Integrated Pest Management, or IPM, for the US Department of Agriculture's estimated 913 million farmed acres, the more than 7 billion bushels of stored grain, and the 100 million metric tons of exported agricultural products is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States. The worldwide problem of pest management is much larger.
Stored grain is transported all over the world by ship, truck, and plane. The distribution of grain is dependent on short to long-term storage ranging from a few days to more than a year. The long-term storage of grain has encouraged the exponential growth of many insects and other pests that infest stored grain. One example pest is the Indian meal moth. Augmentation of pest populations are facilitated by the virtually unlimited food source found in storage grain bins or warehouses. Estimated losses caused by pests in temperate climates come to approximately 10-15%, but in tropical countries, the figure can be as high as 60%.
In less severe cases, unhealthy insect infestations, while not directly consuming the grain in bulk, greatly reduce marketability simply by their presence. Insect body parts or residues that can be found in storage grain samples thus create financial hardship for many farmers. On a state level, this monetary figure runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, but nationally, it is in the billions.
Farmers and industry have turned to chemical management in the form of pesticides and insecticides in an effort to reduce the pest populations found in stored grains and invading farmland. Several problems are associated with the chemical management of pest infested stored grains and the spraying of insecticides over millions of acres of crops. These problems include chemical residues being left on grain destined for human or animal consumption, accidental human exposure to fumigants resulting in death or sickness, corrosive damage to sensitive equipment such as computers, and the potentially high financial costs of fumigation, most especially at ports. These are serious problems that all present and future fumigation companies must address. Further, the ongoing research and development of even more potent and potentially toxic pesticides continues because insects are robust in their ability to develop immunity over time to those chemicals designed specifically to control their populations. Simply stated, the chemicals that work to reduce insect populations today will likely be ineffective in the future due to the insects developing resistance to the same.
An alternative to chemical management is the use of insect traps that contain artificially produced molecules called pheromones. These artificial pheromones may also be deployed in agriculture in order to confuse the insects or disrupt mating. Typically in nature, these molecules are released into the atmosphere by the insects and are used to locate a mate or to aggregate. Current pheromone traps have many limitations. One limitation includes the relatively small number of insects trapped over a given period of time relative to the actual insect population. There are no reliable figures to specify the percentage of insects that can be successively trapped in a given area. Therefore, the traps are more frequently used to simply determine the presence of a given insect population so that some other method of population control can be deployed, which is usually insecticidal in nature. As a result, years of research wholly supports that the traps are ineffective at significantly reducing insect populations in a storage grain bin or warehouse unless the traps are used in very high densities. With respect to aerosol or lure deployment for agricultural control of insects on farmland, it is an expensive proposition with numerous limitations. Inclement weather, high winds, and other factors all contribute to this type of deployment often not even being considered as a solution.
A second limitation is the reduced longevity of the pheromone source or lure in conventional traps, aerosols, or lures. The longevity of the typical pheromone lure is estimated to be approximately six weeks, based on written information provided by the pheromone manufacturers.