The world of land extermination is a very distant process from structural extermination. Fumigation is rare and most treatments are done with powers dropped from a plane flying low over the field. While there are many other ways to kill off pests on farms and large agricultural plants the most important part of learning about land extermination licenses are the specific pests that most often torment the agricultural industry.
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If you want to know just how many, and just how devastating farm and agricultural pests are just take the True Bug. This is a name given to a group of fifty to eighty million different species of bugs that have dozens if not hundreds of transformation stages in their growth from egg to adult and the most common is the Aphid. This insect is very small and can access a plant so directly that it can drain its sap. The plant cannot survive with its sap and when Aphids attack en masse they can destroy whole crops while leaving the plants visually untouched with an exception for thousands and thousands of tiny holes in green leaves. Like Al Capone took a minigun to the plants. These holes can be seen all over, on tree leaves in parks and arboretums. You will also notice that every leaf that has been chewed through more than a few times is already dying. This is how to severe an Aphid infestation can be.
Locust is a well known and often tired example of pests. While America is rarely plagued by them due to our advanced pesticides they still destroy thousands of crops in less advanced countries that rely on their agriculture for survival. These insects date back to ancient Egypt when it was considered a curse from the gods, punishment for not following the dogma of the religion of the time. In truth, grasshoppers and locusts are seasonal insects that produce different numbers every year. Many times the numbers will be low and the danger minor. However, in a year when the locust swarms are large, they can cause devastation across hundreds of miles of farm land. They can also eat their body weight in plant matter a day which can destroy an entire crop in a very short time.
The mormon cricket is one of the most interesting and difficult to deal with pests in agriculture and do not show up seasonally but in something called “outbreaks” like it is a disease or bacteria. In essence, they are. They will suddenly appear in a large area and begin destroying and consuming everything they can find and will remain in that area consistently for up to 20 years. Like the Romans who salted the earth of their enemies so that nothing would grow, so to do the Mormon crickets eliminate large swaths of farm land for decades at a time.
One of the most important crops in the world, corn, the maker of corn syrup, of Doritos and corn bread, popcorn and just about everything else we all love is made of corn or has an ingredient in it that is made of corn. It has saved society from the cost of importing cane sugar and has filled our shelves with high sugar and high-fat foods that allow us to have more than we can eat, a goal dreamed of by farmers thousands of years before. This crop is under threat from something called the Corn Root Worm. They are a danger because of their incredible resistance to many kinds of pesticides. They live in the ground through the winter and then emerge in June and July to start consuming corn silk and leaves that renders the cob unprotected from the sun which kills the plant. They also lay their eggs in the corn immediately after feeding so trying to grow corn on the same land over multiple years will make the issue worse and worse by the year.
