Current Status and Prospects for the Use of Physical Control in Crop Protection

Abstract

Physical control in crop protection goes back a very long time. At the dawn of agriculture, it is easy to imagine our distant ancestors pulling weeds from their small plots. With the rapid advances that have occurred in the physical, chemical and biological sciences since the late 19th century, agriculture has been transformed from a strictly empirical activity, largely based on tradition and aimed primarily at staying off famine, to a quantitative form of agriculture focussed on producing a certain amount of food. During this transition, which has been sustained at an increasing rate over the last 50 years, physical control methods have been set aside because of the tremendous success of chemical control. It is only natural that some people should view the use of physical control methods as a step backward to those distant ancestral practices. The many different examples in this book illustrating the effectiveness of physical control provide a clear picture of the technological changes that have occurred over the past 50 years and underscore the new opportunities that now exist for the application of physical control techniques. Thanks to various refinements and greater precision in the implementation of such methods, physical control now has all the necessary attributes to be part of integrated pest management strategies.

Often a new paradigm emerges, at least in embryo, before a crisis has developed far or been explicitly recognized. T. S. Kuhn, 1970