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The Chemical Pest Control Essay

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The Chemical Pest Control

A pest is usually seen as an organism potentially hazardous to health and is in competition with humans for space food or soil. Pesticides are any chemical or biological agent that kills plant or animal pests; herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, rodenticides, etc. are all pesticides.

There are various types of chemical pesticides available such as contact pesticides which are sprayed directly onto the crop, systematic pesticides, which are sprayed on the crop but absorbed by the leaves and transported through the plant, and residual pesticides which are sprayed on the soil before the crop is planted.

An ideal pesticide should:

- Be specific-toxic only to …show more content…

Its major disadvantage is its violently toxic nature, which has led to its use being legally restricted in the United States, however is still seen as the best pesticide to detect webworms in turfs.

Copper compounds such as copper sulphate are used as fungicides and algaecides, one of the first pesticides ever used was the Bordeaux mixture to control fungal diseases of vines. This fungicide has a history of over a century, and is still used, it is brilliant at withstanding various weather conditions, although the copper can leach out and pollute streams. It has a high level of corrosiveness and is more phytotoxic than other chemical pesticides.

It has many uses in agriculture such as, control of fungus diseases, correction of copper deficiency in soils, correction of copper deficiency in animals and stimulation of growth for fattening pigs and broiler chickens.

Most pesticides are not persistent and are quickly broken down so it doesn’t get passed along the food chain as to destroy other organisms the pesticide hasn’t been aimed at, so it harmless. However, some pesticides such as DDT are quite harmful. DDT is a colourless substance which is crystalline and was used very widely as an insecticide after 1945 and also wiped out malaria from North America and Europe.

DDT is highly persistent and was seen to accumulate in fatty

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