Pest, Disease and Weed Identification

Accurate pest, weed, and disease identification is vital for appropriate pest or disease management. Use Penn State Extension’s vast resources to help you identify and control common insect, disease, and weed problems in your home, garden, fields, and other environments.

Vegetable, Fruit, and Agronomic Crop Pests

Pests come in many different forms. It’s a term used to cover insects, weeds, and diseases, all of which can decimate vegetable, fruit, and agronomic crops, costing producers thousands of dollars. Keeping them under control is therefore crucial, and not just for producers. Pests can be a problem in the backyard as well. Learning how to recognize the different pests is an excellent place to start and plays a crucial role in introducing an Integrated Pest Management system.

Field scouting is the regular examination of fields in a prescribed fashion, in order to measure pest levels. Pests to look out for in soybean crops include the green cloverworm and the Japanese beetle. Beet, spinach, and chard leaves can suffer leaf miner damage. Other common vegetable pests include black cutworm, corn flea beetle, seedcorn maggot, brown marmorated stink bug, Colorado potato beetle, and pea aphid.

Crops that are being stored are just as susceptible to pests as those growing in the fields. Producers have to be aware of pest control best practices throughout the production process.

Orchard scouting uses the same principles only in an orchard setting. Another option in the orchard is monitoring insects using pheromone traps. Timing is crucial with this method. Early spring is one of the best times, and you can use the information gathered for determining the biofix.

When scouting in high tunnels, you should be looking not only for pest species but also for beneficial insects and natural enemies.

Garden and Household Pests

Producers have to take active measures against pests such as the spotted lanternfly and crop damage caused by deer, but they’re not the only ones who need to be aware of pests. If you want to keep your family safe and healthy, controlling household and pantry pests is essential.

Common household pests such as ants, cockroaches, rodents, and the chemicals used to control them, can cause health problems. Learn how to identify pests and diagnose plant health problems with the Penn State Extension Plant Health Diagnosis online course.

Identification, prevention, and control form the basis of Integrated Pest Management, which is an effective strategy for the home. If you’ve got ants, you can control or eliminate them with IPM.

There are lots of other ways Integrated Pest Management can be helpful in the home. For the inspection and control of wood-destroying insects, for example. Your turf can also benefit from an integrated turfgrass pest management program. If you’ve got woody ornamentals on your property, learning how to control insects, mites, and disease requires the use of effective management practices.

Integrated Pest Management

Integrated pest management has been used for managing pests in agriculture for many years. It can also be used by the general public throughout the community and in the home.

Integrated Pest Management is an effective and environmentally sensitive approach to pest management that relies on a combination of common-sense practices. The tactics or methods used in IPM include cultural, physical, genetic, chemical, regulatory, and biological controls.

If you want to eliminate household pests with IPM, the first step is pest identification. Scouting is an important skill to learn for detecting problems with your plants before they get out of hand. Vegetable growers in the Mid-Atlantic have been successfully managing insect pests using sound IPM principles for many years, and they apply equally well for home vegetable growers.

Integrated Pest Management helps orchard owners with various management decisions. By gathering information and comparing pest levels, fruit growers can decide what control tactic or set of tactics to use to control them. It could be biological control, by way of predators, parasitoids, and pathogens. IPM also helps fruit growers detect a new occurrence of a fruit disease or insect pest.

Pest management and control can involve exclusion techniques, such as those used in mushroom production.