Using "Mating Disruption" To Reduce Pesticide Use with Amelia Cadwell (S6, E02)

S6, E02 - Using "Mating Disruption" To Reduce Pesticide Use with Amelia Cadwell

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Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment, presented by Betterbee. I'm Jeff Ott.

Kim Flottum: I'm Kim Flottum.

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Hey everyone. Thanks again for joining. Before we get going, I want to ask for your help. You can help us open a show by sending us an opening greeting much like you've heard in prior episodes. Simply record yourself or a group of fellow beekeepers welcoming others to the podcast, and email it to us. It's easy and fun to do, really. On today's episode, we are joined by Amelia Cadwell. Amelia is joining us to talk about a pest management approach called mating disruption. [chuckles] No, it's not the poor timing of toddlers. This pest management technique is used by growers of nuts such as almonds and pistachios, citrus, vine, and vegetables.

Essentially, mating disruption use nontoxic synthetic pheromones to confuse the male insect pest so fewer pests actually pair up and reproduce. This reduces the need for hard chemical pesticide sprays, perhaps down to once or even zero times a year. Amelia grew up watching her grandfather's honeybees, later in life worked with a commercial beekeeper, and now, while as a hobbyist beekeeper works with a company that produces and sells the synthetic pheromones for various crop pests. Amelia's clients includes California Almond Growers.

This is a fascinating and educational chat with someone who's working to produce pollinator insect and environmental exposure to hard, persistent chemical sprays. I hope your season is going well. Remember to monitor your varroa loads and treat accordingly. If you need help to decide what to do with varroa, check with a local experienced beekeeper, your state extension service, or one of my go-to sources, the Honeybee Health Coalition's Varroa Management Resource webpage. I will include a link in the show notes. Regarding treatments, stick with those which are industry approved.

As the old saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. One last note. If you're interested in honey competitions, you only have a few more days as of the date of this episode's release to enter honey into the Good Food Awards Honey Competition. You can find details and entry requirements on their website. You can Google that or check the show notes. That's it, Kim's getting ready to join us, and we'll be chatting with Amelia, but first, a quick word from our sponsors.

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Jeff: While you're at the Strong Microbial site, make sure you click on and subscribe to The Hive, their newsletter full of interesting beekeeping facts and product updates. Hey, everybody, welcome back. Sitting across the virtual table right now is Amelia Cadwell of Suterra. Their company works with integrated pest management and reducing the use of pesticides in central California as the growers. Amelia, welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast.

Amelia Cadwell: Thank you so much for having me. I've been a longtime listener, a longtime beekeeper, and I'm very happy to be here.

Jeff: We're really happy to have you here.

Kim: It's nice to meet you, Amelia. I have to admit, I don't have a lot of experience in something called mating disruptions, and I know that's one of your strong suits out there. Can you give me an overview of how that works and why I should know more about it?

Amelia: Absolutely, yes. Mating disruption is essentially keeping insects from reproducing so that we don't have to spray them as much. I came from the world of almonds because I used to work in commercial beekeeping, and a pest that is very prevalent in almonds is a pest known as navel orangeworm. Those buggers reproduce by essentially sending out a pheromone so that the other bug can find them, and they reproduce that way. With mating disruption, what we do is we produce copies of that pheromone that get distributed out into the orchards, and essentially it confuses the bug so much that they can't reproduce.

It's a way of keeping-- You don't have to spray as much if they aren't even breeding and if they aren't making babies. The technology is honestly pretty brilliant. It's been around for about 30 years, and Suterra did pioneer that technology. There are, of course, other competitors out on the market now, but it's an incredibly important way to help reduce your heavy pesticide sprays. In fact, even the Almond Board of California is actually requiring most growers to include that as part of their integrated pest management program now.

Kim: What were you doing that led you to this point that got you interested in confusing bugs up in the air?

Amelia: [laughs] Confusing bugs for a living, you mean that's not a super standard job? That's new to me. I have had an interest for a really long time in protecting our pollinators and protecting especially our bees. I think part of that is because I'm a huge contrarian, and growing up, my grandpa had a beehive in his backyard that he never let us go out to because he didn't want us to get stung, so I had this huge interest because I wasn't allowed to. When I went to Undergrad, I started the beekeeping program there because I actually wrote a grant proposal for a couple of hives and then I ended up getting it.

