INSECT PEST MANAGEMENT

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 SUMMARY
Understanding how to properly manage insect pest problems on your farm will help you be
successful and profitable. While many farmers make the mistake of aiming for an all-out eradication
of pests, it is more effective, affordable, and profitable to aim for successful management of the
problem. This course will help you understand the insect pests you are dealing with, how to manage
them properly, and the different applications for pest control on your farm.

IN THIS COURSE:
• Gain an understanding of insect ecology
• Learn how to manage insect pests, especially through IPM techniques
• Learn the applications of insect pest control
For more detailed information on pest control, consider downloading our Pest Control Packet.

This Course was taught by Amy Storey.

Amy Storey is the Content Coordinator for Bright Agrotech.

She built the content structure and resources for the company
from scratch starting in 2013 and now coordinates all content
creation and editing for the company. She spends most of her
free time snowshoeing, reading, and daydreaming about the
elusive Laramie sunshine. Her most rewarding experiences are
when she is able to help new farmers by illuminating their way
with high quality and valuable content.
Elesif McDonald

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LESSON 1: INTRO TO INSECTS & INSECT ECOLOGY....................................................4

INTRO TO PEST MANAGEMENT & INSECTS...................................................................4
PEST LIFE CYCLES...........................................................................................................................5
HONORABLE MENTION TERMS.............................................................................................6
LESSON 2: INTRO TO MANAGEMENT & IPM......................................................................7
ERADICATION VS. MANAGEMENT.........................................................................................7
MANAGEMENT & THE ECONOMICS OF PEST MANAGEMENT..........................8
INTRO TO IPM & THE RULES OF IPM...................................................................................9
TYPES OF CONTROLS USED IN.. IPM................................................................................10
LESSON 3: PEST CONTROL APPLICATIONS......................................................................12
RESEARCHING AND DEVELOPING A STRATEGY........................................................12
COMMON PESTS AND CONTROLS......................................................................................13

Note: To receive the full benefit of the course, we recommend that you
watch the course videos. You can watch them here.

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LESSON 1:INTRO TO INSECTS ECOLOGY
This first lesson is going to cover ecology of insects: how they interact with each other, the
environment, plants, and people based on their traits and life cycles.

1.1 INTRO TO PEST MANAGEMENT & INSECTS

You might have noticed that I’m calling this course “insect pest management” and not “pest
management.” That’s because this course will cover only insect pests, not pathogens or abiotic
problems.

There’s a ton to cover with insects alone, so I thought we’d keep this course limited to that and
focus on viruses, fungi, bacteria, et cetera in another course. Now I will say that I might mention
things like mites in this course because control concepts for mites tend to be more similar to
insects.

This first lesson is going to cover ecology of insects: how they interact with each other, the
environment, plants, and people based on their traits and life cycles.

Knowing a little something about insect ecology (and ecology in general, for that matter) is really
important because many of the controls that you will use to avoid economic damage depend on
knowing the ecological behavior of certain insects.

That might include something like knowing that at a stage in this particular insect’s life cycle, it is
vulnerable to a certain bacteria. It might be knowing the rate at which a natural enemy will prey
upon a certain pest. Ecology is so important to pest management that we could even say that a
definition of pest management is applied ecology.

After all, everything you do with your system, whether that’s walking through it or intentionally
manipulating different factors causes changes. And the results of those changes are what allow
you as a farmer to make a living. So with that said, let’s get more into this course.

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1.2 PEST LIFE CYCLES
INSECT LIFE CYCLES
Insect life cycles are extremely diverse (and can be really bizarre). In general, though, we can
categorize insect life cycles into two broad categories: R and K. In fact, we can do that with almost
any living creature.

The idea of R and K is conceptually very useful because it will save you time when you’re thinking
about control. The idea behind it is that organisms in the “K” category have characteristics like
a large body, large eggs/young, slow development, and a long life. Elephants are the perfect
example of a “K” organism.

“R” organisms are the opposite; they have small bodies, small eggs, fast development, and
short life spans. Because each of these factors is totally relative to what other organisms you’re
comparing this “R” or “K” organism to, the “R vs. K” concept is hard to measure and use in real
“hard-number” studies. But for ecologists and people like us who are thinking about managing R-
and K-categorized organisms, it’s useful.

