As long as there have been farms, farmers have been battling pests. Pests, weeds, and disease are a natural result of ecological disturbance, not a lack of pesticides and herbicides. Remember that tillage exposes weed seeds to the germination zone while pests and diseases thrive in monoculture host plants where they have a ready supply of food and few natural enemies.

In this segment, we take a look at some principles that provide a more proactive approach to the problem of pests. Remember that a highly functional soil is a living system. It teems with beneficial microorganisms and other beneficial insects and organisms that help soil ecosystems keep pests and diseases in check. Healthy soils also mean healthy plants because a highly functioning soil allows the growth of healthier, stronger plants.

Let's take a look at the strategies that make up what's called Integrated Pest Management. Modern pesticides have now been available for over 60 years. In the 1940s when pesticides first became available, farmers gained powerful and easy-to-use weapons for defeating harmful organisms. The new chemicals were so effective that research on ecological methods of pest control was largely abandoned. The next generation of farmers learned very little about nonchemical approaches to controlling pests, but over the years we discovered serious drawbacks to chemical pest control.

Many kinds of insects developed resistance to pesticides and cropland weeds learned to tolerate herbicides. Newer more expensive products were required to cope with the resistance. Many pest control products contaminated the environment and caused unintended damage to wildlife. The agricultural community was compelled to develop broad-based ecologically sound pest-fighting strategies. From their efforts emerged a series of practices we now call Integrated Pest Management.

Integrated Pest Management is an approach to controlling pests that takes advantage of the broad variety of management practices that are available to farmers. The strategies used in IPM can save you money because they offer alternatives to expensive pesticides and herbicides. Integrated Pest Management is built on four main principles, often known as the PAMS approach, Prevention, Avoidance, Monitoring, and Suppression. Let's take a look at each one.

It's usually easier to prevent pests and diseases from developing than to control them after they appear. Make it a goal to interrupt any pathways that enable pests to reach your fields. Remember, prevention is your first line of defense. Pests move from field to field through your equipment. Take the time to clean any piece of equipment after you use it and especially when you move it from one field to another.

We have all our harvest equipment, we blow all the dust and weed seeds and residue off of it every day that we can. We have a big air compressor that we recently got and we blow them down and get everything. So we don't want the weed seed to travel from one farm to another. We just blow all this trash off and leave it in the field it came from pretty much. That's helped a lot in keeping the weeds from traveling around.

Today's treated and weed-free seeds go a long way toward the prevention of pests and will reduce if not eliminate the need for many pesticides. If a pest population already exists in your fields, use the avoidance approach to prevent the pest from impacting your crop and reaching economically damaging levels.

The avoidance approach typically involves a number of cultural practices, for example, intelligent crop rotation will help break insect and plant disease cycles by depriving organisms of a suitable host. We would all understand they think they plant the same crop over and over poisons the land in some way. What happens is all the organisms in the soil that feed on the crop don't feed on a different crop so the population of these parasites in the soil diminishes when the crop is not there to feed them, so all we're doing is controlling parasites by rotating.

Plant crops with maturation dates that allow you to harvest before the pest develops and consider planting disease-resistant cultivars. Remember that cover crops provide a host of advantages. They out compete weeds, feed your soil, and provide diversity to your soil and your land. All of these things go toward preventing pests. High residue cover crops such as rye can be rolled flat on the soil surface prior to planting and they'll also work to fight weeds.

Surface residue will help you avoid weeds. Residue not only suppresses weeds through shading, some surface residues are allelopathic. When the plant material is killed by rolling or undercutting so that the stem is damaged and in contact with the soil, the stems leak out substances that act as pre-emergent herbicides. The effects generally last 30 to 40 days.

When we started to roll, it's flat on the ground, you can see where you're going, where you've been, and it's a whole lot better, plus the fact if you want an allelopathic effect, especially from the rye for your weeds, it needs to be touching the soil. If it's standing straight up there and finally falls down, it's not going to have that same effect because it's not been in contact with the soil very long.

Allelopathic crops include rye, barley, sorghum-sudan, buckwheat, and oats.