Abbotsford Pest Control is the effort to protect property, crops, and health from organisms that damage, spoil, or cause disease. Pest management involves a combination of physical, biological, and chemical methods.
Identifying a pest is important before applying a pesticide. The wrong spray can kill or harm other insects and animals.
Practicing preventative pest control strategies can help keep your home or business pest-free and in tip-top shape. Generally, this is a less expensive option for both homeowners and businesses than dealing with pest infestations that have already occurred.
Prevention strategies include regular property inspections and eliminating conditions that encourage pest infestations. These may be structural problems, such as cracks or holes that must be sealed to prevent pests from entering the home or business. Alternatively, it can be simple things such as regularly removing garbage from the building, keeping trash receptacles away from the structure, and ensuring that doors and windows are closed.
Pests are attracted to food, water, and shelter and need these elements to breed and thrive. Getting rid of any food or water sources in the environment can greatly decrease pest activity. Trash cans, for example, serve as an all-you-can-eat buffet for pests such as ants and roaches. Ensure that trash is removed from the premises at the end of each day and that the large garbage can is placed out in the street for weekly pickup. Clutter also offers hiding places and breeding sites for pests, so remove piles of leaves or debris around the property.
In some cases, pests need to be killed in order to get rid of them, and this is when treatment comes into play. Pesticides are often used for this purpose. However, it is important to understand that pesticides can be dangerous and should always be used in the correct manner. This includes following the manufacturer’s instructions and warnings, and keeping pesticides out of reach of children and pets.
Biological methods also work to kill pests, and these can involve the release of natural enemies, such as predators, parasites or pathogens, or the introduction of genetically modified organisms such as sterile males. However, this type of control is not as effective as eradication or preventative measures and often has a significant lag time before the pest population declines. In addition, there is often a great deal of public resistance to the use of biological controls.
Suppression
Suppression involves reducing pest numbers and damage to an acceptable level. It is generally considered a cost-effective control strategy as it reduces the need for chemicals, which are often more expensive and may have unwanted side effects. Disease and pest suppression occurs naturally through biotic processes such as antibiosis, competition, predation, parasitism and microbial grazing. These processes are usually specific to particular plant pathogens/pest species and the entire soil microbial community, but can also be targeted by agrochemicals.
A number of natural forces affect pest populations, including weather conditions, availability of food and water, and the presence or absence of natural enemies. A pest can only thrive for as long as its food supply is available and its roost or nesting site remains available. Geographical features such as mountains and bodies of water restrict the movement of many pests and can help to reduce their population sizes.
Biological controls are commonly used to suppress pests in gardens, greenhouses and farms. These are organisms that kill or inhibit the growth of pests without harming desirable plants. They are typically highly host-specific so they do not cause unforeseen ecological disruptions. They can be mass-produced for commercial use or obtained from nature and augmentatively released, either through inoculative or inundative methods.
In addition to scouting programs, a detailed record of pest incidence should be maintained for each field or site. This will provide the information needed to determine economic injury levels or, more accurately, control action thresholds (CAT). The CAT is the point below which damage or loss is tolerable and above which pests should be controlled to avoid major crop damage.
Some cultural practices can interfere with a pest’s normal relationship with its host plant or environment and therefore reduce its numbers. These include using pest-free seeds or transplants, preventing weed infestations, timing harvesting and planting to limit insect pest populations, maintaining sanitary equipment between fields or sites and cleaning tillage and other machinery between crops or operations. The use of pheromones and juvenile hormones may also be effective in controlling some pests. Other less natural but widely utilized chemical control methods include the use of fungicides and herbicides.
Eradication
Eradication is the complete annihilation of all organisms within an area of influence (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2005). A successful eradication programme may be the only option in certain situations. However, it is a very costly undertaking that requires thorough planning and monitoring to ensure the achievement of objectives. This includes an assessment of the impact of the pest on trade and other activities, as well as a risk analysis (ISPM 2 and ISPM 11). It also considers possible eradication techniques and their cost-benefit.
The eradication process involves three main activities: surveillance, containment, and treatment or control measures. An initial delimiting survey should be carried out and, once the area of influence is known, ongoing monitoring surveys (ISPM 6) are needed to check for the presence of the pest and determine its spread. These should include a pathway analysis, the inspection of clonally or contact-linked material, and trapping.
Depending on the biology of the pest, an eradication strategy should be developed to eliminate it from the area of influence. This is achieved by reducing the number of insects to an amount below the economic injury level. This is usually accomplished through the use of biological controls, such as parasitoids and predators, rather than chemical pesticides.
Other control strategies aim to disrupt the life cycle of a pest or to change their behaviour. This can be done through genetic manipulation, the introduction of competing species or removing habitat or other factors that influence the pest’s life cycle. For example, California viticulturists planted evergreen blackberry bushes near their vineyards to provide a winter home for parasitic wasps that help control grape leafhoppers.
Eradication can only be undertaken once a pest is discovered and has spread to the point where its presence is threatening trade. Therefore, it is important to have contingency plans in place for pests that threaten major economic crops (e.g. Mediterranean fruit fly) or are of conservation significance (e.g. tramp ants). These should be developed before the pest is found and involve consultation with stakeholders. This will make it easier to apply containment and eradication measures once the pest is detected.
Monitoring
Pest monitoring is the process of observing and checking for pests in fields, gardens, forests, buildings and other spaces. This enables you to see which pests are present, where they are and how much damage they have caused. It also lets you know when a pest problem is getting worse. Monitoring helps you decide which control methods to use, and when to use them.
For example, you might want to monitor your crops for signs of disease or insect infestation using random inspections, sticky traps, or indicator plants. You may also use pheromones to disrupt pest mating, or spray with low-risk chemicals such as soaps and oils. This is all part of the integrated pest management (IPM) approach to managing pests in agricultural settings, as well as in residential and commercial areas.
The information gained from monitoring is used to create a pest action threshold, or a level above which pests must be controlled. This threshold is based on the number of pests, their activity levels, and the amount of damage they cause. It also takes into account environmental conditions like weather and food or harborage availability. These data are fed into pest management models to help predict the growth of the pest population, assist in determining if losses are likely, and guide control strategies.
Monitoring also lets you track the effectiveness of less risky controls, including biocontrol agents. These organisms keep pest populations under control by attacking or killing them, or by changing the environment in which pests live. These are especially important in IPM programs because they reduce the need for pesticides and minimize the chance that resistant pests will develop.
In addition, monitoring can detect the presence of pest predators and parasites. Predators and parasites kill or otherwise harm the pests they attack, or change the environment in which the pests live to make it unsuitable for them. These controls are often important in preventing or controlling pests, and are especially vital in places where health regulations require them, such as operating rooms and other sterile areas of health care facilities.