WHY IS IT USEFUL?
Why is it useful? Because you control an R organism very differently than a K organism.
Say you have an R organism that’s destroying all of your greens in your greenhouse. You’re losing
money on the damage and the control is way cheaper than the loss that you’re experiencing, so
you apply a pesticide as a control and wipe out 90% of the population. But a couple of eggs or
larvae or maybe even adults survive. You know that this organism lays eggs like crazy and has a
high “turnover” rate because it is an R organism. This means that pest population is going to boom
really soon – maybe in the next couple of days, even.

Now, what if instead of applying a pesticide, you employed a wasp that parasitized that pest?
Then over the course of a week or so, most of that pest is wiped out. You know that some have
remained and that they are laying eggs, but you also now that you have a natural enemy there with
it. When the pest population booms, the “pilot population” of the wasp booms with it, and overall
you see a much smaller economic loss. That’s just an example of why it’s beneficial to understand
the R or K characteristics of the insect pests that you’re dealing with.

Obviously, R and K characteristics are extremely variable, so you’ll want to get the details on the
specific pest that you’re dealing with. Almost every pest you’ll deal with is addressed in tons of
information and scientific studies online.

I recommend Google Scholar for finding very detailed information – but there are also a lot of
great books out there that are nice to have for reference. A third resource that you definitely
should be using if you’re managing a farm is your local extension office.

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 1.3 HONORABLE MENTION TERMS
There are some honorable mention terms that I wanted to share with you in case you want to
reference them later. I’m going to be super brief on these, but if you have more questions, feel free
to email me or do some research on your own.

REFUGES
Like they sound, refuges are places where part of a prey population is not attacked by the
predator. This is often what prevents the extinction of the prey in your greenhouse. This could be
something as simple as a curled up leaf.

INVLUNERABLE STAGES
Some insects are invulnerable to a given predator or pesticide at certain stages. A lot of parasites,
for example, only parasitize the egg, larvae, and pupae, while adults are rarely parasitized. Which
means that if the opportunity arises, the adults could maintain the population even when all of the
other stages are killed.

IDENTIFICATION
The most painful (financially) mistake that you can make when controlling pests is misidentifying
the pest that you’re trying to control. It happens all the time but is actually easy to avoid. This will
probably happen more with fungi, viruses, etc. since it’s hard to misidentify the most common
insect pest that you will be dealing with–things like aphids and whiteflies. Regardless, it’s definitely
worth taking ten minutes to identify a pest before controlling it, especially in the first year of
farming if you’re learning the ropes.

If you want to go above and beyond with insect ID, you could get a general idea of the different
orders of insects. This will help you if you’re using an identification book. And as always, the
extension office is the best if you’re having a hard time identifying something. Just bring a couple
insects by and they will almost always be able to help you out. If you do want to start looking at
orders, I recommend starting with:

• Thysanoptera
• Hemiptera
• Homoptera
• Orthoptera
• Hymenoptera

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LESSON 2: MANAGEMENT

2.1 ERADICATION VS. MANAGEMENT

Let’s talk about the main goal of managing pests. Every farmer wishes to keep pests from damaging
his or her yield, right?

We’ve started a lot of farmers on pest control strategies here, and we have noticed something
interesting: a lot of farmers start off with one goal, then as they get into pest management, they
change their goals. The reason is that the goal a lot of farmers start off with is eradication.

Eradication is when every single individual of a population is killed, and many beginning gardeners
and farmers strive to accomplish that goal. Once you get further into pest management, though,
you’ll find that eradication is extremely costly, and not as beneficial as you think.

The reason that eradication tends to be so costly is that when people strive for eradication, a
complete extinction of that pest species from their growing environment, they don’t account for
things like refuges, which I mentioned earlier, re-invasion, or for things like invulnerable stages
in an insect’s life cycle. All three of these make insect populations—if not individual insects—
quite persistent. I can’t tell you strongly enough that insects and their behaviors are much more
complicated than you probably think.

People often imagine that the “tolerable” number of pests in their growing environment is zero.
You’ll find that this is not true, and we’ll talk more about this later.

Another reason that eradication can be not only non-beneficial but actually detrimental to your
farm is that an overly-aggressive strategy might have collateral damage in biological pests or
(depending on the control you’re using) the crops themselves. It can also leave open “niche
space”—a role in the ecology that another pest might come in and try to occupy. And then you
might have another, possibly worse problem on your hands.

When you’re pest control goals are economic instead of conceptual, things go much better for you
as a farmer. We’re going to talk more about this later when we discuss the four rules of IPM.

