Pest management has become a big issue in the world of agriculture. With producers wanting to increase yields and do away with pests completely and others concerned about the environment, the need for a control system that does both is ever increasing. As time has shown, the chemicals have an immediate effect, but the control they offer is not maintained for a long period of time. Eventually, that chemical has no effect at all on the pathogen. Another concern with the use of chemicals is the pollution factor.
Many people are concerned with the effect of chemicals to our air, soil, and groundwater.
Some newer approaches to pest management are biological control and cultural practices. Biological control is any means of controlling disease or reducing the amount of effect of the pathogen that relies on biological mechanisms or other organisms. Cultural practices include crop rotation, certified disease-free plants and seeds, green manure crops, etc., to increase disease resistance and to reduce the amount of effect the pathogen has. Even though all of these techniques have some beneficial traits, they each have their down-sides which can make them undesirable to producers. Researchers of plant pathogens have found that the best control mechanism might not be any one of these management practices but a combination of all of them.