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By Carolyn Bernhardt
With a complicated history of striving to balance human perceptions, environmental concerns, and effective pest control strategies, the professional pest management industry has long faced many challenges in advocating for its importance more widely. As a result of this complex landscape, researchers, funding agencies, and the public widely overlook the professional pest management industry and underestimate its value, according to a team of researchers at the University of Georgia.
Jacob Winkles, for his master’s degree in agribusiness at the University of Georgia, recently led a study analyzing pest management’s contribution to Georgia’s economy that helped clarify the industry’s value. The research also highlights areas where entomologists and economists can better collaborate to gather and analyze critical information and offers a model for doing just that. The study was published in late February in the Journal of Economic Entomology.
“Jacob got his bachelor of science degree in horticulture,” says Brian Forschler, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Entomology at the University of Georgia. Winkles wasn’t in the entomology department but worked in Forschler’s lab during the last few years of his undergraduate degree program and throughout grad school. “During that timeframe, he developed a kinship with folks in the pest management industry,” Forschler says. “[For this project,] I charged him with what I attempted to do 20 or so years earlier—show how you come up with the economic numbers; be transparent about your sources so somebody can follow your work and thereby make it comparable.” CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE
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