By Jerry Heath, BCE, Staff Entomologist, IFC

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," goes some sage advice from American polymath and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. This saying is just as relevant to pest management as to other aspects of life. Whether you call them preventive or proactive, tactics to make the food plant environment unsuitable for pest development are cheaper and more sustainable in the long run.

The "Pest Management Pyramid" (Figure 1) is a great tool for visualizing the integration of many tactics toward the goal of preventive and sustainable pest management:

• The pyramid is built on a solid foundation of identification and biological information about pest threats. Biological information provides insight into the vulnerabilities of pests to the full range of management tools and techniques that are available for management. Often, a very specific environmental requirement or aspect of behavior is the chink in the armor we can exploit. For example, pheromone mating disruption technology works so well against Indian Meal Moths because the adults have short life spans and they need to mate successfully within three days.
• Sanitation to deprive pests of the food and harborage they need, or timed to break lifecycles, prevents infestations from developing. The preferred method for controlling small flies, for example, is not pesticide use, but cleaning of drains and other developmental sites on at least a seven-day schedule.
• Inspection to catch problems early, prevent the import of pests with supplies, or better yet, to locate and correct conducive conditions, keeps infestations small or prevents them from ever developing. Certain stored product beetles are indicators of excess moisture and mold. The insects may be objectionable, but you can thank them for alerting you to an unsanitary moisture issue.
• Monitoring, especially analyzing pest activity data, elucidates developing trends and hotspots for early intervention. It may point to a batch of product that is aging in storage and needs to be moved out, or an issue like a door that is not closing properly and allowing pest invasions.
• Maintenance activities that improve exclusion or eliminate structural harborages are enormously helpful for correcting the source of pest problems permanently.
• Even pesticide applications can be selected and timed with prevention in mind, rather than simply reacting to infestations.

There have been dramatic success stories associated with proactive IPM programs. Facilities have gained ten days or more of production time annually and eliminated fumigations thanks to well-integrated sanitation adjustments, harborage reduction, better monitoring analysis, and smarter pesticide use.

Educational efforts in the grain industry are reaffirming good management techniques for grain quality management, including pest management. Preventive use of grain protectants has been gaining acceptance in the grain and milling industries as an alternative to fumigations after insects have already become established. Imagine the number of times some crack or crevice harborage might be sprayed over time, when it could be sealed once and for all.

References

1. Hygiena. "Food Safety Data Management, Simplified with SureTrend^®." SureTrend^® Analytics | Food Safety Data Management | Hygiena.
2. Hygiena. "Advanced Food Safety and Quality Monitoring System." All In One Solution with EnSURE Touch (hygiena.com).

Jerry Heath, Board Certified Entomologist (BCE), is a Staff Entomologist serving a broad range of technical service needs for IFC's food industry clients. With nearly 40 years of experience, Jerry's career has focused exclusively on the fields of entomology and pest management in academic and industrial settings. Since 1937, IFC is the only national pest management company focused solely on the food industry.