I was like, oh man, I have to learn how to take care of these guys, back at my undergrad, Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. I was just so hooked on it. I thought it was the most interesting, cool, meditative experience just from a hobbyist perspective, of course, is how I started of just going through the hives one by one. I taught myself to beekeep without gloves because I thought that would make myself move more slowly through the hive. Total hippie entry point to beekeeping, which is hilarious since I now work in the hardcore sector of agriculture.

Essentially I just wanted to make an impact as much as I could in terms of helping reduce pollinators while helping to protect pollinators, specifically bees, because we are seeing such a massive decline. In undergrad, I started research projects on comparative policy between EU versus US, specifically on neonicotinoid regulation. If people aren't familiar with neonicotinoids, they're a class of systemic insecticide that stays in the environment for a very long time. They're not evil, but they do need to be managed. That, essentially the EU decided to do a three-year moratorium on saying, we're not going to use this pesticide until we prove that it's not causing any harm.

The US is on the same track to be reducing those pesticides. I was really interested in the comparative policy, so I had a huge academic interest, but then I wanted to work more directly in the field. Essentially I was just trying my best to make an impact in agriculture, and I actually took a job with a National Geographic photographer named Joel Sartore to work on social media campaigns for pollinator awareness.

I was like, you know what? I am happiest with my hands in a hive, like, feeling like I'm doing real work on the ground and really getting my butt handed to me by industry. I realized that was where I was happiest, so I ended up taking this research and development position at a commercial beekeeping operation in Fresno in, gosh, I think it was 2018, and just hit the ground running from there. There's so much to learn in agriculture. I'm always learning something new and especially in beekeeping as you guys know, of course.

It was really a very natural progression from working directly in the industry from trying to improve how we treat our hives specifically at the commercial level. I was trying to improve varroa mite treatments, to trying to say, what can I do on the grower side to be protecting the bees that are out there in the orchard? Because commercial pollination is going to happen anyway, let's see if I can help reduce some of those sprays that are going out there, because that makes a huge difference in terms of the survivability of hives that are out in the orchard.

Jeff: Are you working with all growers, or do you specialize with almonds or oranges, or another crop?

Amelia: We work with a ton of different growers. Most of my comfortability is with almonds, pistachios because it's navel orangeworm, but Suterra works with citrus, stone fruit, veggies, obviously almonds and pistachios, grapes there. Anytime that a pest is something that reproduces with pheromones, we probably have a pheromone for it. California's red scale is a big deal for orange growers. Vine mealybug is something that the wine grape growers and table grape growers have to worry about. Those are the majority of the ones that I work with. The most of the folks that I knew from previous lives were people from the almond industry. My book of business for the most part is almond folks.

Kim: No matter which one of those groups you're working with, that's got to be a tightrope dance every time you're going out there. You've got, I have to worry about getting enough of this material into the air to disrupt mating but not so much that they don't mate at all, or if you goof one way, the grower's going to be mad, and if you goof the other way, the beekeeper's going to be mad. You're just, like I said, you dance in a tightrope there, does that sound about right?

Amelia: It's usually all right because I'm working-- I am hoping what I'm doing, what I'm helping growers with is at large going to, or overall going to benefit the beekeeping industry. I think that that's accurate and that is the case. For the most part, we don't want a pest like a navel orangeworm to be reproducing at all. I would say on that front, it's pretty straightforward. For something like navel orangeworm, we have one puffer, it's an aerosol puffer. It's one per acre and then you hang it and forget about it, and that's pretty much it, so there's not too much to worry about there. I would say what we run into issue most are people that are like, oh, does it work?

I think that mating disruption is pretty widely adapted in industry. I don't want to speak incorrectly, but I think most broadly it's adapted extremely well in the pistachio industry specifically. I would say most of what we run up against are people just saying, show me the science that it works. I'm like, it's on thousands of acres in California. I'm not really sure how much more you want me to show you that it works. That's something that bothers me, is people are like, let me see a trial on 10 acres to show me whether it works, and I'm like, but this 50,000 acres of almonds that they've been using this on that it works on for the last 30 years, that's not enough? All right, sure. Let's get a trial. [laughs]

Jeff: Just so I can understand this, because it's a new field for me. The mating disruption methodology that you're using is a replacement for the neonicotinoid-type pesticides? Is that what you're focusing on?

