A Grower’s Way of Life Threatened by an Insect

Will Gerry is a farmer. He can handle a crisis.

Toss him a frost or a flood or a drought, and he’ll figure out a way to deal with it. He might lose money, but he’ll come through.

This latest crisis, however, has him scared. He has never before battled the Mediterranean fruit fly.

Just three miles from his Camarillo orange grove, trappers found two fertile female Medflies late last week. Inspectors are out there now, prodding and picking and poking as they search for more of the fruit-gobbling insects. Gerry wants to know what they find. Needs to know. Dreads to know.

“There’s a tightness in my stomach,” he said.

His wife, Joy, feels shaky too. Her unease began Friday afternoon, when she learned that Medflies had made their first known foray into Ventura County.

“I started crying as soon as I heard,” she said. “When you hear the word ‘Medfly,’ you know that means trouble with a capital T.”

So far, inspectors have uncovered just two Medflies, both fertile, freshly mated females found drowned in a glass-bottle trap dangling from the branch of a squat fig tree. But experts warn that for every Medfly captured, another thousand usually flit nearby, burrowing into sweet ripe fruit and laying wave upon wave of eggs.

And although intensive weekend trapping yielded no new Medflies, officials are poised to slap a quarantine on all produce grown within a 4 1/2-mile radius of the original find. A spokesman at the Cooperative Medfly Project, a joint state and federal task force in charge of battling the bug, said he expects an announcement within days.

Gerry’s 93-acre grove--speckled with ripe yellow lemons--falls within the likely quarantine zone.

A quarantine would force him at his own expense to spray malathion, a potent pesticide, on any fruit shipped out of his orchards. He normally harvests up to 15% of his lemons from early October to Christmas. And the price of malathion spraying could render that crop worthless.

If the lemons cost too much to treat, he’ll have to let them wither on the trees, he said.

“We don’t work on large margins,” he explained, strolling through his orchard as his puppy, Phantom, yapped at passing shadows.

But that’s not the worst of it--not by far.

If authorities confirm a massive Medfly invasion in Ventura County, the entire agriculture industry could suffer for a lot longer than any quarantine might last.

The Japanese have long threatened to ban the import of all California produce if the Medfly plague spreads beyond the Los Angeles Basin. Proof of Medfly migration north to Ventura County could trigger a boycott. And since nearly one-third of Gerry’s lemons are sold to Japan through the Sunkist cooperative . . . he does not like to think about the consequences.

“A lot could happen in the worst-case scenario,” he said.

In his quarter-century on the farm, Gerry has endured many bad spells.

He’s survived droughts and flooding rains, wells that run dry, trees that don’t blossom and many, many, hungry pests.

But those were disasters he could see and study. He could take action. With the Medfly, his enemy is elusive, his battle plan uncertain. State and federal officials have taken over the investigation and will direct any eradication efforts. He must wait for them to make decisions that could sink him.

“This is a much more intense crisis because it’s so out of our control,” Gerry said. “In a frost, I can turn on my wind machines, run my water. That may not do anything, but at least I’m trying, and that makes me feel better. With this, I don’t know what to do.”

He does know, however, that he wants the Medflies out of Ventura County. Even if he has to sacrifice some of his crop to intensive pesticide spraying, even aerial spraying, he wants the agricultural community to take decisive, aggressive action.

“That pest must not be here,” he said simply.

Of course, fighting the Medfly full-tilt could require aerial spraying of malathion bait, a sticky mixture of poison and corn syrup. In other counties, the mere mention of pesticide-spewing helicopters has sparked furious community protest and threats of lawsuits.

Pleading for cooperation and understanding, Gerry said, “I really hope this would not end up in court. All this antagonism really bothers me.”

Even if neighbors and politicians permit spraying, however, the Medfly problem might persist. Medflies breed so quickly that spraying rarely zaps them all. Because they feast on 200 different crops, renegades are hard to track down.

Gerry suspects the two Medflies found in Camarillo hitchhiked to Ventura County in a sack of fruit transported from the Los Angeles Basin, where a quarantine covers 1,500 square miles. He knows that such transgressions can occur again and again.

“This thing goes beyond all barriers and moves so fast,” Gerry said. “Stopping them must be a community effort.”

Deena Gerry, Will’s mother, insists on optimism. “This is a wonderful way of life and we’re not going to quit,” she said. Gerry agrees readily. But nervously.

“We’re committed to being here,” he said. “We like the lifestyle. We just hope it’s not taken away from us.”