A quarantine is pending in San Luis Obispo County after three adult light brown apple moths (LBAM) were found in Los Osos on July 31.
This is following similar quarantines in Los Angeles County, Ventura County and the Bay Area (approximately 3,473 squares miles or about 2 percent of California) the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) said.
Native to Australia, the caterpillar stage of the moth can destroy, stunt or deform young seedlings, spoil the appearance of ornamental plants and injure citrus, grapes and deciduous fruit crops such as apples, cherries and pears according to the San Luis Obispo County Department of Agriculture.
“The light brown apple moth has been present for three years in California,” Bob Lilley, Agricultural Commissioner/Sealer for San Luis Obispo County, said.
The first LBAM was detected in Berkeley in 2006 and was positively confirmed by the United States Department of Agriculture on March 22, 2007, according to the USDA Web site.
The quarantine presents a major obstacle for Central Coast farmers who sell their products to areas outside of the quarantine limits, said David Headrick, member of the Environmental Advisory Task Force.
What is a quarantine?
Quarantine regulations instituted by the CDFA are aimed at preventing the spread of LBAM to other areas of California and to other states. It could take up to one year for a quarantine to be lifted, the county said.
State and federal quarantine regulations prohibit the movement of all vegetation within or from the quarantined area unless it is certified as free from the pest by an agriculture official, is purchased at a retail outlet, or was produced outside the area and is passing through in accordance with accepted safeguards, the CDFA said.
Within a quarantined area, regulations require that all known host plant material must meet phytosanitary protocols, Headrick said.
“Loosely translated that means all plant material must be sprayed with pesticides to kill off any light brown apple moths that might be present,” he said.
Exterminating the Light Brown Apple Moth
Quarantines are the first step to controlling LBAM for the CDFA. The ultimate goal is eradication.
The CDFA has reviewed a range of strategies to terminate the moth, including: spraying ground-based pesticide, releasing sterile moths and tying twist ties coated with pheromones designed to disrupt mating on trees and fences in urban areas. The CDFA also evaluated aerial pheromone spraying outside residential areas but was met with considerable public resistance. People don’t want to be inhaling sprays.
The USDA and CDFA recently lifted quarantines for LBAM in Santa Barbara County after success using the pheromone infused twist tie method.
Currently, there are no eradication treatments planned in San Luis Obispo County.
While some think extermination is needed, others believe that the CDFA has exaggerated the threat of LBAM to get money for its budget.
Stephen Scholl-Buckwald, Managing Director of Pesticide Action Network North America, contends the moth doesn’t pose a significant threat to California’s agriculture industry and can be managed without a massive eradication effort.
“This is a pest that is going to have to be managed, it’s not going to be possible to eradicate but it can be managed quite well,” said Scholl-Buckwald. “They have been managing it in Australia and New Zealand for well over a century and Hawaii for 100 years.”
Critics contend that quarantine and eradication measures pose environmental and health hazards and will take an economic toll on some growers.
“Not enough is known in California, if one starts with the notion that this is a pest to be managed and not eradicated they are already down a path that makes a lot of sense,” Scholl-Buckwald said.
The Pesticide Action Network also argues the controversial bug should be taken off the high-threat target list of farm pests.
“It should be reclassified so they don’t have to use extreme measures,” Scholl-Buckwald said.
Local Impact
Locally, the real economic issue is the impact that quarantines have on growers’ ability to sell their products, Headrick said.
The College of Agriculture at Cal Poly is the fourth largest undergraduate agriculture program in the nation. Within the college, the horticulture and crop science department teaches numerous pest management classes.
Dr. Michael Costello says invasive pests have always been a part of his curriculum.
Costello doesn’t think LBAM will have much of an economic impact on local farmers.
“It’s not going to change things that much; a big percentage of grape growers have to pay for other closely related moths already,” Costello said.
Invasive pests are a chronic problem in agriculture.
“We always have to worry about something,” he said.
MOTH IS A COMPLETE FRAUD.
In order to get $ to expand their own budget, The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) exaggerated the danger of an insect called the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM). CDFA repeatedly announces that the moth will devastate agriculture, forests, home gardens, everything in California even though there are NO examples of these types of devastations anywhere else on earth where the moth lives.