Amelia: I wouldn't say it's a full replacement. I would say that it definitely helps reduce, so obviously a grower wants to chat with their pest control advisor, I'm nobody's PCA, so I can't advise them to specifically do that. We do have growers that since they've started using mating disruption, they can cut down to maybe once spray a year or no sprays. It definitely does help reduce but I can't say this is an exact substitute, because it isn't right. If somebody has an orchard that's super-duper infested, maybe they're going to want to keep using those conventional products for a while.

Because it is important to be sustainable and to protect the environment, and honestly industry is going this way because every year something gets pulled out of the toolbox in terms of what we're allowed to use. Chlorpyrifos just got pulled, so our tools are getting smaller and smaller. Eventually everybody's going to be using this but I'm never just going to come in and say, you need to totally change how you're doing things. I want my growers to be able to grow food, and I want that to happen in a way that's sustainable for them in a business sense as well.

Kim: I used to do apples a lot, acres and acres, and acres of apples, and I'm familiar with the mating patterns and the timing, and the weather, and last fall and this spring, all of the things that come into play with the eventual population of the pest I'm trying to control. From your perspective, what kinds of things are you trying to make growers aware of so that their applications are most efficient, most effective, and least costly?

Amelia: Specifically, at least in the almonds, man, I know it's rough out there because the prices of almonds are not fantastic right now and that is a complaint that I get from a lot of growers, is they're like, I'm just farming water this year. I can't even afford to farm. A lot of times folks will try to cut corners, which I completely understand. but if you want to control your populations of navel orangeworm, it's really important to make sure that you are following a good sanitation program, so where you're going out or where you're going into the orchard and you're actually getting the mummies off of there.

I think the UC standards are, I think you can have two mummies. For folks that don't know what mummies are, those are essentially the almonds that didn't come off during the shake when everybody harvests. When those are sitting up there for the whole season, they're just food for your pests. Why would they go anywhere? It is free rent, free board, they're just hanging out there mating, having a field day.

It is important to make sure that you are setting aside the resources to make sure that you're having good sanitation as well, because I know it's tough to make sure that you do that because it is expensive, it's an annoying part of the process specifically for almond folks, but if you can just help yourself out and make sure that you have some form of sanitation in place, that helps a lot even if you're not sure if you're going to budget for what you're going to budget for product-wise. That is just making sure you're starting off on the right foot.

Kim: I'm going to be following the weather and the pest population in my orchards because I'm sampling routinely, I know that they're either below or above where I want them to be, and worst case scenario, I do everything right and I go out and I sample, and I've got 20 times the number of bugs out there that I wanted to have out there because of all the things that stop the chemicals, stop the process from working right. Is that common, not common, do people just give up and say, I'm going back to where I started?

Amelia: I haven't seen too much of that. I've seen some the other direction. I was working with a gentleman out in-- he was near Visalia and he had an orchard that was just overrun. Yes, it was an orchard because they were citrus. He was like, no, I want to keep it organic. I'm going to use mating disruption. Then he might have done an oil spray or something, I'm not totally sure. He essentially got the California red scale population really, really reduced just using mating disruption and maybe some other things, but I feel like for the most part I don't see too much of that.

I hear about it, but oftentimes that's because folks aren't actually employing or deploying the product correctly. Sometimes folks will hang our puffers in the trees and then forget to turn them on, which is a bummer, but that actually does happen. We'll see stuff like that happen. Then we'll have a field team that runs out and does a puffer check and we're like, oh man, your devices aren't on, that's probably why you're seeing that.

Of course, if a grower is feeling like things aren't effacous or they've done everything they could and they're still not seeing that reduction, that would be really weird. I would consider that like, I'm running this up because this shouldn't happen, and we would start a customer concerns process for that. Because that shouldn't be the case unless you just bought a bucket of product and left it sitting in your field without putting it on.

Kim: From a grower's perspective, I own 1,000 acres of almonds that I need to harvest as many of them as possible, the cost-effectiveness of your project versus hardcore chemicals versus some sort of hybrid, is there a hybrid, A? Is there some way you can combine good mating disruption with touch-ups on pesticide applications to get your numbers down to where you want them? From a goer's perspective, is that how I'm walking that tightrope?

