This paper develops a decision aid for agricultural producers regarding their pest scouting and spraying activities. The basic issue is how estimates of pest populations are computed and when the operator should act using that information. Scouting for pests, essentially a search operation, can lead to a change in the strategy for applying pesticide. An adaptive‐scouting process is developed to unify the spraying and scouting activities. Some results, for the cotton‐lygus bug system, are presen