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 2.1 MANAGEMENT
2.2 ERADICATION VS. MANAGEMENT
& ECONOMICS OF PEST MANAGEMENT
Instead of taking this “all-or-nothing” type of approach with eradication, smart farmers use
management. Management involves manipulating different pest populations in relation to the rest
of the farming ecology to the farmer’s economic and management advantage. That advantage
could entail saving money, reducing stress, having a more labor-friendly greenhouse, etc.
This means strategically researching, introducing or removing different factors, and constantly
monitoring and assessing the factors of your ecology.

WHEN TO IMPLEMENT CONTROLS

When a farmer does these things, he or she will almost always end up using a variety of types
of controls in a management system that is called IPM – or Integrated Pest Management. We’re
going to discuss IPM in a little while. But first, we need to decide WHEN to implement pest control
methods. The next lesson topic will address this question and discuss the economics of pest
management.

Perhaps the single most important phrase that you can know when you’re deciding on whether
or not you should take action with your pests is the “action threshold“. The action threshold is the
point at which you as a greenhouse (or warehouse, or whatever type of system) manager take
action against pests. That threshold is clearly defined and allows us to accomplish our goals better.

The action threshold is defined by an economic injury level, which describes the level or density of
pests at which your crops are so damaged they “injure” your farm economically. When you use the
economic injury level as your standard to decide when to take action, you remove the risk of taking
action too soon or unnecessarily.

For example: Instead of immediately taking control action as soon as a pest

manager sees an aphid, they would survey the pest population and then make
an educated estimate of the total damage that pest population is doing and
could do to their crops. Then they would compare the cost of that damage to
the cost of pest controls. That information would decide whether or not they
would take pest management action.

Economic injury level could be reached in roundabout ways, too. Maybe you estimate that there
are only 200 aphids in your whole greenhouse, but you suspect that they will migrate to the
seedling benches and wreak havoc there. While 200 aphids might not cause economic damage
to mature heads of lettuce, they could significantly damage your seedlings. And if a third of your
lettuce seedlings are destroyed, that could put you behind schedule for the next planting. OR it
could cost you a delivery or two and put you on bad terms with a produce manager. So in this
case, the cost of current damage is low, but in a week you know it will boom and cause economic
injury then.

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 2.3 INTRO TO IPM & THE RULES OF IPM
Integrated pest management is a management system based on the idea that a farm manager
who is managing a diverse group of organisms should use a diverse group of pest control
strategies. IPM has existed for a long time—really since farmers started being strategic about pest
control (so hundreds of years)—with the goals of a) sustainable pest management, b) profitability,
and c) stewardship/social image. IPM can enable farmers to maintain really healthy ecosystems
with minimal environmental repercussions.

IPM is sustainable for farmers because its rules dictate that farmers don’t use controls when it
isn’t necessary, saving them money in the long term. It also reduces the risk of pests becoming
resistant to a certain control.

To be successful in IPM there are four rules to follow when you’re making decisions.

THE FOUR RULES

First, only spray when you need to.

Second, know your system. Know the biology of your pests and their enemies and way they
interact with each other. Like we talked about earlier, you manage an ecosystem. Before you can
change something in that system you need to know the side effects and the best time, place, and
way to do it. Knowing everything about your system will also give you much more power when it
comes to employing multiple controls at once.

The third rule is to let predators suppress pests when possible. You probably know this as
biological control. If the natural enemy of a pest (say a predator that particularly likes munching on
that pest, or a parasitoid that lays its eggs inside that pest) is present, it is likely to stick around for a
long time, and you can leave your pest control on nature’s autopilot.

The last rule of IPM is to only combine different methods when they are compatible. Only use two
or more controls at the same time IF they don’t change the effectiveness of other methods or if
they don’t reduce the overall pest suppression effort.

Those are the four rules of IPM, but if I could put another one in there I would say that monitoring
is the fifth rule. You just can’t be successful with your pest control if you aren’t constantly
monitoring and assessing the success of your management. If you want more tips on successful
IPM, there’s an article on our site called “Tips for Successful Pest Control” by Meredith Pratt, which
is worth checking out.

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 2.1 TYPES
2.4 ERADICATION VS. MANAGEMENT
OF CONTROLS USED IN IPM
There are four different types of pest controls for you to employ in your IPM strategy.

CULTURAL CONTROLS
The first type of controls to cover is cultural controls. The goal of cultural controls is to interrupt that
pest’s life cycle, and I have FIVE ways for you to do this right off the bat.

