Pesticide Application and Integrated Pest Management

Our Approach

What separates us from a lawn spray route is not the equipment. It is that we evaluate the property first and then apply the method that our evaluation indicates is the best approach, which is not always the method the industry sells.

Integrated Pest Management

Integrated Pest Management, or IPM, is the framework professional pest management is built on. It is not a product and it is not a schedule. It is a decision process that runs in order: identify the species correctly, monitor the property to learn where the animal or insect is and how much of it is present, judge whether the damage justifies action, then select from the full set of tools rather than reaching first for the one that is easiest to sell.

The tools available to us on a given property include:

• Identification and monitoring. Confirming the species and mapping activity before anything is applied or set.
• Habitat and cultural modification. Irrigation practices, mowing height, leaf litter, mulch borders, drainage, container removal, and the placement of structures that concentrate pests or their hosts.
• Food source management. Reducing the prey base a pest is working, including soil invertebrate populations in turf.
• Exclusion. Physical barriers that keep an animal out of a structure, a bed, or a defined area.
• Direct removal. Trapping and physical capture, which is the tool that actually takes an animal off the property.
• Repellents. Registered repellent products where the evidence supports them and where moving an animal is an acceptable outcome.
• Toxicants and pesticide applications. Registered products applied by a licensed applicator, on label, at the point in the pest's biology when the application does something.
• Verification and follow-up. Returning to confirm the result and adjusting the program when the property changes.

No single tool solves a pest problem on its own. A program that uses several of them, sequenced against the pest's biology and the season, is what IPM means in practice.

Why These Are Maintenance Programs

Pest pressure is a condition of a property, not an event that happens once. Neighboring land, deer movement, soil moisture, rainfall, and the water and cover on adjoining parcels all keep supplying pressure regardless of what happened on your acreage last month. Remove a mole and the runway system it built remains, available to the next animal that disperses into it. Knock down a mosquito population and containers two lots over refill it. Clear ticks off the edge and deer walk more in.

That is why our services are structured as maintenance programs rather than one-time treatments. A program keeps the monitoring going, applies the right tool at the right point in the season, and catches the rebound before it becomes damage you can see. It also lets us spend your money on the tool that works in a given month instead of the same application twelve times a year.

Our Programs

Every program below is built the same way and stocked from the same toolbox. What changes is which tools carry the load and how often we are on the property, and that is driven by the biology of the pest, not by a billing preference.

Mole Damage Management

Surface runways, molehills, and browning turf along the tunnels.

Moles are insectivores, more closely related to shrews than to rodents, and they eat constantly. Published intake figures run from 70 to 100 percent of body weight per day. In the stomach content data reported in the standard wildlife damage management handbook, white grubs were present in 64 of 100 eastern mole stomachs and earthworms in 49, with beetles and beetle larvae also heavily represented. Grubs are not incidental to a mole. They are one of its principal foods.

That is why the food base is part of the program and not an afterthought. The same handbook lists food source reduction as a cultural control method, reporting that reducing soil moisture and removing the food source with insecticides discourages moles and generally results in lower populations. It carries an important caution with it, and we pass that caution on: before moles leave an area, they may increase digging in search of food, so surface damage can worsen for a period before it improves.

Our program works both ends at once. We map the runways to learn which tunnels are active. Trapping and labeled toxicant baits take the animals that are on the property now, and trapping remains the most effective single control method for moles. Turf grub applications go down on the turf calendar to protect root systems, and on the treated acreage they reduce the seasonal soil invertebrate load. Irrigation practice is adjusted, because consistently wet turf holds prey near the surface and holds moles with it. Surface ridges are rolled or tamped so the grass recovers instead of dying along every run.

Mole pressure does not end when the last animal is caught. The runway system stays in the ground, adjoining properties keep producing dispersers, and good habitat refills. That is why this is offered both as a job to resolution and as an annual turn-key program with unlimited removals, activity-triggered visits, and one late-spring turf grub application.

Turf repair and site recommendations are included in both.

Read the full Mole Damage Management page, or see mole removal and Turn-Key Mole Program pricing on the price list.

Tick Management and Tick-Borne Disease Risk

Kentucky sits in the heart of lone star tick country, and the Kentucky Department for Public Health identifies Rocky Mountain spotted fever, ehrlichiosis, and Lyme disease as the primary tick-borne illnesses of concern in the Commonwealth. Alpha-gal syndrome, the tick-induced allergy to mammalian meat, is a growing problem here as well.

