NW Watches for Stink Bug

NW Watches for Stink Bug. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

We have been looking at how the ag industry on the East Coast has been dealing with the brown marmorated stink bug but let’s turn our attention to here at home. Peter Shearer is with Oregon State University and has had plenty of experience with the bug which has been spotted in Oregon.

SHEARER: It was first found in Portland, Oregon in 2004, that’s ground zero for us out west. In 2010, the end of 2010 these are the counties where it was found in. Multnomah County is where Portland is and it’s working it’s way down through the Willamette Valley and then it jumped over Hood River County and Wasco County where we have our major cherry and pear orchards and it’s found near Arlington.

Shearer says it was found near the local trash dump in Arlington where Portland transfers it’s trash. He notes that it’s a great hitch-hiker.

SHEARER: Unfortunately this is right across the river from Roosevelt where there’s some big orchards there and it’s 60 miles due south of Yakima so it’s just around the corner.

He says there has been some money allocated from the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission to set up some monitoring for the bug.

SHEARER: We had pheromone traps out. We didn’t bother to put them out early in the season because my previous work showed they weren’t going to be that effective so we waited for the fall to deploy these traps. We had over 70 of these pheromone baited pyramid traps out in the orchards and we did find stink bugs earlier in Portland when we went out and looked for them visually.

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