Need to manage a pest problem? Luckily, there are many ways to do that! From physical to biological and chemical controls, plant pathologist Steve Savage covers an array of pest management strategies farmers can use when an issue arises.

Remember when Bill Murray’s character uttered, “Anything different is good” in the classic movie Groundhog Day? Well, that idea can also be applied to farming and pest control. There are many different ways to farm and many different methods, tools and strategies that farmers can use to control the pests and diseases that prey upon our food.

This is not unlike the journey Murray’s character, Phil, takes in the movie, hilariously trying to make it out of the time loop he finds himself in and to make it to tomorrow. Groundhog Day is a great example of finding different ways to solve a problem, and recently there have been a crop of these types of movies and TV shows making their way to our screens, like Happy Death Day and Russian Doll. They are great reminders that ingenuity and original thinking can help you out of many jams!

If the jam you find yourself in concerns bugs, then you are typically quite open to a few options that involve killing the invaders or hiring an expert service to do the job. If your house or apartment is overrun with ants, roaches or fleas, you are probably going to do something about it! If you are unfortunate enough to get a bedbug infestation, you may have to consider some pretty extreme solutions to eliminate that threat. In an earlier podcast, I described the recently introduced Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, a pest that likes to migrate in the thousands to the inside of houses in the weeks leading up to winter. In these situations, killing something makes sense.

Farmers often find that their crops are being attacked by bugs of various types, and they too need to do something about it. But there are actually lots of different options for pest control on the farm.

Physical methods

Perhaps the most familiar way to kill a bug is using physical tools like a fly swatter or a shoe. That isn’t a practical approach for an entire farmed field, but there are physical approaches used by farmers. For instance, California strawberry growers have found that by running a big vacuum machine over the crop rows, they can keep the population of Lygus bugs in check. That means that you and I will be able to buy strawberries that are not marked and deformed by the feeding of this large, true bug. Homeowners can also buy special bug vacuums that deal with those stinkbugs if they invade your house (apparently you shouldn’t just squish them because of the “stink” part).

Perhaps the simplest kind of physical control is a barrier. For something like a greenhouse for growing vegetable crops, screens are a simple and practical way to keep out bugs, just as they are for our homes.

Traps

Many homeowners from areas where there are lots of mosquitoes use a “bug zapper” to protect themselves while on the porch. The mosquitoes are attracted to a light or source of CO2, then an electrical discharge kills them. In agriculture, the traps might just have some sort of juice with a smell that attracts the bugs, or they might be loaded with an insect sex pheromone that lures the pest into a container from which it can’t escape. Other traps, meanwhile, encourage the bug to land on a sticky surface. Traps used in farming are usually designed to get a feel for what kind of pests will show up in ...