Companion Planting and Insect Pest Control

There is growing public concern about pesticides’ non-target effects on humans and other organisms, and many pests have evolved resistance to some of the most commonly-used pesticides. Together, these factors have led to increasing interest in non-chemical, ecologicallysound ways to manage pests [1]. One pest-management alternative is the diversification of agricultural fields by establishing “polycultures” that include one or more different crop varieties or species within the same field, to more-closely match the higher species richness typical of natural systems [2, 3]. After all, destructive, explosive herbivore outbreaks typical of agricultural monocultures are rarely seen in highly-diverse unmanaged communities.