Pest refers to any animal or plant causing harm or damage to people or their animals, crops, or possessions, even if it only causes annoyance. Pests belong to a broad spectrum of organisms including insects, mites, ticks (and other arthropods), mice, rats, and other rodents, slugs, snails, nematodes, cestodes (and other parasites), weeds, fungi, bacteria, viruses (and other pathogens).

Another definition of pest is Any organism which feeds on and damages cultivated plants, attacks in the field or in storage, causes a nuisance or transmits pathogenic organisms to plants, man or domestic animals and livestock is regarded as a pest (Youd eowei & Service 1993).

Pests include insects, fungi, viruses, nematodes, weeds, rodents, birds etc pest is any organism that spreads disease, causes destruction or is otherwise a nuisance.

Pests damage crops at different stages of growth on the field, at harvest, during transportation and in storage. This leads to 5 – 40% crop loss yearly and has a serious effect on the food security for the ever-increasing population of the country.

EFFECTS OF PESTS ON CROPS

1. Quality and quantity reduction.

Pest reduces the produces quality and quantity as they eat up the produces on the farm even at storage. They reduce the nutritional quality of the produce as they release their saliva on the produce. Example is grasshopper, Grasshoppers are plant-eaters, with a few species at times becoming serious pests of cereals, vegetables and pasture, especially when they swarm in their millions as locusts and destroy crops over wide areas.

2. Disease vectors.

Most insect pests are disease carriers. Example is Leafhoppers (family Cicadellidae) transmit over 80 known types of plant disease, including ones caused by viruses, mycoplasma-like organisms (MLOs), and spiroplasmas. Examples include aster yellows, beet curly top, blueberry stunt, dwarf disease of rice, phony peach, and Pierce’s disease of grapes.

3. Reduce rate of photosynthesis.

Larvae of insect pest eat up the leaves and stem of plants thereby reducing the plant rate of photosynthesis. The plant growth and yield is reduced. Example is the Army worm that feed of maize, barley and other cereal crop.

4. Pest reduces farmer’s income.

Infested crops and other plants eaten by pest usually have low market value which reduces the farmers’ income. The beans beetle bore in the beans seeds and reduce their quality which make their market value to reduce in the market.

5. High cost of production.

The cost of controlling and preventing pest infestation increases the farmers cost of production.