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THE FINE POINTS OF ALMOND PEST MANAGEMENT

Don't take our word.  Find out yourself how cost-efficient your pest management program is by asking these questions, and comparing your answers with ours:

• Spray when you first see "worms" in the hull?  If so, you may be too late.  Peach twig borer, navel orangeworm, and oriental fruit moth can be decimated if you spray the newly hatched larvae when they're about the size of pinhead, and just entering the nut.  If your advisor shows you larvae this large "---", you're too late to get optimal kill because the "worms" are pretty well protected within the nut.  Your spray probably won't even pay for itself.  Spray often enough and you'll probably be on target at least once.  But how much did those applications cost?  Scientific Methods advisors find pests when they first appear.  Early detection allows optimally timed applications for best kill.
  
  

• Spray by the calendar? At hull-split?  If so, you're practicing "insurance" sprays.  When labor and materials were cheap, this was a practical strategy.  Not now.  Spraying by the calendar ignores that pest emergence occur at different times each year.  Spraying at hull split ignores that not all orchards have economically damaging pest populations, especially if you practiced prior preventative measures.  Scientific Methods not only determines when pests emerge, but verifies they occur in potentially damaging numbers before recommending a spray.  Since we receive no commission from pesticide sales, you never become prisoner to our self interests.
  
  

• Sprays based on day-degree predictions and pheromone traps?  Although pheromone traps are great for gauging population changes, they're lousy at indicating population size.  Day-degrees also say nothing about pest population size.  Scientific Methods combines forecasting methods with on-site inspections to verify that your orchard actually has a problem.
  
  

• Always spray the entire orchard?  Some nut varieties are so hard-shelled they're virtually impenetrable, even to navel orangeworm.  Why spray them?  Even vulnerable varieties hullsplit at different times:  some may be vulnerable to peach twig borer and fruit moth while others in the same orchard are not.  Scientific Methods often recommends varietal on one-sided sprays because they work.  Costs are reduced with no economic reduction in control.
  
  

• Spray all your orchards at once?  True, pests emerge at about the same time throughout a region.  But do you think orchards of different ages, varieties, and sites are equally vulnerable to that pest?  We know many adjacent orchards with totally different pest susceptibilities.  Scientific Methods considers each orchard on its own before recommending a spray.  We don't cut corners.  
  
  

• Can you tell beet armyworm eggs apart from navel orangeworm eggs?  In California, beet armyworm from nearby fields frequently lay eggs on almonds.  The eggs look almost identical to those of navel orangeworm.  But if you spray for beet armyworm, you're wasting your money -- it cannot feed on almonds and the hatching larvae quickly die.  Scientific Methods advisors can distinguish the real pests from the non-pests.  And we'll tell you honestly which is which.
  
  

• Sprayed for peach silver mite?  Such is spray is virtually never needed.  In fact, early season plant-feeding mites provide food for predatory mites, which can keep 2-spotted mites in check.  Our growers attest to the value of the Scientific Methods mite monitoring program, which emphasizes long-term management over the short term reactionary sprays.
  
  

• Does your pest advisor inspect row and tree crops?  A jack-of-all trades may be a master of none.  Scientific Methods works only on tree crops, well over 20,000 acres of them.  The northern Sacramento Valley is our base of operations -- where decades of nut farming has lead to the highest yielding orchards in the world.  We know what good orchard management and efficient pest control can produce.  We see it every day.  It can work for you.