Examples of trap crops include:
* Alfalfa planted in strips among cotton, to draw away lygus bugs, while castor beans surround the field, or tobacco planted in strips among it, to protect from the budworm Heliothis.
* Rose enthusiasts often plant Pelargonium geraniums among their rosebushes because Japanese beetles are drawn to the geraniums, which are toxic to them.
* Chervil is used by gardeners to protect vegetable plants from slugs.
* Rye, sesbania, and sicklepod are used to protect soybeans from corn seeding maggots, stink bugs, and velvet green caterpillars, respectively.
* Mustard and alfalfa planted near strawberries to attract lygus bugs,  a method pioneered by Jim Cochran.
* Blue Hubbard squash is planted near cucurbit crops to attract squash vine borer, squash bugs, and both spotted and striped Cucumber beetle.
* In push-pull agricultural pest management, napier grass or signal grass (Brachiaria brizantha) are used as trap crops to attract stemboring moths such as Chilo partellus.
Trap crops can be planted around the circumference of the field to be protected, which is assumed to act as a barrier for entry by pests, or they can be interspersed among the main crop, for example being planted every ninth row. Planting crops in rows helps facilitate supplemental management practices that prevent insect pest dispersal back into the main field, such as driving a vehicle above the trap crop which then removes insect pests by vacuuming them off of the trap crop row  or targeted insecticides, which are only deployed on the trap crop. Even if pesticides are used to control insects on the trap crop, total pesticides are greatly reduced in this scenario over conventional agricultural pesticide applications because they are only deployed on a small portion of the farm (the trap crop). Other strategies that prevent dispersal of insect pests back into the main crop include cutting the trap plants, applying predators or parasitoids to the trap plant that eat the pest, and planting a high ratio of trap plants to other plants.
Trap crops, when used on an industrial scale, are generally planted at a key time in the pest's life-cycle, and then destroyed before that life-cycle finishes and the pest might have transferred from the trap plants to the main crop.