Battling a beetle may not sound like much of a fight.
But when Ontario potato growers faced a bug that adapted quickly to all their available pesticides, it was hard to keep the upper hand.
A horticultural crop adviser with the Ontario agriculture department recently told the war story to a forum on pest management.
Sam Squire said farmers first started noticing some chemicals for Colorado potato beetles weren’t working in the late 1980s.
“Growers who used to only spray once a year now began to spray two or three times,” he said.
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But using the same insecticides left only the aggressive, resistant beetles to breed, Squire explained.
The department hired integrated pest management specialist Eugenia Banks, who put a variety of methods to work in the fields.
Banks had growers apply b.t. bacteria as beetle eggs were hatching. The growers dug trenches between infected and healthy fields to prevent beetles from wandering. Farmers went through fields with propane flamers attached to tractors to fire the bugs away.
But by 1994, nothing was working against the beetles, Squire said.
The best insecticide out of 13 controlled just over half the beetles in the field. Growers sprayed every 10 days, but beetles were still stripping potato plants of their leaves.
Growers could apply mixed cocktails or two or three chemicals once or twice to the crop, an expensive and ultimately fruitless solution.
“You could imagine the cost, you could imagine the frustration,” Squire said.
Then Banks learned about a product called Admire, registered for use in the United States.
Squire said growers got together and prepared a submission about the problem and lobbied to get the chemical registered in Canada.
Registration approved
Working together the growers accomplished in several weeks what usually takes two or three years. They got to use the chemical in the spring of 1995.
But Squire said the tale doesn’t end with getting the chemical. He said growers recognize that unless they use a variety of chemicals and methods to control the beetles, they could find themselves overrun again.
This integrated pest management philosophy is also used to control late blight, a serious potato disease.
