Pest control services provide homeowners with peace of mind. They ensure their homes are free of harmful pests that may cause disease. They also help preserve property value by preventing the destruction of structures and furnishings.
A review of public attitudes towards pest control strategies found that the public generally favored specific, humane, and low-in-uncertainty methods. Click here to Learn More.
Prevention is the best way to control pests and reduce their impact on our lives. It focuses on reducing the conditions that attract pests, such as food, water, and shelter. Prevention is typically part of an integrated pest management program (IPM), which combines multiple strategies to manage pests effectively. Prevention methods include cultural practices, crop protection, sanitation, and physical barriers.
Clutter provides hiding places and food sources for pests, so getting rid of it is an important step in preventative pest control. Sealing and closing entry points into buildings can also help. This includes using door sweeps and sealing expansion joints, as well as locating trash bins away from doors. It’s also helpful to check the building regularly for potential pest entry points, like holes in the foundation or loose siding. It’s essential to patch these openings as soon as you discover them to keep pests from finding their way in.
While pests are generally considered nuisances, some can cause significant harm to plants or human health. For instance, some pests can physically contaminate foodstuffs by introducing rodent droppings or insect parts, or they may contaminate food through the transmission of disease-causing bacteria. Pests can also damage buildings or their contents, resulting in fires and property loss.
A comprehensive pest management plan can minimize the impact of pests and their damaging effects on humans, crops, livestock, and property. However, there will be times when preventative measures are ineffective or even impossible to implement. Pests can be difficult to predict, and they often move quickly once they have found their way into a facility.
There are three main goals of pest control: prevention, suppression, and eradication. Prevention is preventing pests from becoming a problem; suppression is reducing their numbers to an acceptable level; and eradication is eliminating them altogether. Eradication is rarely attempted in outdoor situations, but it is possible for enclosed spaces like dwellings; schools; office buildings; and food processing, storage, and preparation facilities. Ideally, pests should be controlled only when they are causing unacceptable harm to people, plants, or animals. However, many factors influence this decision and the effectiveness of pest control methods.
Suppression
In pest control, the goal is to reduce the pest population to an acceptable level. This may be achieved by preventive methods (such as sealing cracks, repairing leaks and maintaining cleanliness) or by chemical control.
Prevention is the most desirable approach since it involves not allowing pests into food processing environments in the first place. In this way, the resulting damage is avoided. However, the risk of pests is never eliminated, as they can enter in a variety of ways. These include physical contamination of foodstuffs by rodent droppings, insect parts and other foreign matter; microorganism contamination through penetration and ingestion; and damage to buildings and equipment by pests that feed on plants or contaminate stored products.
Pests are usually present in food processing environments for the same reasons that they occur in natural settings – water, nutrients, shelter and/or other resources. Damage to foodstuffs can lead to a decrease in quality and/or an increase in costs. In addition, pests can carry disease causing agents (e.g. bacterial pathogens and intestinal nematodes) that can cause illness in humans, animals and plants.
Suppression aims to reduce the number of pests below an unacceptable level by using various techniques, including biological, cultural and chemical controls. Knowledge of the biology of a particular problem pest will serve as a basis for planning these control strategies.
For example, certain climatic conditions (temperature, day length and relative humidity) affect the growth rate of many plant-eating pests. The use of crop protection chemicals can also suppress pest populations by preventing reproduction or by directly killing them.
Another type of suppression is accomplished through the use of naturally occurring predators, parasites, and pathogens that can limit a pest population. The most commonly used natural enemies in pest control are birds, mammals, and amphibians that prey on insects. In addition, some fungi and bacteria can directly or indirectly suppress insect pests, either by competing for resources with them or by releasing substances that inhibit growth, e.g. spores, toxins and volatile organic compounds.
Eradication
Eradication is a goal rarely pursued in outdoor pest control, where preventive and suppression strategies are more effective. However, in some indoor situations (such as food processing and storage, hospitals, and some residences) eradication is an important objective.
To eradicate a pest, all of its population must be eliminated. This is a very difficult and expensive endeavor. Successful eradication depends on strong and sustained control efforts on local, community, national, and international levels, plus adequate funding to sustain them. The success of eradication programs also requires monitoring to identify new cases of the target disease and stopping transmission before it spreads to uninfected persons.
A successful eradication program must carefully balance the benefits and costs of the various eradication methods employed. It is essential to structure applications of toxic substances to exploit complementarities provided by natural agro-ecosystem processes and to minimize negative spillover effects on non-target organisms. This also involves identifying and supporting natural enemies of the targeted pests so that their populations remain stable or increase, and so that they can continue to perform the functions for which they are well-adapted.
Many pesticides harm natural enemies as well as the target pest. The impact of this can be reduced by using less toxic chemicals, applying them with knowledge of the biology of the natural enemy to avoid vulnerable life stages, and limiting the areas treated.
Changing living conditions can also help control some pests. For example, draining collected puddles where mosquitoes breed can significantly reduce their numbers. Similarly, running a pool filter regularly can help reduce fire ants, and maintaining a population of fish that consume larvae in ornamental ponds can control mosquitoes and other pests in residential gardens.
In addition to requiring a strong commitment of human resources and financial resources, the success of eradication programs must be based on sound research and evaluation at the local, community, national, and global level. These should include assessing private versus social net benefits, short-term versus long-term net benefits, and local versus international net benefits. This information can guide control and eradication decisions at the community, regional, and global level.
Monitoring
Pest monitoring is the ongoing inspection of crops, structures, landscapes and other sites to identify what kind of pests are present and how many are there. This is the basis of Integrated Pest Management (IPM), and it allows for pest control strategies to be developed that reduce or eliminate the need for chemical spraying.
The information that can be gained from monitoring includes: identifying pests, knowing their life cycle and growth rate, understanding the environment that affects them, and the damage they cause. This data helps managers determine threshold levels (the point at which the pests must be controlled to prevent unacceptable loss or injury) and select control tactics that will most effectively reach those thresholds.
In order to be effective, monitoring needs to be frequent and thorough. This can be accomplished by using spreadsheets or other stand-alone data collection systems, but better benefit may be gained by participating in areawide pest monitoring networks that are optimized for scout-centric workflows. These provide visualizations and indications to guide pest control decisions in addition to providing perspective on what other people are seeing across the network.
Detection tools that can be used for scouting include traps, sticky boards, multiple catch traps and bait stations. They vary by design and type of pest but they all can help to identify a presence, determine their number and allow for tracking their progress and the effectiveness of control tactics.
Physical exclusion tools, including screens, barriers, fences and radiation, can be useful in controlling pests as well. These devices change the environment around them, preventing access by pests or altering their behavior through the use of repellents and attractants.
Food processing facilities can also implement a variety of physical controls, such as adjusting structural conditions that might encourage pests, or maintaining good sanitation and employee habits that will deter them. Hand tools like screwdrivers, pliers and caulking guns are also valuable for sealing openings, repairing damaged screens or securing gaps in walls and floors.