CALIFORNIA
Vegetables A SPECIAL GROWERS’ REPORT OF AG ALERT ®
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University of California and U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers have been gathering data on aphid, thrips and diamondback moths captured in traps set up since 2020 in Salinas Valley farms.
New app tracks movement of Salinas Valley ag pests By Bob Johnson
“Our job is to monitor and report on the populations every week,” said Daniel Hasegawa, a USDA research entomologist. “We go out and change them on a weekly basis, but we don’t report information for particular traps.” Hasegawa has supervised the trap counts since Pozo-Valdivia moved on from Salinas, and researchers have worked closely with the grower-funded Leafy Green Research Board. The new app was developed after Hasegawa and UCCE entomology specialist Ian Grettenberger discussed what information from the monitoring would best be made public to aid growers. Then Ben Lee, a postdoctoral researcher in Grettenberger’s lab, did the coding and app design. Lee, Hasegawa and Grettenberger announced the app on the Monterey County UCCE’s Salinas Valley Agriculture website in mid-September. “We wanted to provide growers with a tool to view the most up-to-date lettuce pest population data available and have developed an app to track pest populations over time throughout the Salinas Valley,” the researchers wrote.
Monterey County vegetable growers can monitor areawide pressure from three important lettuce and cole-crop pests on their phones or laptops, using a new app showing the results of 21 monitoring traps at strategic locations throughout Monterey County. The recently released app provides nearly three years of data on aphid, thrips and diamondback moth catches in traps set up from Prunedale to King City. Various University of California and U.S. Department of Agriculture research- ers have been involved in the monitoring project since former UC Cooperative Extension farm advisor Alejandro Del Pozo-Valdivia chose the first trap sites in 2020. Now UC researchers say data they have gleaned from sticky, bug-catching traps set up across the Salinas Valley can help vegetable growers by providing up-to-date infor- mation on regional pest populations. The trapping data tell how many of the pests were caught countywide or in a partic- ular region. But it is not intended to replace traps set up near particular fields to help trigger management decisions, researchers say.
See PESTS, Page 8
November 2, 2022 Ag Alert 7
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