‘Tis the Season!  Relax a little, reflect a little and be prepared to change.

As the year winds to a close it’s a great time to take a well-deserved deep breath. Business is slowing down as the occasional invaders from outside die off with the frost, but a great long Indian Summer helped fill the coffers with an extra treatment here and there. 

In retrospect not a bad year to be in Pest Control

It’s also a great time to review both your customer base, and the high points, and low points and figure out how to better tackle 2024.

But in doing this, take stock of your toolbox and make a note of what worked great, and what didn’t.   Call backs or a satisfied customer.

Then change, adopt and adapt, find out other’s successes.  And think about how to do your job with dwindling tools and product restrictions.

Be prepared for the on-going uprising in cities and towns and provinces as these pesticide bans and restrictions start to snowball across the country.

What happens if the rodenticide bans hits 80% of your customer base in Ontario?  Or continues to expand to other products and use areas?  Neonics, pyrethroids, and perimeter applications. 

The trick is being proactive instead of reactive.

Let me give you an example…

BC banned the Second Generation Anti-coagulant Rodenticides 2 years ago. Montreal followed suit this year and now the buzz is that the same discussion is taking place in Ontario, especially Toronto. in reaction, SPMAO had an emergency meeting in an attempt to bring members together to fight this, with about 20 folks going to or zooming the conference.

Too little, too late? Probably, to be truthful.

But what kept them from starting up 2 – 3 years ago, simply by engaging the whole industry to start laying the groundwork locally that rodenticides, including the SGARs. SPMAO and CPMA and non-members (ask distributions help) should have started a grass roots campaign targeted at local level politicians.

A simple but real list of the reasons why we need to keep these, and the negatives if lost.

All, yes every last one, of your local politicians know absolutely nothing about rodenticides. They have no position, until it’s brought to their attention. And so far the first ones to mention the word are…

You guessed it! The dreaded ”environmentalist”. But the real word is the ”anti-pesticide movement”. They need one dead owl, and boom! No mention the owl was hit by a truck first, but the autopsy showed rodenticide in its system. Or did it? Since the BC ministry folks wont share the results….

But thats water under the rat.

So since we weren’t prepared to be proactive and you lose Contrac, Resolv, Ratak and Final, what else have you used? What else have you tried? Might be the season, eh?

Happy Holidays, may peace rain down on all of us.