- The pest control industry can be divided into two distinct branches: the agricultural branch and the residential branch. Agricultural pest control focuses on keeping crops free from harmful pests that eat or contaminate the supply. Residential pest control is geared toward keeping living spaces and commercial spaces free from unwanted pests like cockroaches, spiders and flies.
- While the origins of pest control cannot be pinpointed, it can be assumed that it has been practiced since the beginning of agricultural endeavors. Burning and plowing weeds has been used successfully for centuries as effective management for offensive flora and is still used in modern pest control. Pesticide can be traced back as far as the Sumerian culture, which used sulfur and poisonous plants to exterminate unwanted insects in their fields and homes around 2,500 B.C. The traditional methods of pest control were expanded and adapted to be used on larger scales in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the inventions and breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution. Synthetic pesticides were introduced into the industry within the past hundred years.
- A large range of techniques are currently used for agricultural pest control, including laying pesticides and destroying offensive populations of insects and animals through hunting, trapping and introducing rival species. Pest control is now often worked right into the planting scheme of many fields, using strategies such as crop rotation, intercropping and selective breeding. Many crops that are susceptible to pests, like cotton, are now being genetically engineered to resist pests.
- Residential pest control is usually conducted on a smaller scale than agricultural pest control, though some of the techniques are similar. Exterminators, a term interchangeable with pest controllers, are often able to manage a pest infestation with a small amount of pesticide, baited traps or preventative coating. For serious infestation, however, exterminators may need to evacuate the human occupants from the space and fill the entire area with pesticide. Homes and businesses that get "sprayed," the colloquial term for mass extermination, are traditionally covered in a striped tarp to keep the pesticide in the space and deter people from entering when there could be potentially damaging levels of poison.
- The pest control business was wrapped into controversy during the Vietnam War with the production and use of flora-killing pesticide on the dense jungle of South Vietnam. The United States military used over 77 million liters of state-of-the-art pesticides across South Vietnam to thin the foliage in an attempt to locate and monitor enemy strongholds more easily. The most famous of these pesticides was Agent Orange, an ester-based chemical called a defoliant that was also a carcinogen. Agent Orange, along with the other pesticides used in the program, produced harmful side effects in humans, and increased cancer, Hodgkins disease and birth defects in those who came into prolonged contact with it.
