention, when possible, is the preferred tactic because it causes less disruption.
IPM programs first look for ways to prevent pests from becoming a problem. In agriculture, this means using crop rotations, pest-resistant varieties and limiting the number of times you plant each field or row. In landscaping, it can mean adding physical barriers, such as netting over small fruits or screening in greenhouses; or using mulch to inhibit weed germination beneath desirable plants.
If prevention is not possible, a variety of cultural practices can reduce pest populations. These may include introducing natural enemies to the environment, or modifying the environment to make it less favorable for pests. The latter can include things like maintaining a cover crop in vineyards to enhance natural enemy populations, or using pheromones to disrupt insect mating behavior.
Once monitoring, identification and action thresholds indicate that it is time to take action, IPM programs select the most effective and least risky control method available. This could include removing weeds manually, using traps or pheromones to disrupt pest mating, applying an appropriate dose of a chemical such as a fungicide or insecticide, or even broad-spraying with a non-specific pesticide.
If an IPM program tries everything it can think of and the pest population still is not under control, then eradication might be needed. Eradication is the most destructive and expensive form of pest control, but it can be used if other options are not practical or cost-effective. For example, eradication might be the only choice if you operate a hospital or other health care facility where any bacterial contamination must be kept to an absolute minimum.
Pests, whether insects, weeds, or pathogens that affect plants or animals, usually have evolved to resist the pesticides that humans apply to them. As a result, many pesticides are losing their effectiveness over time, despite a continued increase in dosages. This is partly because of resistance and partly because of the environmental damage caused by residues in soil, water and air that eventually enter our food supply.
Eradication
The aim of eradication is to completely eliminate a pest from an area so that it cannot return. The pest might be eradicated by reducing its food sources (for example, poisoning a crop), destroying the organisms it parasitizes or otherwise degrading its habitat, or through genetically modified weapons. Eradication is a very difficult goal for pest control programs to accomplish. Humans often form an essential component of the pathogen’s life-cycle, and elimination may leave a reservoir in another part of the world (as was true with yellow fever, malaria, and guinea worm). The tools of eradication may become resistant or fail to detect infection at critical points in the disease’s progression (as has occurred with HIV/AIDS vaccines and poliomyelitis antibodies). Civil unrest or political problems might prevent eradication efforts from being carried out (as is currently the case with eradication attempts for swine flu).
The biological method of reducing pest populations involves boosting the numbers of natural enemies, such as predators and parasitoids, that naturally limit pest densities. This is usually accomplished by carefully researching the biology of a potential pest and its native prey or host population, searching for natural enemies with the right characteristics, collecting them, and then releasing them in sufficient numbers to have a significant impact on the pest’s overall population. Careful timing of enemy and pest life cycles is necessary to ensure that the release does not disrupt natural enemy populations, and less persistent types of pesticides are used to reduce the likelihood of contact between the beneficial and the toxic organism.
Pesticides are a common means of removing unwanted organisms, but their use is tightly regulated by law. Only licensed, certified applicators are allowed to spray pesticides on properties where people live or work. When purchasing and using pesticides, it’s important to read the label thoroughly. It contains detailed instructions and information on how to apply the product correctly, as well as warnings and hazards associated with the chemicals. When in doubt, consult a pest control professional for advice. The alternative to pesticides is prevention, which can be achieved through exclusion or quarantine barriers, repulsion techniques, trapping and monitoring, or physical removal.