Amelia: Yes, absolutely. Some is better than nothing, I want everybody to at least try it, get some of their acres under mating disruption to some extent. Of course, they are shifting standards. If you're working with a certifier like CCOF and you want to be organic, then your toolbox is super limited, so you're going to have to use mating disruption most likely and you aren't going to have much of the systemics to choose from. However, if you are a conventional, let's say pistachio grower and you're wanting to see reduction to your damages, because they get incentive.

If they have what's called grade sheets at the end of the season, and I think for pistachios it's below half a percent they get a certain bonus, the product eventually ends up paying for itself. Because if it's however much per acre and then you're getting that money back because your almonds or your pistachios are making that grade, then it makes sense. We can pretty much guarantee that the first year you're going to see 50% reduction in whatever your damage is. It does end up paying for itself, and of course there are so many different-- there's multiple ways to skin a cat, but the reality is there's only a handful of conventional products that growers can even still use.

I am also in no way anti pesticide. I think I saw a stat the other day that was something similar that we wouldn't-- I think it's 50% of our food, it wouldn't even be possible without systemic pesticides of some sort. We just have to be using them in a smart way and reducing whenever possible, and using what other products are in the market when possible as well. Of course resistance is a huge issue. Products like, I don't want to name names but there are products out there that used to work really well and now the pests have gained resistance towards them. That's never going to happen with something like mating disruption.

Kim: That was my next question is, like all pesticides, a product that controls pests, whether it's a poison or a hammer and a nail, whatever you have it, do these things come and go? Do insects develop resistance to them, or do I have to continue to either spray more concentrated or more often to make them work like they did when I first introduced them?

Amelia: The great thing about mating disruption is it's not dead or not dead in terms of pests. It's either they reproduce or they don't. It's never going to happen that insects are going to get resistance towards birth control, because that's what it is. It is bug birth control. [laughs] From a biological perspective, it's not how it works. I think it's easier to tell also.

Let's say, and part of why some folks are still like, does it even work? Is when you spray an herbicide, you can see a plant die. When you spray a pesticide you can see the bugs die. Mating disruption, it's just you will hang your traps and you do your counts, and you're not going to see as many bugs out and about. No, we're not ever going to run into a resistance issue towards what's essentially birth control, which is great.

Kim: There's some compensation, that's good to hear, because that's the trick. You mostly always get on with the pesticides. It's just more and more, and more often, and more often, and pretty soon no matter how much you have it doesn't work because they just laugh at you when you put it on. What other crops are you looking at longer term to make this process effective?

Amelia: Obviously I work with almonds, because I haven't been able to be quiet about that. We have products for vine mealybug, which is something that I've been working more this year with wine grape growers and table grape growers, which are totally different kinds of folks. That's also part of what's super fascinating about ag, is just working with different kinds of growers, is they're just totally different kinds of people. I've been doing more up in Northern California with wine grape people. They tend to have larger budgets than the table grape people, so it's usually a bigger--

It's usually an easier shoe in because they're like yes we want the Cadillac of mating disruption. Yes we want Suterra. Table grapes has been one that they're more central valley located, and I've loved working with those people. I found that a little closer to home, because my first office was a trailer in Kerman County which is middle of nowhere in the middle of a raisin vineyard with no AC. Sometimes it had AC but usually it didn't. Our bathroom was a porta-potty that had my coworkers in it, which were black widows, because I was the only person working out there for a while.

I love all the kinds of folks that I work with, but the majority of my work has been with obviously the net crop folks, and then vine folks as well. We're doing a little bit more work with veggies and developing some products for fruit as well. That is coming up on the pipeline. Then we work a lot with growers up in the Pacific Northwest as well with almonds, or not almonds, sorry, apples the other A one, and then citrus. We have tones of citrus in the central valley.

I, for whatever reason, don't work as much directly with citrus. I'm well versed on it, I understand it, I can talk to Aurora about their citrus program, but for whatever reason, I've primarily been working with almond folks and then more of the vine people as well. We also have stuff for stone fruits, so like peaches and cherries, and those folks which are also going to be a little more central valley located.

Jeff: Let's take this opportunity to take a quick break and we'll be right back after this word from our sponsors.

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Kim: Amelia, this just begs the question, is there a workman's compensation clause for black widow spiders in your potty?

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I couldn't resist that, and you don't have to answer. [laughs]

Amelia: There really should be. I was working for a startup and I didn't know much about workman's comp. It was one of those classic jobs where I'm just very thankful to have health insurance. We'll leave it at that.

