Biological pest control

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Biological pest control (also called Integrated Pest Management) relies on useful organisms to deal with pest organisms. If you have grasshoppers destroying your vegetables, see it as an opportunity! Those grasshoppers represent energy and biological matter in your garden and all you have to do is convert that into a more desirable form. You can do this by getting turkeys; a turkey can transform 3kg of grasshopper into 1kg of valuable meat. A particularly effective technique is to use one plant that repels the pest, and another that attracts it away from the food crop. See push-pull technology.

Some mushrooms can advantageously be grown to repel pest insects such as aphids, grasshoppers, termites and others. See Wikipedia's page on entomopathogenic fungi and our page on mushrooms.

Useful online tools for planning biological pest control