Fighting Back

Fighting Back. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

This is the time of year that fruit growers in the northwest are getting ready to fight pests and disease in their orchards and Byron Phillips, Sales Representative with Valent U.S.A says there are few alternatives.

PHILLIPS: They can’t use endosulphan because bees are in the orchard plus endosulphan is going to get a big, big black eye really soon as soon as the WSDA Surface Water Monitoring report comes out so that’s an issue and they have in the last few years gotten away to a certain extent from oils and so scale is starting to build up so all of those things have come together this year to really create a wonderful environment for Esteem.

Esteem is a good choice for pest management on stone fruit, apples and pears.

PHILLIPS: Esteem is really shining pre-bloom applications this year as a diazinon replacement. I’m fielding a lot of calls right now about bee safety because bees are coming in early and Esteem is one of the safest products there is on bees. There’s really no concern.

Phillips also says that Esteem works well for scale even without oil.

PHILLIPS: It has really nice timing flexibility on scale compared to some of the other insect growth regulators that are out there. We’re not limited to just that delayed dormant spray, we’ll still pick up scale at pink, pre-pink, even with petal fall we’ll still pick up scale. We would prefer to see it go on earlier with oil because it will look better but it will still give acceptable control clear out to petal fall.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.