Pests cause property damage and can be hazardous to health. Traditional pest solutions often involve chemicals that are harmful to pets and people. Click here to Learn More.

Sanitation can prevent and suppress some pests. This includes keeping garbage cans closed, regularly removing them, and fixing leaky pipes.

Prevention can also include traps and bait stations. These methods are most effective when predicting a pest’s activity is possible.

Prevention

The best way to deal with pest problems is to keep them from occurring in the first place. Regular inspections by experienced pest control professionals will identify problem areas and potential entry points before they become full-blown infestations. This early detection can save homeowners from extensive damage and expense, preserving their home’s value and peace of mind.

Preventive measures may include the installation of door sweeps, sealing expansion joints and locating dumpsters away from building entrances. These steps, along with a pest management plan that includes both preventative and eradication treatments, provide the best long-term results for any property.

While preventative treatments are effective for most pests, some require more invasive methods. For example, when cockroaches or flies invade a house, pesticides are often used to kill them, but it is possible to reduce the need for such toxins by addressing conditions that attract these pests in the first place. For example, regularly wiping and vacuuming floors removes food crumbs, trash, and fecal matter that can attract and sustain these insects, and drain cleaners destroy the bacteria that many pests rely on to thrive (see the section below on sanitation).

Rodents such as mice carry diseases like salmonellosis and hantavirus and chew through material to build nests. The resulting droppings and gnaw marks can also spread disease, contaminate food and create asthmatic and allergic reactions in people. Preventative control measures may include the use of traps, repellents and rat exclusion.

In commercial settings, preventing pests is equally important as it is in residential properties. Regular inspections should be done of the outside buildings, paying particular attention to foundation cracks, loose siding, and roof and utility lines. Maintaining landscaping, keeping woodpiles and debris away from exterior walls and cleaning out gutters regularly will also help to deter pests.

A successful pest prevention program involves everyone on the plant, from the c-suite to the loading dock. The degree to which employees understand and embrace the protocol a company has put in place will often determine how effective it is. For example, if fungus gnats and thrips are a problem at a greenhouse, establishing a spray schedule that targets these pests in their larval and pupal stages (see the section below on horticultural insecticides) will help to decrease their numbers.

Suppression

Taking preventive action is an important first step to preventing pests in the landscape or on your farm. Suppression tactics include traps, netting, fences, physical barriers and other control devices that can keep pests away from plants or inhibit their movement.

Physical control methods such as traps, netting and decoys can help you deal with pests without using chemicals. These types of controls may take some time to work, but they can significantly reduce pest populations and damage to plants.

Cultural practices can also disrupt the environment of a pest and prevent it from moving into new areas. Examples of these practices include planting pest-free seeds and transplants, removing plant debris from fields and garden sites, cleaning greenhouse and tillage equipment between cropping and harvesting, avoiding long periods of high relative humidity that favor disease development, managing irrigation schedules to minimize wet and humid conditions, and practicing field sanitation that includes avoiding carryover of pests and diseases from one field or operation to the next.

Many people think that when they see a bug or some other undesirable organism, the only way to eliminate them is with pesticides. However, there are many nonchemical solutions that can be as effective at controlling pests and often much more humane.

Chemical controls are typically easier to find and use, but they can also pose health and environmental threats when used improperly. It is important to understand the risks involved in a pesticide before using them.

It is also important to realize that, for the best results, integrated pest management should be used as a framework for solving pest problems. IPM uses a variety of tactics to prevent the introduction and spread of pests, with the goal of minimizing the use of pesticides. Pesticides are only used when monitoring indicates that they are needed according to established guidelines, and are applied with the goal of removing only the target organism. IPM can be used in urban, agricultural and natural or wildland or wildflower areas. For more information on IPM and its components, including pesticide selection and application, visit the UF/IFAS IPM page.

Detection

Detecting pests early in their life cycle is the key to controlling them. Pest detection solutions leverage advanced technology to enhance traditional inspection and monitoring methods by identifying pests and highlighting potential problem areas for remediation. These solutions can also help identify the type of pest and the extent of the infestation to inform more targeted and effective control methods.

Many of these pest detection solutions use sensors and cameras to monitor environments in real-time. The result is greater accuracy in detecting the presence of pests, especially when they’re small and hard to see. This improved detection can reduce the number of unnecessary and harmful spraying operations that may otherwise be triggered by inaccurate sensor readings.

For instance, a pest detection system using an improved version of the YOLOv5m deep learning model can identify insect pests at rates higher than 90%. This improvement was achieved through feature fusion to capture more relevant features and increase the receptive field of the network. Additionally, the model was trained with a larger and more detailed training set to further increase its recognition performance.

In addition to enhancing traditional methods, AI-powered pest detection systems can also improve crop protection, helping farmers save time and resources while reducing the need for pesticides on their fields. By analyzing data about pest populations, these systems can alert farmers to the arrival of an infestation before it spreads. This allows them to take action quickly and save their crops before they’re lost.

This type of precision and rapid response can minimize the damage caused by an infestation and reduce the need for broad spraying, which can harm the environment and the health of people working on the field. It can also help prevent the development of resistance to pesticides by lowering the number of applications used on a field.

Detecting pests at an early stage can significantly cut down on the amount of pesticide that is needed to eradicate them, which can reduce the risk of chemical-related health issues and environmental pollution. By enabling more targeted and efficient treatment plans, this approach can also lower labor costs and reduce chemical resistance, resulting in substantial monetary savings for the farm and the community as a whole.

Eradication

Eradication is a rare goal in outdoor pest situations, where the intent is often prevention or suppression. It is sometimes attempted in enclosed areas, where the goal is to eliminate a microbe-transmitted pest that can no longer be tolerated (e.g., Mediterranean fruit fly, gypsy moth, fire ants). Although eradicate literally means to “pull up by the roots”—as in yanking a weed—it has also come to mean to completely remove or exterminate something.

Sterile insect technology (SIT) is a proven eradication method for insects that threaten health, safety and economic vitality on a local scale, such as disease-transmitting mosquitoes or tsetse flies. SIT uses sterile insects to control their reproduction, offering an environmentally responsible, long-term solution that does not introduce non-native species into the environment. Other eradication methods occur at larger scales, such as quarantine or eradication programs for foreign plant pests that can damage domestic agriculture and industry. Examples of these types of regulatory control efforts include the eradication of invasive exotic plant species such as Brazilian pepper and the Asian citrus psyllid.