Pest Issue Bugs Many Local Growers

In the last two months, Tom Morris has had to keep an eagle eye on his shrubs at the Baron Bros. Nursery in Camarillo. He’s on the lookout for glassy-winged sharpshooters: ugly, bacteria-carrying bugs with needle noses and a penchant for destroying acres of crops.

The worry isn’t for his plants--they’re merely hosts. He’s protecting the grapes of Napa and Sonoma counties. And his own business.

“The northern counties just keep adding more regulations and more regulations,” Morris said. “On one shipment, they just saw one egg mass and they made us take it back.”

Ventura County has been living with sharpshooters for years, but with the war against the grape-devastating glassy-winged sharpshooter raging in the Central Valley, Southern California has become a battleground in the plan to keep the insect from spreading throughout the state.

Ventura County supervisors are expected to accept $267,000 from the state Department of Food and Agriculture--a tiny part of the $36.3 million pledged to the state by the federal government--to root out the glassy-winged sharpshooter, a pest described as the most serious threat ever to California’s grape crop. The federal government last month declared an agricultural emergency over the pest.

The battle plan has some area farmers resentful that the state and federal governments are willing to fund a battle against a bug plaguing the powerful wine lobby, but have done little to stop the impending import of Argentine lemons, which local citrus growers fear will spread unknown diseases to their orchards.

“There’s some grumbling. There’s no doubt about that,” said Agricultural Commissioner Earl McPhail. But “we as a regulator have to do whatever we’re requested to do.”

Jim Churchill, an Ojai avocado and citrus grower, said he doesn’t begrudge the wine industry its weapons against the pest, but hopes to see more help for growers in this county.

“They [grape growers] are an influential bunch of guys who have managed to motivate the state and federal government that this is a serious problem statewide,” Churchill said. “I wish we had that clout for avocado and citrus growers.”

The funding is expected to pay the salaries of four additional agricultural inspectors, who would make regular visits to nurseries that ship outside the county to search host plants for the bug. That means that some inspectors who have been working on the sharpshooter problem will be able to focus on other tasks, including pesticide regulation and other pest inspection, McPhail said.

The insect carries a bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa, that causes Pierce’s disease. The disease, which is incurable, clogs a plant’s water-carrying tissues so that it slowly dies of thirst.

Experts said the half-inch-long bugs like to munch on the stems of a wide variety of crops, including citrus--which is not susceptible to Pierce’s disease. The insects have spread to the ornamental oleander along highways and are visible along river bottoms, where they’re attracted to willow trees, said Paul Baradat, a pest control advisor at Green Thumb in Ventura.

The disease has never been a real problem in this county, despite the presence of the hungry little monsters for years, and is only cataclysmic for grapes, said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. He questioned how well an inspection process would work in stemming the tide of the insect.

“I doubt that they’ll be able to isolate it,” Laird said. “It’s spread through the state more than people think.” The point is “for us not to become [known as] the West Coast distributors of the glassy-winged sharpshooter.”

Bob Kelly has a more pressing reason to worry. His Camarillo vineyard, Pacific Ridge, is one of the few grape growers in the county. He hasn’t seen any evidence of the bug yet and is fairly certain his grapes are isolated enough to avoid any large-scale visits from the far-flying suckers.

But he knows there’s little he can do for his tiny acreage.

“We realize the whole thing could be completely wiped out,” he said. “But we’ll just hope for the best.”