PESTICIDES/FERTILIZERS: Insect Control Strategies

With the arrival of spring comes the blooming of flowers, the greening of lawns and the budding of insects. This season promises to offer lawn care operators (LCOs) a wide array of problem pests in their clients’ turf, trees and ornamentals. What should LCOs be especially on the look out for in 2006? Researchers and pesticide manufacturers give their predictions, and lawn care operators share their insights into how they make these services profitable.

RESEARCHERS’ PREDICTIONS. Rick Brandenburg, a turfgrass entomologist at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, N.C., says that fire ants will continue to be a problem for all segments of the green industry – from golf courses to parks and residential lawns. “We continue to see increases in the distribution and spread of fire ants throughout the Southeast,” he says, “and in areas where they are established, the severity has increased. They are moving further north and west and this is simply a problem that’s never going to go away. They are well-established and challenging to manage.”

Brandenburg believes that although operators can suppress fire ant populations with various products, these pests may never be eradicated.

So, how should the LCO manage fire ants? “Most people like to use bait products because they are cost effective, quick, easy to apply and relatively inexpensive,” Brandenburg says. “But baits take a long time to work. Some of the newer broadcast application products on the market are providing better control.”

But “these pests are challenging to manage so it takes a combination of products to keep them at bay,”
Brandenburg advises.

In addition to fire ants, Brandenburg believes that chinch bugs will continue to be a problem in St. Augustinegrass, which is popular in the Gulf Coast region. “Multiple treatments are required to manage these pests,” he states. “They keep coming back again and again during the summer.” To fight this pest, Brandenburg recommends using pesticides labeled for chinch bug control.

White grubs will also be a problem in various U.S. regions this year, including the Southeast, according to Brandenburg. “Lawn care operators are spending more time trying to identify the different species of grubs so they can obtain better control,” he says. “This pest is an important one to eliminate in clients’ lawns because not only do they cause turf damage, but they also attract other pests, such as skunks and rabbits, that can cause even worse damage digging for the grubs,” he says.

Since the turf roots are the main source of food for grubs, keeping them buried in the soil, control with insecticides can be challenging. “The most successful outcomes occur when insecticides are applied to immature grubs early in their life cycles,” Brandenburg stresses. “Larger grubs are more difficult to control and may require more than one treatment.”

MANUFACTURER VIEWPOINTS. Chris Wooley with Dow AgroSciences in Indianapolis, Ind., agrees with Brandenburg on at least one point – grubs will be a problem this season.

Wooley, the product marketing manager for insecticides and fungicides in Dow AgroSciences’ turf, ornamental and technical products division, stresses that operators should use products that do not have to be watered in immediately. “It helps a lot of the LCOs because their clientele may not have irrigation available, for example, in your lower income and your medium income neighborhoods. From the standpoint that the operator doesn’t have to be right on top of that client all of the time, he or she can just wait for the normal rain patterns or whenever that client does their irrigation and the product will be fine. This will help the LCO relax somewhat when it comes to making sure the product is going to be advantageous.”

Wooley sees several new trends in the insecticide marketplace, but the continued development of post-patent or generic products is one that stands out for him. “In the future, we should be seeing a lot more competition in the preventive grub marketplace in terms of products,” he says.

Kathie Kalmowitz, market development specialist for BASF in Raleigh, N.C., provides product development and technical services for the sales team in the southern and the western parts of the United States. She sees the main advancement in insect control as the advancements of products that are targeted to a single pest and, therefore, are better able to control that pest. “Many of the older chemistries have gone out of favor with the Environmental Protection Agency, and we have lost many of their turf and ornamental uses,” she explains. “So, what you have are new insecticides that have come through the pipeline that are much more specific to target pests vs. a broad spectrum of pests.”

This trend may increase costs for the LCOs because they have to buy more products to control each insect, according to Kalmowitz. “I think what will happen is that instead of having one product that can be used on everything from mites to grubs, you may have three products because each one is going to be very specific to one class of insects,” she predicts. “That could mean the operators have to keep more than one product in their portfolio.”

On the other hand, there are manufacturers still focusing on trying to control more insects with one product, which Bryan Gooch, business manager for insecticides, Bayer Environmental Sciences, Research Triangle Park, N.C., cites as a growing trend. Gooch says these types of products will only benefit the busy LCO who wants to rid their clients’ lawns of more than one insect quickly. “The key thing about these types of products is that some of them are not just pre-mixes of two existing products,” he comments. “Significant work is being done to optimize the formulation ratios and, as a result, synergy is actually being found in research trials. That’s one of the important things to establish. Outside of getting all of the insects, these types of products give LCOs operational efficiency. What would sometimes take two applications previously is now combined into one application.”

