Bug Vs. Bug : With Growing Concern Over Danger of Pesticides, Farmers Turn to ‘Good Insects’ in Fight Against Bad

When most people want to get rid of bugs, they call in an exterminator. When Jake Blehm wants to get rid of bugs, he calls in other bugs.

Blehm and his father Jack run Rincon Vitova, a Ventura firm that breeds good insects that eat bad insects.

Each day, they produce more than 80 million hungry critters from ladybugs to wasps, which are let loose by farmers to devour pests from mealybugs to houseflies.

As concern about agricultural pesticides mounts, firms that offer farmers organic alternatives are fairly buzzing with business. Rincon Vitova says business has tripled in the last five years. Last year the Blehms supplied millions of dollars (they won’t give actual sales figures) worth of bugs to customers on three continents.

“They’re the major supplier in the U. S. and they’ve been very successful in working with the growers,” said Larry G. Bezark, a pest management specialist with the state Department of Food and Agriculture in Sacramento.

Bio-pest control, as the system is called, is a low-tech method of controlling bugs that was first used by the Chinese thousands of years ago, although it came into vogue again in the late 1800s.

But that was before the chemical pesticide industry took off in the late 1940s and became the preferred method of controlling insects.

The tide is slowly turning however, and today, a close-knit group of about 15 insectaries nationwide have sales that total $25 million annually, Blehm estimates.

In agricultural Ventura County, a handful of insectaries flourish, including two non-commercial grower cooperatives started by farmers to breed insects that eat citrus parasites. They are the Fillmore Insectary, which dates to 1922, and Associates Insectary in Santa Paula. Several other firms breed bugs, albeit on a smaller scale than Rincon Vitova, including Sespe Creek Insectary and Oxnard Pest Control.

Industry-watchers say the field is poised for growth as an increasing number of growers turn to organic farming to satisfy consumer demand. Universities are adding classes on integrated pest management. The Assn. of Applied Insect Ecologists, a trade group, is producing a video that shows farmers how to work with beneficial insects. And the state agriculture department has given its stamp of approval to the method.

“The department is definitely promoting bio-control. As more and more chemicals are being restricted, it’s an economic alternative,” said Bezark, whose office includes six pest management specialists who help farmers launch bio-control programs.

“This is the future,” added Ken Hagen, a professor of entomology at UC Berkeley. “There is a great need. The farmers are desperate.”

State agriculture officials say they don’t know how many growers practice bio-control, although they estimate that it’s under 10%.

However, many echo the sentiments of Oxnard grower Dean Walsh, who converted his 800 acres of vegetables to organic farming two years ago and now keeps pests under control with bugs purchased from Rincon Vitova.

‘Much Healthier’

“It has worked quite well, and it’s much healthier, not only for the end user but for the ground, the ground water and the employees applying it,” Walsh said.

But controlling pests this way also takes longer. And since pesticides often kill good bugs along with the bad, farmers must cease chemical spraying while waiting for the good bugs to take effect.

“The hardest thing for the farmer is to have enough faith,” Blehm said. “He’s not used to seeing pests in the field; he’s used to a quick knockdown when you go in, spray and next day you come back and see dead bugs. With this method, you have to watch for several weeks before you see a difference. And at the beginning, all the farmer sees is that his crop is contaminated with bugs.”

Also, a farmer must cultivate a habitat for his insect armies, which can mean growing a “cover” crop such as clover in between the cash crop of, say, strawberries.

Then there’s calculating when to release the insects.

Computer Models

Rincon Vitova works closely with farmers to draw up a method of application and monitoring. They use computer modeling to track the insects’ life cycle, the weather and other variables.

“It’s a very complex web of life we’re trying to manipulate. We time the release of these insects to coincide with when the pest is most vulnerable,” Blehm said.

Depending on the size of the field, laborers can walk through the planted crops, sprinkling bugs or bug larvae like some insect-bearing Johnny Appleseed. Blehm has also been known to use a specially rigged leaf blower and, in the case of large fields, to disgorge them in bulk from helicopters.

Rincon Vitova mixes the insects with an inert material such as corn cobs, calculating a density of between 5,000 to 250,000 insects per acre, depending on the parasite and crop.

The firm also ships a lot to greenhouses and plant maintenance firms that release the bugs in indoor areas with plants, such as malls and offices.

Catalogue Sales

Locally, Green Thumb, a Ventura nursery, sells some Rincon Vitova bugs. Distributors hawk Rincon Vitova insects through mail-order catalogues, also pitching “bug chow,” a specially prepared mix to feed beneficial insects before loosing them for battle.

Rincon Vitova began in 1948. Blehm’s father, Jack, a licensed pest control adviser, provided the business and production expertise. His partner, E. J. Dietrick, an entomologist formerly with the biological control division at UC Riverside, provided the field know-how. They took their name from Rincon Beach, where they first set up shop, and Vitova Insectaries, a Riverside-based firm that they acquired in 1972.

