Over the decades that pheromone pest programs have been used several disadvantages have been argued when compared to the use of conventional pesticides. Most pheromones target a single species, so a specific mating disruption formulation controls only the species that uses that pheromone blend; whereas pesticides usually kill indiscriminately a plethora of species, including multiple species with a single application. Some synthetic pheromones have high developmental and production costs, causing the mating disruption technique to be too costly to be adopted by conventional commercial growers. Furthermore most commercial pheromone mating disruption formulations must be applied by hand, which can be an expensive and time consuming. Novel pheromone formulations recently developed to be mechanically applied provide long lasting mating disruption effects (e.g., depending on the target pest a single application of SPLAT controls the target pest for a complete reproductive cycle, or for the entire season.