IPM is applicable to all types of agriculture and sites such as residential and commercial structures, lawn and turf areas, and home and community gardens. Reliance on knowledge, experience, observation, and integration of multiple techniques makes IPM a perfect fit for organic farming. For large-scale, chemical-based farms, IPM can reduce human and environmental exposure to hazardous chemicals, and potentially lower overall costs of pesticide application material. Steps for IPM: Proper identification of pest - What is it? Cases of mistaken identity may result in ineffective actions. If plant damage due to over-watering are mistaken for fungal infection, spray costs can be incurred, and the plant is no better off. Learn pest and host life cycle and biology. At the time you see a pest, it may be too late to do much about it except maybe spray with a pesticide. Often, there is another stage of the life cycle that is susceptible to preventative actions. For example, weeds reproducing from last year's seed can be prevented with mulches. Also, learning what a pest needs to survive allows you to remove these. Monitor or sample environment for pest population - How many are here? Preventative actions must be taken at the correct time if they are to be effective. For this reason, once the pest is correctly identified, monitoring must begin before it becomes a problem. For example, in school cafeterias where roaches may be expected to appear, sticky traps are set out before school starts. Traps are checked at regular intervals so populations can be monitored and controlled before they get out of hand. Some factors to consider and monitor include: Is the pest present/absent? What is the distribution - all over or only in certain spots? Is the pest population increasing or decreasing? Establish action threshold (economic, health or aesthetic) - How many are too many? In some cases, a certain number of pests can be tolerated. Soybeans are quite tolerant of defoliation, so if there are a few caterpillars in the field and their population is not increasing dramatically, there is not necessarily any action necessary. Conversely, there is a point at which action must be taken to control cost. For the farmer, that point is the one at which the cost of damage by the pest is more than the cost of control. This is an economic threshold. Tolerance of pests varies also by whether or not they are a health hazard (low tolerance) or merely a cosmetic damage (high tolerance in a non-commercial situation).Different sites may also have varying requirements based on specific areas. White clover may be perfectly acceptable on the sides of a tee box on a golf course, but unacceptable in the fairway where it could cause confusion in the field of play. Choose an appropriate combination of management tactics For any pest situation,there will be several options to consider. Options include, mechanical or physical control, cultural controls, biological controls and chemical controls. Mechanical or physical controls include picking pests off plants, or using netting or other material to exclude pests such as birds from grapes or rodents from structures. Cultural controls include keeping an area free of conducive conditions by removing or storing waste properly, removing diseased areas of plants properly. Biological controls can be support either through conservation of natural predators or augmentation of natural predators. Augmentative control includes the introduction of naturally occurring predators at either an inundative or inoculative level. An inundative release would be one that seeks to inundate a site with a pest's predator to impact the pest population. An inoculative release would be a smaller number of pest predators to supplement the natural population and provide ongoing control. Chemical controls would include horticultural oils or the application of pesticides such as insecticides and herbicides. A Green Pest Management IPM program would use pesticides derived from plants, such as botanicals, or other naturally occurring materials. Evaluate results - How did it work? Evaluation is often one of the most important steps. This is the process to review an IPM program and the results it generated. Asking the following questions is useful: Did actions have the desired effect? Was the pest prevented or managed to farmer satisfaction? Was the method itself satisfactory? Were there any unintended side effects? What can be done in the future for this pest situation? Understanding the effectiveness of the IPM program allows the site manager to make modifications to the IPM plan prior to pests reaching the action threshold and requiring action again. Thus, it would be much more labour-intensive.
The balance of pests and predators meant that the farmers must know how much predators to release into his farm to control pests. If too much are released, it will turn into a catastrophe as those helpers may become predators for your farm. If too little is released, almost nothing will happen to the pests you want to remove.
Broad Spectrum pesticides are pesticides that are designed to kill a wide range of animals. They are non-selective and often lethal to reptiles, fish, pets, and birds as well as the insects that they were originally targeted to eliminate.
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