Elizabeth Doughman, editor, WATT PoultryUSA and Poultry Future: Hello and welcome to WATT Poultry Chat. I'm Elizabeth Doughman, the editor of WATT PoultryUSA and Poultry Future.
Today’s Watt Poultry Chat is brought to you by MGK. MGK manufactures a full line of insecticides designed to control flies, darkling beetles and other insects that impact your poultry operation.
Joining us today is Tommy Powell, east coast field specialist at MGK.
Thanks for joining us, Tommy
Most poultry producers know that pesticides play an essential role in Integrated Pest Management. How do the active ingredients in these products affect insects and control methods?
Tommy Powell, east coast field specialist, MGK: That’s a great question.
It’s sometimes a little confusing. When you look at a product and you’re looking at a pesticide, a lot of people look at the name of that pesticide, right? And they think, “well, you know, I’m using this pesticide, and I can use a different pesticide.”
But, really, what matters is the active ingredient – what actually is killing the insect. When you’re looking at that pesticide, there’s a list. And right above the other ingredient statement, you’ll see some names on there, and some of them are a little hard to pronounce.
But what I always tell people is it’s really easy nowadays because everybody carries a computer in their pocket. So, you can Google that active ingredient, and it’ll tell you what type of active ingredient it is. And that is actually what’s important.
That’s what we call the mode of action, basically, in simple terms, how that pesticide kills insects, so different pesticides kill insects differently. So, when you look at that active ingredient, and you know its mode of action, then you can use something different with a different mode of action.
That’s what it’s all about: knowing that mode of action, knowing what active ingredient and different modes of action. It’s easy. Google it; don’t try to memorize it. It’s just easy to do; you Google it. And you it’ll tell you, oh, this is a pyrethroid. This is organophosphates. Google is a wonderful thing.
Doughman: Why should modes of action matter to poultry producers?
Powell: When you look at a mode of action, insects, especially house flies and insects with a lot of reproduction capability, if you use the same active ingredients with the same mode of action over and over on an insect population, they can become resistant.
The way I always describe resistance is, think about yourself, when you’re exposed to colds when you have young kids – and my kids are older now. But when I had young kids, and they kept bringing these things home all the time, at first, it made me very sick. Eventually, I became immune to them.
Exposure to certain things over and over again, even with people, we become resistant to colds and viruses. Insects can do the same thing with pesticides. You know, you treat, you get really good control, but some of those insects you don’t and those insects spread that, and then all of a sudden – now you’re treating – and you have a whole bunch of resistant insects.
When you switch to a different mode of action, it kills differently. They’re not resistant to that. That’s like getting exposed to a whole different thing in your life – so you might be out for a couple of days sick. So that’s what mode of action is all about.
Doughman: Do you have any recommendations for rotating insecticides?
Powell: I wish I had a scientific recommendation, but we have tried. As entomologists, we’ve gone in and we’ve said “how long does it take house flies to become resistant to something,” right? And nobody’s ever been able to show that it’s exactly this.
What we typically recommend is at least every six months, maybe a year. It all depends on your facility and what you’re seeing. I like getting on a rotation program where you’re using, again, not different products with different names, but different modes of actions every six months; or, if you can do it more, that’s great. But operationally, I always say, it’s up to the operator. Six months is good – a good standard. A year would be the longest I would go. And if you could do more, that’s great, right?
Because when you rotate from one mode of action to another, what happens is that those insects in there – the ones that are resistant – they’re getting exposed to something different, and that benefit of being resistant to a pyrethroid, let’s say, goes away. There’s a cost for that housefly to be resistant to that pyrethroid. They usually don’t reproduce as much; there’s a cost that it takes for resistance.
When you move to a different mode of action, all those resistant flies will kind of go away. And then when you go back to that pyrethroid, you rotate six months later, you’re gonna get “Wow, look at the control I got.” You’re gonna see it, because the resistance doesn’t stay forever in that housefly population. The natural flies will come, and they’ll just start a new population. And that benefit of being resistant goes away for the six months that you’re using something else. And that’s why we talk about rotation all the time.
Doughman: What about adding IGRs?
Powell: So, the great thing about using an IGR with an adulticide that – we just talked about what the mode of action is – it’s almost like a little bit of an insurance policy.
An IGR controls reproduction. It stops those insects from becoming adults and then reproducing. When you use an IGR in combination with an adulticide – even if the insects are resistant to that adulticide – it’s an insurance policy that those flies or those beetles are not going to spread that resistance to the next generation, because they never become adults.
That’s the beauty about an IGR. You don’t see the immediate effect, but it actually will slow down populations and stop them from being able to reproduce.
Doughman: Thank you so much for sharing these insights. For more information on the solutions discussed here today, visit MGK at www.mgk.com.
Thanks again, Tommy, and thanks to you for tuning in.