The firm sells 15 species, including predatory mites, beetles and parasitic wasps, which help control flies at chicken and livestock ranches by feeding on the larvae. There’s also general predators such as lacewings and ladybugs, which indiscriminately eat most soft-bodied bugs.

Main Users

The insects are sold primarily to cotton and vegetable growers, as well as to back-yard farmers who want to avoid pesticides. Rincon Vitova also sells about 5% of its crop to universities and the U. S. Department of Agriculture for research, Blehm said.

They also swap bugs with other insectaries, trading, for instance, a few million Cryptolemus (mealybug-eating ladybugs) for an equivalent number of Aphyis melius (a bug that attacks the California red scale, a citrus parasite).

The Fillmore Citrus Protective District, a cooperative of 350 growers that runs the Fillmore Insectary, says the local insectaries complement one another and avoid competition by breeding different species of insects.

The district has 9,200 acres under bio-control and raises four species of bugs that attack citrus parasites. “It’s safe and it’s less expensive than using insecticides,” said Monte Carpenter, the district’s manager.

Business has grown steadily for Rincon Vitova. In 1972, the firm moved to a compound in the midst of oil fields near the mouth of the Ojai Valley. Today it employs about 40 workers during peak season (April to September), and houses its offices in cottages alongside the railroad tracks. The bugs hang out in a series of former ship cargo containers.

Pleasant Setting

Bug headquarters is a disarmingly pleasant place, planted with flowers and graveled walkways. But a sour smell of meal and of millions of insects hatching and mating and dying permeates parts of the compound.

Blehm reports no major insect breakouts so far. Every once in a while, he said, a bunch of flies will get loose, but “it isn’t like they fly over someone’s house and take over.”

Rincon Vitova’s film-maker clients however, want bugs that can do just that. Last summer, a studio filming a horror movie placed a request for four gallons of maggots.

“We shipped them Federal Express to their location site in Montana,” Blehm said.

The Blehms estimate that they spend about 70% of their time raising host insects for the beneficial insects to feed on. It takes about four months to get a species under cultivation.

“It’s not high-tech. Growing bugs is very low-tech,” said Blehm, who has a bachelor’s degree in agribusiness and economics from Colorado State University, where he also studied entomology for two years.

Mesh Cages

Lacewings, for instance, are raised in cages that resemble gallon-sized ice cream cartons covered at both ends with fine mesh. Five hundred adult lacewings are put into each case and within three days produce 5,000 eggs that stick to the cage’s paper lining. The paper is removed and the eggs are scraped off and stored in a refrigerator.

When an order comes in, the Blehms ship the eggs UPS or Federal Express in insulated plastic foam containers. Once dropped onto fields, they will hatch and begin eating the agricultural predators.

Trichogramma, on the other hand, is a tiny wasp that attacks avocado-eating bugs called loopers but will only feast on looper larvae. So Rincon Vitova must coordinate release of the tiny wasps shortly after looper love season, right after the female lays its eggs.

The whole system works on delicate timing. An unexpected heat wave can speed the reproductive process; cold can chill it. “We don’t have a lot of shelf life,” Blehm said.

Guarding Secrets

After years of honing their bug-raising skills, the Blehms consider many of their techniques proprietary. They used to give frequent tours to business and scientific groups from around the world: One recent delegation hailed from the People’s Republic of China. But the Blehms have cut down on the tours recently, alarmed that many of their guests spent the time asking technical questions, taking furious notes and snapping photos.

They still ask to come in droves to Rincon Vitova, however, because much remains unknown about manipulating insect environments. Bio-control is a sensitive process, and bugs and animals that take over new habitats have been known to wreak havoc: Witness the Medfly and the so-called “killer bees.”

Most inquiring minds recall the killer bee saga, which began when a high-yield Africa honeybee with a vicious temperament escaped from a Brazilian lab, mated with local bees and began winging its way to North America. Entomologists say killer bees sting in swarms without provocation, which has led to several human deaths and destruction of cattle herds.

Averting Disaster

Today, scientists know the perils of introducing animals and insects into an environment that lacks natural predators. When a pest is introduced by accident, federal food and agriculture officials often visit the pest’s original host country, find a natural predator and introduce it into the new habitat where the pest has been running wild.

More than 600 species of beneficial insects have been introduced this way into American agriculture in the past 100 years to curb pest populations, according to the U. S. Department of Agriculture, which must approve the insects for use before firms like Rincon Vitova can start breeding them.

Phil Phillips, a pest management specialist with the University of California state cooperative extension service, said Rincon Vitova works closely with government and university officials to identify and breed potential new beneficial insects.

But until recently, Jake Blehm said, “we’ve been considered the alternative and not the mainstream.”

Like Dean Walsh, however, more and more farmers are seeing results.

“Once we weren’t spraying the fungicides and pesticides and insecticides, the ladybugs came in and we also saw frogs coming into the field--a lot of natural elements that weren’t there before. It’s a much healthier way to farm.”