Ticks are the clearest case for IPM on a residential property, because the single most common approach, a broadcast spray of the lawn, puts product where ticks are not and leaves the exposure where they are. Ticks concentrate in the woodland edge, leaf litter, tall grass, and shaded transition zones, and the load on a property is driven by deer and small mammal activity that a spray does not touch.

The program is built on a written assessment: where the ticks are, what habitat is producing them, what host activity is feeding it, and where all of that intersects the routes your family and pets actually use. From there we place acaricide on tick habitat rather than across turf, modify the habitat that is producing them, address host concentration, and build the personal protection side that the research says carries the most weight.

Assessment is renewed annually, and reassessed whenever the property changes: new landscaping, a cleared fence line, a shift in deer pressure, a new play area near the woods.

Read the full Tick Management page.

Mosquito Management and Mosquito-Borne Disease Risk

In 2025 the Kentucky Department for Public Health issued a statewide health alert on mosquito-borne illness after West Nile virus cases nearly tripled the prior-year average and La Crosse virus appeared in eastern and central Kentucky.

Mosquitoes are a maintenance problem by definition. The adults you feel are the visible end of a population being produced in water on and around the property, and that production does not stop because a barrier application went down three weeks ago.

The program starts with finding the water, including the cryptic containers most inspections miss: corrugated downspout extensions, hollow fence posts, tarp folds, plant saucers, and treeholes. Source reduction comes first because it is the only step that lowers production rather than knocking back what has already emerged. Larvicide handles the water that cannot be removed. Targeted adulticide barrier applications go on the shaded resting habitat mosquitoes actually use, timed and placed to keep product off blooming plants. Retreatment follows published efficacy intervals and your actual pressure, not a subscription calendar.

Read the full Mosquito Management page.

Turf, Lawn, and Ornamental Pest Management

Licensed applications for turf, lawns, and flower beds, including white grub management to protect root systems from larval beetle feeding. Applications are scouted and threshold-based, made on the correct seasonal calendar, and sold as turf protection.

Turf grub application is $215 per acre, with any part of an acre billed as a full acre; see the price list.

TODO (Jon): Pricing owed from Jon: published prices for turf, lawn, and ornamental pest treatments beyond the $215/acre turf grub application. Until supplied, these treatments are quoted on request; no prices have been invented.

Why a Wildlife Biologist

Most pest control is chemistry applied on a schedule. Wildlife management is a different discipline. It asks which species is present, what it needs, what the habitat is providing, and what intervention will actually change the outcome. That question is the front half of IPM, and it is the half most companies skip.

Southern Wildlife Resources is led by a Ph.D. wildlife biologist and Certified Wildlife Biologist whose career spans state wildlife agency leadership, including eight years as Commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, and national conservation policy work. We evaluate the primary literature, we work these problems in the field every season, and we will tell you when the product you were about to buy will not solve your problem.

How We Work

1. Site assessment. We walk the property and identify the species, the habitat driving it, and where it intersects how you actually use your land.
2. Written plan. What we are treating, what we are using, when, and what result to expect. If part of the problem cannot be solved with a pesticide application, the plan says so.
3. Execution by a licensed applicator, in accordance with the product label and Kentucky pesticide regulations.
4. Monitoring and adjustment. We verify the result, and we change the tool when the season or the property changes.

Our Licensed Applicators

These members of our team hold pesticide applicator or dealer credentials:

• Jonathan Gassett, Ph.D.
• Robin Gassett

Reference Library

We publish plain-language reference guides on the species we manage. They are free, they are cited, and they will tell you honestly when a problem does not require hiring anyone.

• Moles in Kentucky Lawns
• Ticks of Kentucky and the Diseases They Carry
• Mosquitoes of Kentucky and the Diseases They Carry

TODO (Jon): The three reference PDFs are owed from Jon and will be linked here as free downloads when he supplies the files. The titles above are listed without links on purpose; nothing is linked until the documents exist.

Service Area

Southern Wildlife Resources serves Central and Northern Kentucky, including Anderson, Boone, Bourbon, Boyle, Bracken, Campbell, Carroll, Clark, Fayette, Franklin, Gallatin, Grant, Harrison, Henry, Jefferson, Jessamine, Kenton, Madison, Mercer, Nicholas, Oldham, Owen, Pendleton, Robertson, Scott, Shelby, Spencer, Trimble, Washington, and Woodford counties. Get in touch to schedule an assessment.

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