Revolutionary Organic Pest Controls

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Till recently even the most dedicated eastern organic orchardist has had to resort to powerful, indiscriminate insecticides from time to time—or lose a crop to the twin banes of fruit producers: the codling moth (apple maggot) and oriental fruit moth, whose brown-tunnel-making larvae ruin stone fruit

Now you can get Isomate-C to protect apples and Isomate-M for the oriental fruit moth. These are artificially produced sex pheromones—the chemical lures that females emit to attract males. At petal fall, and later if following generations are detected, plastic strips soaked in the female moth's version of Chanel No. 5 are hung in the trees, flooding the area with lepidopteran allure. The boys can't find the girls, resulting in 98 percent reduction in fruit damage. That's better than any chemical. No other species are affected, and there's no way the affected moths can become tolerant. Cost ranges from about $50 to $100 an acre. A bargain!

Pheromones are also put into traps that will reduce populations of such major pests as Japanese beetles and the peach twig borer—as well as apple and peach maggot adults. Surefire is the brand name.

Most any kind of caterpillar—inch worms, the tent caterpillars that can defoliate cherry trees, army worms, and others—contract a fatal sbillach ache by ingesting Bt or Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium that is harmless to all life but the target insect larvae. Dipel is the trade name of a widely available broad-spectrum variety. Special strains have been discovered/bred for specific pests such as the elm leaf beetle.

Agrimycin

is a variant of the antibiotic strepbillycin that is effective against the fire blight that affects pears and apples. Galltrol-A is the trade name of a concoction of Agrobacterium radiobacter,a naturally occurring microbe that repels the microbes that cause crown gall. If roots of trees are dipped as they are planted, the good bugs will thrive in your orchard soil indefinitely. Cost is about $70 for an acre of dwarf trees.

Promot Plus

contains natural fungus that feeds on fusarium and other fungal rots and wilts that affect fruit and fruit trees. Several strains of beneficial nematodes—microscopic soil worms—are available; they consume bacteria and other nematodes that prey on roots of fruit trees. And we still have the traditional organic pest controls—many of them given new life through well-financed research programs—now that organic has become almost the status quo.

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