CDFA says they will use the money (Billions of dollars over decades) to eradicate the “Pest.” And then CDFA implements an entire program of activities to appear that they truly are eradicating the insect. They force growers to buy and use unnecessary pesticides on their crops. They inspect fields and for those farmers who challenge them, they increase the number of inspections and they trample their crops and further interfere with the growers’ ability to earn a living. They put quarantines all over the state that makes it even more difficult for farmers and nursery operations to move their products. And none of this is necessary – that is the crime.
The director of the CDFA is named A.G. Kawamura. He is already responsible for children being rushed to emergency rooms unable to breathe and tens of thousands of people getting ill from unnecessary toxic pesticides being released into their communities. Kawamura toured communities and told the people that the pesticide was “Non-toxic” to humans even though a state agency report existed that clearly stated the pesticide was toxic. So destroying small farms in San Luis Obisbo is trivial for Kawamura. CDFA can shut down an operation based on “Suspected finds” and since CDFA is the one that decides which moths are suspected, they can go after the nurseries that challenge their despicable methods and lies.
And all for something that is totally unnecessary, other than increasing the budget of his organization and giving Kawamura funds to distribute to insider pesticide manufacturers that are given the lucrative pesticide contracts with the CDFA.
The Light Brown Apple Moth – No Big Deal.
1. It is true that the first detection of LBAM inland was 2006, but there have also been numerous detections at inspections arriving in country for nearly 30 years. It would be foolish to believe than no LBAM had ever made it through prior to a Micro-moth specialty Entomologist at Berkeley finding/identifying a couple in his back yard in 2006. They look identical to other tortricidae (leaf roller) moths, requiring DNA testing for verification.
2. Also, based on the numbers and the square miles that LBAM currently covers, it is likely that LBAM has been in California for numerous decades, likely 30-50 years or more. Based on distance LBAM travels during its life (only a small number of yards), based on the number of generations per year, based on real statistics and science, for LBAM to have reached the sprawl in California that it has (over tens of thousands of square miles), it has had to be in California many decades. No moth, in the history of the world, would fit the pattern of spread that would be required for LBAM to be in the numbers and square mile coverage that it is in California if LBAM were only here for a few years. James Carey, UC Davis Entomologist and the premier invasive pest biologist regarding LBAM in the state, confirms this. So many more LBAM are being found in so many more places today, not because it is spreading so rampantly as CDFA pretends, but simply because the number of traps and number of locations of traps and CDFA motivation to find and identify it has expanded so intensely.
CDFA claims that trucks move LBAM. That may be correct for a find of a few moths such as in San Luis Obispo/Los Osos, but that cannot account for the broad populations across tens of thousands of square miles.
3. CDFA has been promoting LBAM as a recent arrival in 2007 through press releases distributed by media thousands of times. CDFA needs people to believe that LBAM is a recent arrival. If people recognize that LBAM has been here a very long time, then people would also recognize that over such a long period of time, they had seen no damage and then they would also know that LBAM is not the voracious pest that CDFA wants them to believe.
4. CDFA has been making damage claims on LBAM repeatedly for nearly two years now. Back in 2008, two superior California Courts had findings of NO DAMAGE and scolded CDFA for lying. Courts do not evaluate media press releases so CDFA has continued on with new and more sophisticated methods of falsifying damage. Prior to the court cases, CDFA falsified damage with blatant lies and fake pictures set up to appear as LBAM damage. Today, CDFA uses real damage of crops and then falsifies that it is LBAM larva that did the damage.
5. Why is CDFA doing this? How would you like to add $100 million to your budget every year to keep the sky from falling? I suspect that you wouldn’t mind that and also that you could do a pretty satisfactory job of accomplishing that, keeping the sky right where it is. Well there you have it. After 25 years or more (the average eradication time for other CDFA eradication programs) CDFA will finally complete their LBAM program. LBAM will still be here, as it is now, but CDFA will claim they eradicated it and saved California Agriculture. They will use LBAM as an example of a “Success” and they will move to eradicate other pests where unnecessary $$$$ is again wasted on huge insider pesticide contracts. This is the pattern of CDFA under current secretary A.G. Kawamura.
The light brown apple moth is rapidly spreading in California. From May 2008 to May 2009, the number of square miles where LBAM is found in California has nearly doubled—from 509 square miles to 980 square miles. The number of square miles in California under quarantine grew from 1,860 square miles in May 2008 to 2,922 square miles in May 2009, an increase of more than 1,000 square miles.
Read more here: http://www.hungrypests.com/LBAM.html