are used for coddling moth and oriental fruit moth. MD for
NOW appeared in 2008. Higbee has conducted field trials
with MD in Kern County in a variety of situations. He found
MD in combination with a spray program achieved reject
levels of two percent or less. In orchards with very low
pressure, MD alone was effective.
His experience with a variety of field trials leads to these
observations on how best to manage NOW:
Sanitation
A thorough sanitation program is the foundation of any
NOW management program. The only places you can
find immature NOW – eggs or larvae – are in nuts or
mummies. Shoot for zero mummies but leave no more than
one mummy per five to ten trees. Females will lay eggs
in mummies on the ground if they can’t find them in the
trees so do a good job of shredding. A good sanitation
program gives the grower a tremendous opportunity to
reset the population of NOW in the orchard over the
winter for a fresh start the next year.
Monitoring
Having good data on NOW populations is crucial to
designing your management program.
Insecticides
Spraying for NOW is very challenging due to the thick
canopy and inability to get residue on every nut. Residue
has to be on the nut to be effective. It’s no good on the
leaves. About 50 percent coverage is the best you can
hope for, which supports having multiple sprays in your
program. Sprays before the second flight (April-May) do
not contribute much to NOW damage reduction but are
useful for controlling PTB and plant bugs. Later sprays have
the most impact. They reach tissues not previously exposed,
leaving more residue for moths to land on. Make your
first spray the day before nut split and, if you are doing
only two sprays, the second one as close to harvest as
possible. We have found that 60 to 80 percent of NOW
discovered in nuts are young larvae which tell us that the
eggs were laid not long before harvest. There are no new
sprays on the horizon, not even in development.
Mating Disruption (MD)
MD helps get NOW populations down. It has been shown
to reduce damage by 50 to 80 percent when added to
a control program. The best control program combines
MD with insecticides. The most effective MD materials
are those that impair the nervous system of the males. Use
these in high-pressure situations for good results. It is highly
unlikely that NOW will develop resistance to MD products.
Grower Experience
Two
Blue Diamond growers
joined the panel to relate their
experiences with MD.
Kent Stenderup, Blue Diamond director from Arvin, added
MD to his NOW management program four years ago.
“It has worked well for us. We had a flare-up in rejects
that we had never before experienced. So, we ramped up
our sanitation program. We poled before sweeping and
introduced MD. We also got our neighbors involved. Our
reject levels dropped to acceptable levels. MD is important
in light of the Almond Board’s goal of reducing pesticide
use by 25 percent by 2025.”
Jeremy Seibert grows almonds in Fresno and Merced
counties. “I have a neighbor who is not good at orchard
sanitation, which resulted in our reject level shooting up to
eight percent. We added MD to our sanitation and spray
program and dropped our rejects to two percent. One of
the challenges we found is educating employees on how
to place the MD products properly in the orchard and in
the trees.”
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