For many years the use of chemical agents such as pesticides and herbicides has been effective in controlling the many varieties of pests that infest both agricultural crops and backyard gardens. However, these pests are gradually becoming resistant to these agents, because the agents themselves are acting as selective factors making the pests better and better able to resist and persist. As a result, the use of biological controlling agents is increasing. This book is a comprehensive and authoritative handbook of biological control.
Biological controls that utilize natural predation, parasitism or other natural mechanisms, is an environmentally friendly alternative to chemical pesticides. Chemical pesticide methods are becoming less readily available due to increasing resistance problems and the prohibition of some substances. This book addresses the challenges of insufficient information and imperfectly understood regulatory processes in using biopesticides. It takes an interdisciplinary approach providing internationally comparative analyses on the registration of biopesticides and debates future biopesticide practices.
Human population is growing rapidly, disproportionate to food supply, which necessitate production of more volume of food in the near future. The reliance on insecticides for quick and dramatic results was not totally free from adverse effects. This book intends to fill the gap by providing a critical analysis of different management strategies that have a bearing on agriculture, sustainability, and environmental protection. This book emphasizes the management strategies with evaluation of each strategy in the bigger picture of ecologically driven pest management. This book includes 24 chapters, which cover ecological and biorational basis of pest management, integrated pest and disease management, crop breeding for resistance, use of entomopathogenic nematodes and other agents, remote sensing, biosecurity issues, risk to biodiversity by exotic species, new and emerging pests of horticultural crops, saffron and stored grains, the role of extension technologies in dissemination of IPM and, future challenges and strategies. The book is aimed to serve as reference book for teachers, researchers, extension officers, and policy makers associated with IPM. This book can also be used as supplementary reading material in undergraduate and postgraduate courses. This book provides a multidisciplinary IPM perspective to entomologists, plant pathologists, extension educationists, anthropologist and economists.
This volume combines theory with current global practices involved in the biological control of diseases in 12 major crops. It highlights the day-to-day challenges of organic crop management for cost-effective real-world application.
This study is facilitated by following economic entomologists' and ecologists' changing ideas about different pest control strategies, chiefly 'chemical', 'biological', and 'integrated' control. The author then follows the efforts of one specific group of entomologists, at the University of California, over three generations from their advocacy of 'biological' controls in the 1930s and 40s, through their shifting attention to the development of an 'integrated pest management' in the context of 'big biology' during the 1970s.