Integrated Sanitation & Pest Management (ISPM)

From farm to facility to community to natural resources.

A pest is far more than a bug

Let me clear up a misunderstanding right away, because it may be the very reason you almost did not write to me. When most people hear the word pest, they picture an insect. A cockroach, an ant, a termite.

But a pest is a great deal more than that, and so is the help I offer. Under the federal law known as FIFRA, the United States EPA defines a pest as very nearly any living thing, other than a human being, that turns up where it is not wanted or causes harm to your crops, your property, your animals, or your health.

Just look at how wide the door is

A pest can be a weed strangling a field or splitting a parking lot. A fungus rotting a crop or staining a wall. A rat in your ceiling, a bird fouling your dock, a nematode chewing at your roots, or an invasive species overrunning a wetland. It can even be the bacteria and molds you cannot see, the ones that fail a food-safety swab or turn a spotless reputation into a costly recall.

If a living thing is draining your money, harming what you value, or simply refusing to leave, then by law and by plain good sense it is a pest, and it is squarely my work.

Why sanitation comes first

This is exactly why the word Sanitation comes first in what I do, ahead of Pest Management. The two can never really be separated. Pests of every kind come looking for the same three things, food, water, and shelter, and poor sanitation rolls out a welcome mat for all of them.

Clean up the conditions and you have solved half the problem before you ever reach for a treatment.

Four decades, well beyond insects

I am a Board Certified Entomologist, that is true, but for more than forty years my work has reached far past insects. I have managed weeds along hundreds of miles of right of way, built sanitation and food-safety programs measured against national standards, handled rodents, birds, and wildlife, fumigated stored products, and worked the microbial and public-health side where the real danger is a germ, not a bug.

Across twenty-three years running the pest and sanitation program for one of California’s largest counties, I met very nearly every kind of pest the law recognizes.

An old fight, a wiser way

We have fought this full range of organisms since farming began. The word pest shares its root with pestilence, a reminder that our oldest enemies were the invisible ones, the blights and the plagues, long before anyone fussed over ants on the counter.

For most of that history the only answer was a stronger poison, until the last century taught us, at a heavy price, that the strongest poison often harms the very thing it was meant to protect. That lesson became my craft: understand the organism, remove what invites it, and use the least toxic tool that will finish the job.

Bring me your trouble

So whatever is troubling you, please do not talk yourself out of asking because you are unsure it counts. If it grows, crawls, flies, swims, spreads, spoils, or contaminates, and it is costing you money or peace of mind, you have come to exactly the right place.

Tell me what you are facing, whether it is a nuisance you want gone this week, a standard you have to meet, or a plan for the years ahead.

Ask the Old Man Explore how I help