Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
known for keeping to himself, said “I don't mind sharing anything with
anyone else as long as they want to kill worms!”
Growers and PCAs in Butte County point to this social learning
process in the late 1970s as convincing them that sanitation is more
important to NOW control than pesticides, but UC scientists had identi-
fied cultural strategies as early as the 1950s.
3
Scientists frequently
conduct research in advance of problems, but its movement into the field
is filtered and warped by the social processes of extension, both public
and private. UC scientists and extensionists have to simultaneously pur-
sue fundamental scientific research and provide information meaningful
to PCAs and growers, who are reluctant to alter their practices as long
as they are profitable. Before the Durham growers ponied up funds to
pay for independent PCAs to determine the cause of their NOW prob-
lems, the US Department of Agriculture and the Almond Board had
already received results from research into sanitation and early harvest
they had funded. Charles Curtis of the USDA and Martin Barnes at UC
Riverside determined that leaving one nut per tree could cut an orchard's
NOW population in half. Curtis was inspired by Rachel Carson and the
IPM pioneers. The USDA funded the “Ballico/Famoso Project” for more
than $435,000 between 1974 and 1976 to investigate the benefits of
regional almond IPM practices.
4
In 1980, the Almond Board and the new UC IPM Project initiated a
four point program for NOW control: dormant spray, orchard sanita-
tion, properly timed in-season sprays, and early harvest. Over the past
20 years, California's almond growers and PCAs have learned that
cultural practices are equally or more important than pesticides in con-
trolling NOW populations. The validation of the UC IPM program has
been critical to the almond industry's success. Even affiliated PCAs
acknowledge that sanitation is the key to controlling the navel orange
worm, although they gladly sell organophosphate pesticides for in-
season use to compliment cultural controls.
The almond industry's social learning about NOW control is akin to
the citrus industry learning about biocontrol in the nineteenth century.
The almond industry in the 1980s was recognized as an early IPM suc-
cess story because it relied heavily on ecologically rational, non-chemical
strategies to control its primary insect pest, even though many UC Farm
Advisors, growers, and PCAs were reluctant to rely exclusively on
