One advantage: Because the nature of their business is so unique, co-founder Everett J. "Deke" Dietrick, his daughter Jan, her husband Ron Whitehurst, and the rest of the Rincon-Vitova crew have always needed to innovate the equipment and techniques they needed. “Deke always says it’s much easier to train a mechanic to grow bugs than to teach an entomologist to fix equipment,” says Whitehurst, the firm’s pest-control advisor and marketing chief.

In 2004 Rincon-Vitova set out to reduce its energy consumption to carbon neutral. It started with a 5 kW solar photovoltaic (PV) array atop one of its buildings, which supplies about one-third of the company’s energy needs. The state reimbursed about $18,000 of the $40,000 cost of the PV system through its small-business energy-efficiency program, Whitehurst says, and the paperwork completed to get the state rebate was all they needed to obtain an $11,000 loan at 4% from SAFE-BIDCO, a utility industry fund created to help people conserve energy. That left Rincon-Vitova with out-of-pocket expenses of about $12,000. “Our savings are bigger than the loan payment, so we were saving money right away,” says Whitehurst.

Adding insulation and reflective radiant barriers to the roofs of insect rearing rooms (bug nurseries), which occupy a cluster of steel shipping containers and reused old wooden buildings along upper Ventura Avenue, is an ongoing part of the plan.

One aspect of the plan is converting the rearing rooms to a solar-warmed hydronic heating system. Insects require 80° F. heat to reproduce rapidly and stay healthy. The old method, using gas heaters with some supplemental electric heat, has grown increasingly expensive and led to problems from the drying nature of the heat and occasional failure of heaters.

“Our gas bills jumped 40% last year,” says Whitehurst. “They were never less than $1,000 a month and sometimes as high as $1,400.”

In one of its rearing rooms the company has experimented with hydronic heating, in which heated water is pumped through pipes. This produces a very even heat and makes humidity control easy: Just spray water on the floor. The room was fitted with PEX tubing that runs underneath the shelves holding insect containers. “For the fly parasites it worked really well,” says Whitehurst, but “for the lacewing larvae it was too dry” until they developed the water-on-the-floor trick.

Water for the hydronic system is heated by a gas-fired tankless water heater, although in the next phase of the experiment it will be heated by 17 rooftop solar collectors. For this Rincon-Vitova is refurbishing older collectors that needed only minor repairs to their copper tubes. They obtained some of these solar collectors from the Ventura County Materials Exchange Program (VCMAX) and some from other sources. Those units, from the 1970s, were obtained for “almost no cost,” says Jan Dietrick, general manager and CEO.

A new 8-by-10-foot walk-in refrigerator was installed to replace an ancient, inefficient refrigerated cargo shipping container. An office rehab will be snugly wrapped in insulation and have double-glazed windows to isolate the workers within from outside temperatures and the traffic sounds of nearby Highway 33.

All this attention to energy efficiency is just part of Rincon-Vitova’s commitment to work in harmony with nature. Aside from its core business of fighting pests with other organisms rather than chemical pesticides, the company maintains “foodscape” gardens that provide employees with fresh fruit and vegetables throughout the year—as well as favorite foods and growing mediums for ladybugs and other beneficial insects.

The waste product from rearing flies makes a great soil amendment or mulch. The company uses this material in its own foodscape, and also offers the material free of charge to gardeners in the community.

“We want to do the right thing and be examples in our dedication and experience,” says Dietrick.