Treasure Valley Pest Control includes activities that reduce or eliminate organisms that contaminate, spoil or damage crops and products. Natural controls such as birds, reptiles and fish often suppress pest populations.
Some pests, like continuous pests, are always present and require regular control. Others, such as sporadic pests and potential pests, may only require control under certain circumstances.
Prevention is the best approach to pest control, especially in outdoor situations where it’s difficult or impossible to eliminate all pest populations. This involves taking action to prevent pests from entering buildings or other sites where they aren’t wanted, or from spreading to areas where they are undesirable. Prevention strategies include modifying the environment, using physical barriers and repellents or trapping and exterminating pests when necessary.
Keeping the environment as unattractive as possible is one of the most effective ways to deter pests, whether it’s your home or workplace. This includes removing food, water and shelter sources. It also means reducing clutter and eliminating hiding places, such as stacks of books or newspapers. Inside a building, it may mean replacing open trash containers with sealed ones, washing out milk or other liquids that can attract pests before throwing them away and storing food in refrigerators and freezers. It is important to be aware that the mere presence of pests can affect the wholesomeness and appearance of products and services, including museums.
In residential settings, it’s important to keep doors and windows closed as much as possible. This can help prevent the entry of pests through tiny openings in walls and foundations. It is also a good idea to regularly inspect the exterior of buildings for cracks and holes, and seal them when found.
Regular inspections can catch problems before they become major infestations. This can help save the expense and inconvenience of repairing or replacing damaged property, and it can preserve a home’s value. It can also reduce health and safety risks, such as disease-causing germs and allergens.
Pests can cause damage and loss to crops, landscapes, structures and property. They can also pose a threat to human and animal health. The sanitary environment created by pests can be harmful to people, livestock and pets, as well as plants, and their droppings can spread diseases. In addition, many pests carry pathogens that can contaminate foods and other substances.
Threshold-based decision making focuses on monitoring and collecting information about specific pests to determine their numbers, behavior and damage in order to decide whether action is required. Monitoring can be done on an ongoing basis or through periodic surveys. Once the information is gathered, appropriate management techniques can be chosen.
Suppression
The goal of pest suppression is to reduce the number of pests below levels that cause unacceptable damage. This is often a more difficult task than prevention. It requires monitoring, recording population levels and estimating whether the pests will reach damaging numbers before action is required.
Thresholds are determined for many pest species based on esthetic and health concerns as well as economic considerations. For example, homeowners may be willing to tolerate a few grubs in the lawn, but any more and they will take action. In industrial environments, tolerance levels are often set by governmental or regulatory agencies. The use of thresholds helps guide IPM programs and provides a framework for pest control decisions.
Preharvest pest control is important for reducing losses to crop production and deterioration of quality. It also contributes to the protection of human and animal health by limiting exposure to pesticide residues.
A variety of tactics can be used to suppress pest populations, including physical barriers to entry, cleaning up attracting food sources and other environmental conditions that make an area unsuitable for the pest, and the use of natural enemies. Classical biological control involves introducing natural enemies of the pest, usually predators or parasitoids that occur naturally in the environment, to help reduce the population of the pest.
Another approach is microbial pest control. This uses microorganisms – bacteria, viruses and fungi – to kill insects. The microorganisms are engineered into a biological pesticide that is sprayed on the soil. When an insect ingests the poison, it is killed from the inside out. This method is not as effective as chemical pesticides but is safer for the environment and human beings.
Eradication
The goal of eradication strategies for pest control is to eliminate a disease by interrupting transmission at the human level. This requires a high level of surveillance to identify infected individuals and prevent their spread, especially to susceptible persons not receiving prophylactic measures. It also requires a rigorous certification process in which independent, respected parties verify the absence of disease transmission. Eradication programs are often costly and may take decades to complete.
The terms exterminate, extirpate, and eradicate all mean to destroy completely. The latter two also imply driving something from an area or uprooting it. To eradicate a pest involves more than killing it; it requires eliminating its natural enemies and preventing it from regaining ground. This is a difficult proposition, especially when the target pest has evolved resistance to its natural enemies and can survive only in areas with specific environmental conditions.
To achieve this, we must know more than just the biology of the microbe and its vectors and intermediary hosts. For example, it is essential to understand how local factors affect the reproductive rate of the microbe, which is influenced by both the presence of other pests and environmental conditions such as humidity, soil type, and plant growth regulators.
In addition to monitoring, we must use a variety of control techniques, including physical traps, netting, and decoys. We must also know when to apply these methods and how to handle them correctly. Correct identification is important because it allows us to understand a pest’s life cycle, which is essential for planning and timing control activities.
Chemical
Chemicals are generally considered to be the fastest way to control pests, because they can kill them or disrupt their behavior. However, pesticides can have a negative impact on the environment and human health if not used properly or when they are not needed.
Biological
Biological controls utilize organisms that naturally parasitize, prey on, or otherwise limit the reproduction of unwanted insects. These include predators, pathogens, and parasitoids. They are sometimes augmented by introducing more of a pest’s natural enemies or by genetically manipulating the organisms to make them more effective. However, a biological control usually takes longer to work than a chemical one because of the lag between the onset of pest population growth and the emergence of natural enemies.
Natural Forces
Often, the best method of controlling pests is through natural enemies. These can be predators, parasitoids, or fungi that kill pests, or pathogens (bacteria, fungi, protozoans and viruses) that infect pests to slow or stop their growth or reproduction. These organisms may be introduced from another area or be native to the environment in which the pest is present.
In addition, sanitation practices can reduce the number of pests by removing food, shelter and breeding sites. Sanitation techniques in urban and industrial areas include improving cleanliness, reducing garbage pickup frequency, and decontaminating equipment and materials before moving from one location to another. In agricultural settings, removing crop residues and practicing good manure management can help prevent carryover of pests. Pests can also be controlled by using pest-free seeds, transplants and avoiding the movement of infested crop material from field to field.
Sometimes, natural enemies control pest populations through a process called “fortuitous biological control.” This happens when native predators or parasitoids move into an area where a foreign pest is established and take over the population. This can be the result of deliberate introductions (as with alfalfa weevil) or inadvertently when land-use patterns change and allow these natural enemies to move into an area where a pest is present.
Other forms of natural pest control are physical barriers that block pests, such as sticky bands placed around the trunks of trees to prevent mites and insect pests from crawling up them; and cultural methods that manipulate pest mating or host-finding behavior, such as planting weedy varieties in fields where the target crop grows well. These are less expensive and disruptive than pesticides, and they are often more effective.
The development of natural pest control archetypes requires extensive research on crop-pest and natural enemy interactions, including the impact of landscape or climate conditions and management regimes on their abundance and performance. Once this research is completed, an empirical database of pest-enemy combinations and traits can be created to support a framework of rules that are applicable at various levels of complexity, from local to global. Ideally, this database will be available to researchers and practitioners from many different disciplines, such as agronomists, climate scientists, geographers, farmers, entomologists and others. This information can be fed into models that will enable the identification of optimal set of pest-enemy pairs for any given situation.