Despite whether an LCO using an insect-specific treatment or one that manages  more than one pest, there will continue to be a trend toward combining these products with others, such as fertilizer, to save time on the job. “LCOs are combining more of their insecticides with fertilizer to take care of two things at once,” Kalmowitz says.
   
Gooch agrees, saying that he sees the combination of insecticides with fertilizers as current and future tools lawn care operators will continue to use. “We’re really expecting lawn care professionals to embrace these products in particular because now by adding the fertilizer you are really combining two and three things into one. For obvious reasons, this is going to increase productivity and reduce man-hours and energy costs and everything else that operators keep track of.”
   
According to Gooch, the cost of some of these new technologies is less than if the LCO used two products separately, particularly if the fertilizer is purchased separately from the insecticide. “The other thing that gives the turf manager a lot of leeway is there is a very broad use rate range that they can pick from,” he explains. “In some cases, they may have just  minor insect pressure, and they can choose a very low rate which is very cost effective or in other cases such as with chinch bugs in Florida, if it’s a very severe outbreak and they are worried about losing turf, then they can pick a rate that is more in the mid to high range to control the pest. The situation dictates the rate they use.”

Nick Hamon, director of development and technical services for Bayer Environmental Science, Research Triangle Park, N.C., recommends that lawn care operators cooperate with customers in order to build premium programs for different landscapes. He says this will help operators realize improved profit and productivity. “Better products allow quarterly services outside the home that significantly reduce labor costs and improve homeowner perception,” Hamon remarks. The future holds “some new chemistry for sure, but tailoring existing active ingredients into products that fit the needs of the LCO and his customers is likely to have the most impact.”

LAWN CARE OPERATORS SPEAK OUT. Insect control services in turf and trees have been important to Baltimore, Md.-based ProLawnPlus’ business since its inception in 1978. The company provides a tree and shrub program for the maintenance of ornamental insects as well as a lawn program, which includes control for grubs as well as a fleas and ticks. Grub control and crabgrass prevention have been staples for this LCO; however, the flea and tick program and the tree and shrub programs developed out of demand. “Our customers were calling asking if we did something that controls the fleas and ticks because they had problems pulling them off of their dogs,” recalls Kevin Nickle, the company’s operations manager. “So we added it because of the phone calls. Our tree and shrub program evolved when we found someone right for the position. There was always a demand for it, but it was just a matter of finding the right employee. It wasn’t a service that just anyone could do; we needed someone who was knowledgeable about plant materials and insects.”

Working to increase business in lawn and tree care is a constant effort for this operator. “Every winter we send out our renewal letters,” Nickle explains. “Grubs have been a problem over the last three or four years in our area, so we do have a brochure that we send with our renewal letters to try and actively upgrade their programs with grub control. Also, when we do a lawn application, if we know they have a pet we may leave them a brochure about our flea and tick program.”

Nickle also believes that the high level of customer service helps ProLawnPlus maintain their customer base. “We are probably about 80/20 residential vs. commercial,” he says. “We do a lot of extras with our services. For instance, a lot of our customers want to be prenotified by phone about their service schedule. We also take extra time to adequately blow off our customers’ driveways and sidewalks. We try to back up our costs with service – that’s what I think sets us apart.”

Though insect control is the company’s most profitable service overall, Nickle believes that the company’s turf insect control service is a lot less profitable than the tree and shrub insect program based on the chemical costs involved. “I think to be honest with you insect control is probably one of our most profitable treatments overall,” Nickle adds. “The cost of product per cost of service is small so our profitability is high. Our tree and shrub insect service is probably our most profitable based on the fact that you use very little product to do the job.”
 
Another reason tree and shrub pest control is more profitable for the company is because “you can sell a tree and shrub program to anyone,” Nickle comments. “The nice thing about it is you can actively see problems and you can actually see the insects doing damage, so it’s an easy sell. A lot of times it’s not as easy to sell a lawn program to someone if they’ve never had a grub problem. You are trying to sell them on the fact that it’s an insurance type policy where they are pretty much assured they won’t get grubs if they take the preventive treatment.”
 
“In the last four years of us promoting preventive grub treatments and people neglecting to take them, we will get some people calling in and they are being wiped out with grubs, and they are very upset,” Nickle explains. “They forget that back in January we mentioned this in our renewal letter. It’s just like anybody would be when they see damage to their lawn and they have a lawn service. They expect that because they have a lawn service that there shouldn’t be any problems, but a lot of these programs are basic programs for fertility and weed management more so than insect management so until the customer bumps up their program, they’ll have an insect problem periodically.”