1. Keep your greenhouse clean. Get rid of refuges. This is going to be a huge help in keeping
spores of pests like powdery mildew out of your greenhouse, too.
2. Intercropping. One thing that intercropping does is break down “patches” of food for pests that
feed on certain crops. Intercropping can also be helpful if you intercrop plants like marigolds or
even mint, which deter some pests. There’s a ton of info on intercropping online.
3. Exclusion. Keep pests away from your crops. Do your best not to track in pests, and space your
crops if you can to keep pests from traveling from plant to plant.
4. Use trap crops. Keep a plant that your pests prefer over your crops in your greenhouse and use
it as a collection plate. When many of the pests have moved to the trap crop, remove it. It’s as
simple as that. You can find lists of trap crops online, too.
5. Keep your nutrient levels normal. Some pests will need the plant to be vulnerable to feed on or
lay eggs on. The healthier your plants, the better they will be at natural defense.

BIOLOGICAL CONTROLS
The second type is biological controls. This means using other living organisms to control pests.
There are three biggies here: release enemies from an insectary (Hydro-Gardens is a great place
to start looking for those), conserve the habitat of natural enemies (conservation biocontrol), and
finally, bring in an enemy from the pest’s natural habitat.

Note on biocontrols. We use them and most of our farmers use them in some form or another
because they can be a huge asset. Some people even say that you should use biocontrols and
biocontrols only. But you do need to use biocontrols in conjunction with other controls, and
sometimes you won’t even be able to use biocontrols for a certain situation. Depending on the
predator or parasite and the pest density, biocontrols could be ineffective.

Biological controls are much more complicated than other controls because you’re depending
on the interaction of one insect with another, and that depends on behaviors, which depend on
a bunch of factors—like density, environment, species, etc. Perhaps the most important thing for
you to know about is something called a “functional response”, which describes how a predator
responds to increasing prey density.

The number of prey eaten (or parasitized) by a predator (or parisite) does NOT increase in a linear
manner with the density of prey. For instance, if a ladybug eats 5 aphids per hour when there
are 200 aphids per plant, that doesn’t mean that he will eat 10 aphids per hour when there are
400 aphids per plant. Nor will a wasp, who parasitizes 10 aphids in her lifetime when there 100 in
her vicinity, parasitize 20 when there are 200 in her vicinity. That’s because the amount of time a
predator spends looking for and “handling” their prey may or may not change.
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The number of prey eaten/parasitized plateaus when the predator gets full or can’t handle any
more. All this means that with any given pest, there is a threshold point when using biologicals
won’t work very well. Hopefully, none of you will see that threshold, since with most pests, an
infestation has to have gone for a long time unnoticed and that density has to be really high before
biologicals are ineffective. Functional responses can be even more complicated, but I’d say that
what we’ve covered is as much as you need to know for management purposes. (Additional
research is recommended.)

MECHANICAL CONTROLS
The third type of pest control that you can use in an IPM strategy is mechanical controls.
Mechanical controls are simple. You exclude, remove, and destroy pests with mechanical controls.
We’ve talked a bit about exclusion already. Destruction is quite simple—you can go out with a pair
of scissors and start going crazy on slugs, you can use diatomaceous earth…use your imagination.
Removal means things like vacuuming, water pressure sprays, and hand picking. Those are the
mechanical controls.

CHEMICAL CONTROLS
The last type of controls is chemical. You know these guys well. They are usually sprayed to either
kill or inhibit the development of specific insects, mites, fungi, etc. We have a list of pesticides that
are safe for aquaponics on our blog.

Note: So there’s a stigma surrounding chemical controls that they are unsafe and irresponsible to
use. Some pesticides are (don’t just go using anything willy-nilly) but there are actually many safe,
responsible options for you to use. Look into things like Neem, Safer soaps, Azamax, Serenade—
these are all safe if used correctly. Follow dosing instructions to the tee, use the proper equipment,
including masks and protective clothing.

Before using chemical controls you have to think about how those controls are going to affect
the biological controls that you have in place and the pollinators that you need if you have fruiting
crops.

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LESSON 3: APPLICATIONS

3.1 RESEARCHING AND DEVELOPING A STRATEGY

How do you get started on building an IPM Strategy?

I have five basic steps for you to follow but before that, you should know that you’ll be constantly
updating and fine tuning any strategy that you make. You’ll find that this thing or that thing needs
more applications or that this pest control works better than that one (not to mention that there’s
no way of predicting exactly what and when things will come into your farm).

So that being said, the five steps to building an IPM strategy are Assess, Monitor, Synchronize,
Act, and Follow-up. These are the modified steps of an IPM strategist named Meredith Pratt, and I
think they’re a wonderful place to start for building a strategy.

