Crusader Bug Comes to Orange County
It was mite versus mite in the middle of Orange County last week, part of big-time agriculture’s battle to reduce its dependency on chemicals. The unlikely front was the Irvine Ranch, one of the metropolitan area’s last bastions of farm land, which finds itself squeezed between cookie-cutter complexes of condominiums and office parks filled with malls.
Despite the urban/suburban setting, farm workers still must use the tools of their trade: pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and other toxic chemicals.
But a new program at the ranch has significantly reduced insecticide usage as part of an extensive experiment with chemical alternatives. The effort is the work of Sun World International, the Coachella-based firm that manages and farms the Orange County properties for the Irvine Co.
The process, known as Integrated Pest Management (IPM), is more than 40 years old. It involves elements of plant breeding, strategic crop planting, release of predator bugs to control those insects that harm plants or produce--and chemicals only as a last resort. IPM is considered a compromise between organic farming and traditional growing practices by blending the most practical parts of the two methods.
The process is in use throughout the state to varying degrees as growers are pressured by environmentalists, government regulators and consumers to seriously cut back on the 200 million pounds of farm chemicals used annually in California.
“In theory, IPM, as designed by agriculture researchers, is an excellent approach to pest control,” says Jennifer Curtis, senior research associate with the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. “IPM means monitoring and paying close attention to what is going on in the field and deciding what treatment, if any at all, is necessary and least disruptive to the field.”
However, Curtis complains that too many growers just give lip-service to the IPM philosophy and continue to use far more chemicals than intended under the plan.
Sun World, however, is claiming a 60% reduction in chemical usage by successfully employing IPM techniques on its trademark Le Rouge Royale bell pepper plots.
The most serious insect threat to the peppers is the spotted mite, a pinpoint-sized pest in the spider family whose scissor-like jaws attack both plant and vegetable.
In a recent demonstration, Sun World workers released 15,000 red mites (the arch enemy of the spotted variety) for every acre of pepper plants. The U.S. Department of Agriculture-approved red mites are imported from Denmark and will reproduce until they number about 50,000 per acre, a figure that should be sufficient to control damage from the spotted mite. More importantly, the use of the predator bugs has allowed the company to reduce its spraying to just three applications per growing season, down from nine.
“Spraying (insecticides) is more disruptive (it kills both good and bad bugs) and it is not completely effective for the way in which the pepper plant grows (in a dense, bushy fashion),” says Rachel Cortez Neal, a pest control manager for Sun World.
IPM practitioners realized early on that insects develop resistance to some pesticides and that increasingly stronger compounds are needed, making farmers even more dependent on chemicals. In fact, those products used to control spotted mites are Category 1 compounds, the most toxic classification in use. Environmental groups want all Category 1 products phased out in California by 1994.
“The reality is that California (agriculture) is losing its pesticides (because of government bans) and, thus, losing the tools we have to fight problems,” Cortez Neal says. “What are we going to do? Well, we have to deal with it now so we are ahead of the game . . . We want to continue to farm and to grow something that people want to eat.”
