Pest management has long been a problem for farmers worldwide and new techniques are continually being developed to reduce the adverse effects of pest populations. The use of areawide pest management has increased dramatically over the past decade and offers potential advantages to traditional and more localized approaches. Suppression over a broad area can reduce re-infestation of previously treated areas and the specific pest management techniques may be more effective when applied over larger areas. Providing the first comprehensive discussion of areawide pest management, this book will explore the theoretical development and implementation of techniques from a worldwide perspective. Areas covered include history and development, biological and ecological impacts and recent case studies of pest management programmes.

Between the 1890s and the early 1920s, the boll weevil slowly ate its way across the Cotton South from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. At the turn of the century, some Texas counties were reporting crop losses of over 70 percent, as were areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. By the time the boll weevil reached the limits of the cotton belt, it had destroyed much of the region’s chief cash crop—tens of billions of pounds of cotton, worth nearly a trillion dollars. As staggering as these numbers may seem, James C. Giesen demonstrates that it was the very idea of the boll weevil and the struggle over its meanings that most profoundly changed the South—as different groups, from policymakers to blues singers, projected onto this natural disaster the consequences they feared and the outcomes they sought. Giesen asks how the myth of the boll weevil’s lasting impact helped obscure the real problems of the region—those caused not by insects, but by landowning patterns, antiquated credit systems, white supremacist ideology, and declining soil fertility. Boll Weevil Blues brings together these cultural, environmental, and agricultural narratives in a novel and important way that allows us to reconsider the making of the modern American South.

King Cotton in Modern America places the once kingly crop in historical perspective, showing how "cotton culture" was actually part of the larger culture of the United States despite many regarding its cultivation and sources as hopelessly backward. Leaders in the industry, acting through the National Cotton Council, organized the various and often conflicting segments to make the commodity a viable part of the greater American economy. The industry faced new challenges, particularly the rise of foreign competition in production and the increase of man-made fibers in the consumer market. Modernization and efficiency became key elements for cotton planters. The expansion of cotton- growing areas into the Far West after 1945 enabled American growers to compete in the world market. Internal dissension developed between the traditional cotton growing regions in the South and the new areas in the West, particularly over the USDA cotton allotment program. Mechanization had profound social and economic impacts. Through music and literature, and with special emphasis placed on the meaning of cotton to African Americans in the lore of Memphis's Beale Street, blues music, and African American migration off the land, author D. Clayton Brown carries cotton's story to the present.

The book deals with the present state and problems of integrated pest management (IPM) as relating to stakeholder acceptance of IPM and how IPM can become a sustainable practice. The book covers the implementation of integrated pest management in USA, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Netherlands, China, India, Indonesia, Australia, Africa, and its impact in reducing pesticide use in agriculture. The book also deals with the impact of transgenic crops on pesticide use.