Introduction
Pest control is the human-directed effort to reduce the population and impact of any species that harms agricultural production and food storage. A pest species can be arthropod (insect and mite), vertebrate (animal), plant (weed), or plant pathogen. A control strategy may be chemical, mechanical, or biological. A chemical control is the spraying of a pesticide. Mechanical control consists of some kind of physical disturbance of the pest species or its habitat (e.g., plowing weeds or removing all crop residues which provide refuge for insect pests). Biological control is the manipulation of beneficial organisms to reduce the impact of pest species. This entry chiefly addresses arthropod (insect and mite) pests in agriculture and insecticides and their alternatives in crop production.
Pest control emerged as an ethical issue with industrialization of agriculture and the associated...
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Warner, K. (2014). Pest Control. In: Thompson, P., Kaplan, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_60-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_60-4
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