With the heat and humidity of summer hitting, it can be difficult to think about those invasive fall pests that will start popping up later in the season. However, if you start planning now, you can reduce pest pressures, prevent them from invading, and (maybe most important!) protect your products. Most facilities have a third-party vendor to handle basic pest control, but there are still things you can do to minimize pest impacts. So where do we start?
So far, it’s been a good year if you are a rodent. Temperatures have been warm, food supplies are available, and there haven’t been many major weather events (floods, droughts, extreme temps) to stress out populations. When conditions start to cool in the late fall, all those rodents are going to be looking for a safe, warm space, with the food your site is producing, to overwinter. Don’t let this be your facility! Talk with your pest management professional and ask whether they are noticing a higher population of rodents around structures. Where that is happening, sanitation and exclusion are always the first steps. Along with that, ask if they need to start putting out more traps and bait stations to reduce the overall populations. Look at the exclusion that needs to happen. A full-grown rat can fit through an opening the diameter of a quarter, or about 2.4 cm. Mice can squeeze through a hole the size of a dime, about 1.7 cm. If all those openings get addressed now, you can keep the rodents and even other pests out when they are trying to get inside.