ASSESS
When you assess, you’re looking at the potential pests that you could be dealing with now and in
the future. You’ll want to research both the common pests of your crops as well as the common
pests in your area. The agricultural extension office is really helpful for that second one.

MONITOR
Monitoring will tell you what pests you’re dealing with right now. You’ll want to collect information
from your growing space using something like yellow sticky traps (that’s the simple way to do it),
identify the pests that are there, then start researching solutions.

SYNCHRONIZE
As you research you’ll probably naturally slip into the next step, which is synchronizing. As you
learn about possible solutions and possible preventative solutions, you’ll figure out which ones
you can use together, which ones you can’t use together, and how long or far apart you need to
use controls that don’t mesh.

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ACT
Once you’ve solidified that step, you’ll take action. Order what you need, make sure that your
timing won’t be thrown off by shipping times, then implement that plan! I recommend writing an
actual schedule to keep you on time. You might find over time that you get into a routine. That’s
fine, and might make your life simpler, just be sure that you aren’t overusing a certain control.

FOLLOW-UP
After you’ve released controls, sprayed, sanitized, etc., you must follow up. It’s important to
evaluate the effectiveness of your controls so that you know if they’ve worked, if you need to
apply something again, or if there are ecological side effects.The follow-up is the best thing you
can do to keep your strategy sharp and effective!

One way to do a follow-up is to use traps. You can also collect samples of plants that host
the pests. As you assess the samples, you’ll want to look for a mortality rate (how much of the
population was killed or affected by the control).

3.2 COMMON PESTS AND CONTROLS

To give you a bit of a head start on pest control research, I wanted to summarize some
information as a sort of index for you. I’m going to go over a few of the most common pests and
the controls that we’ve found effective for them. You can find a more bulked up version of this
here and in the pest and disease control packet if you want.

SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS
First, let’s start with special considerations for controls.

Because we’re not using a technique that has been around since the dawn of time, there are
some special considerations that we need to be aware of. If you’re using aquaponics, you’ll
want to be especially mindful of things like lethal dose or “LC50″—the concentration at which a
given pesticide may harm your fish. We have a whole tutorial on calculating this in “Pesticides in
Aquaponics“, so if you’re an aquaponic grower, be sure to check that out.

Also, if you’re using aquaponics, you want to be very careful of exposed water. ZipGrow systems
have much much less exposed surface area than other types of systems, which means that you
don’t have to be quite as paranoid about this, but it’s still something to be aware of. If you’re using
hydroponics—which I’m sure most of you are—things are easier.

Other considerations to look into are weighing the costs and benefits of more susceptible pests,
using coated seeds, and using pest-resistant varieties.

For more information on pest control, download the Pest Control Packet.

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APHIDS
Remember how I listed some classes of insects for you to do personal homework on? Well if you
have done that, you know why I included Hemiptera on that list. Hemiptera are a class of insect
that have piercing-sucking mouthparts, which some of them—like aphids—use to feed on your
crops. They make a mess, stunt leaves, cause yellowing and they can carry plant diseases. You
can control them biologically with ladybird beetles, lacewings, Aphidius wasps, and Mycotrol,
which uses the fungus Beauveria bassiana to kill aphids. You can also look at sprays like Pyganic,
and use Neem oil and Azamax as background controls.

SLUGS
Aside from the nasty feeling of picking up a leaf and feeling something slimy on it, slugs and
snails can cause damage to crops and to the aesthetic factor of your saleable produce. To get rid
of them, try traps, lowering your pH to about 6.0 for a week or two, and using diatomaceous earth
around your towers.

WHITEFLIES
Whiteflies are the worst. They cause yellow spots, sometimes necrotic spots, and can even
cause leaves to fall off completely. They’re really hard to get rid of, so once you have them you’ll
probably battle them for a long time. You’ll want to have several different controls up your sleeve.
Lacewings, some predatory mites, and a parasitic wasp—Encarsia formosa—will work pretty well.

THRIPS
Thrips are another one that feeds on the sap of your plant, causing light marks and papery
distortions, especially on young growth. Lacewings, minute pirate bugs, and some traps made
specifically for thrips will work as controls. You can also use Botaniguard, Bonide, and safer soap.

SPIDER MITES
Spider mites are especially bad on crops like strawberries and lettuce. They cause light spots,
then more intense discoloration like “bronzing” and maybe even leaf loss and plant death if
they get bad enough. Probably the most common spider mite is the two-spotted spider mite.
You’ll definitely want to get a positive identification on the mite, and will most likely have to use a
miticide of some kind to get them under control.

This wraps up our Insect Pest Management course!

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