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Jeff: The mating disruption would be good for the black widow spiders. You could sell a lot of those with all the little honey buckets around the countryside, I think.

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Amelia: Man, we're not kidding. If they reproduced that way, absolutely, I'd be the first one on top of that, that's for sure.

Jeff: I've been dying to ask you, because we originally tried to get you on, when was it, back in March, I believe, we tried to get you scheduled. Then we had all that weather disruption in Southern California and the West Coast. I'd like to ask you your perspective in what you saw, what you experienced, what you know the growers experienced, because many of the beekeepers are through the spring, especially along the West Coast, experienced the fallout from the weather situation in the almond orchards in California, with the package seasons and then the queen disruptions. Can you describe a little bit about the weather disruptions?

Amelia: Absolutely. That was wild, I'll tell you that much. I would go on calls and I was on my way to Bakersfield, and then there just wouldn't be a road. I ran into that pretty frequently this season. I feel like a glorified truck driver sometimes because all of my growers are so far apart. I do a ton of driving. I'm very good driver, but man, that is some of the scariest driving I have done, is just realizing that everything is just completely washed out. I have pictures from pulling up to where I was supposed to be hit, and there's an SUV on its side.

Just completely no road, and the cops are like, oh you're the big truck, head on through. I'm like yes, I'm not doing that. Think I'm good, thank you. It was honestly a very scary and sad time, and I felt like I needed to tread really lightly, and I did tread very lightly with my folks, because, man, what do you say when somebody's orchard is just completely underwater, or their house is gone? It was very disrupting, how hard, to a lot of what I had going on because tons of my work is really just going out and talking to folks about their pest management programs and seeing how I can make that better.

There's not really a time to do that tactfully when there's a crisis. It was just a really weird and sad time, to be honest. I spend a lot of time really just checking on folks, and saying how are you doing? How can I help? Or just leaving people alone. You figure out what people would want from you. I have growers that I know that would love to hear from me, and I have growers that I know would love to be left alone.

Really just from a social perspective, it was very like, oh, okay, let's contribute and help how best I can, but for the most part just let people be. Because there were folks that were getting evacuated by boat, and these are in dry, dry areas. Or if you told me that a year ago I'd be like, what are you talking about? No way. Because everything is so flat, it floods for an inch, it goes forever. That's one of the struggles of living in a place where you can watch your dog run away for a week because it's just so flat.

[laughter]

Jeff: I hadn't heard that.

Kim: Amelia, we've talked about the past, the present, the future, various different crops, and the way they are produced or not produced using mating disruption and some of these other techniques. What did we miss that growers and beekeepers need to know about all of this?

Amelia: I think communication between the grower and the beekeeper is really key, I have a list of 10 things that I tell my growers to try to do to help protect their beekeepers or to help protect their bees specifically. One of them is I always see hives that are placed really close to the highways, if more growers made a stink about it and just got them placed 50 meters back in the road, that would help a lot. Because I know that a lot of folks, we drive our F-150s and we get bees just completely painted across our windshields. That's a tip that I would love for--

If growers made more of a stink about hive placement, it would help a lot, I think. Additionally, just doing things like, hey, let's plant cover crop. There's this what I call a cover crop fallacy where there's this idea that if you plant cover crop, the bees are going to be attracted to that and they're not going to pollinate your almonds efficiently. That is super untrue.

The bees actually prefer the almond pollen. It's very nutrient-dense, the anthers on the pollen of an almond are actually-- it's easier for them to reach. The bees, it's easier for them to reach.

They're actually going to be more attracted to that. When bees are placed out there in February, March, there's not enough forage out there for them to survive. Plant cover crop if you're a grower. Try to have the hives not placed close to the highway. Put water out. Communicate with your beekeeper when you're spraying. Then if you do spray, spray at night, the bees are at home then. I'm a big fan of harm reduction. Just making sure that you're communicating. None of this is rocket science, it really is just very sensible tips in terms of what I encourage my growers to do, the ones that are sustainably-minded.

There's also tons of funding available. There's tons of funding available for cover crops, I work specifically with the folks at the Natural Resource Conservation Service. I also help connect growers through funding through them and through USDA as well. There's tons of ways and there's tons of resources, if you're a grower, and you're interested in improving your pest management, or if you're interested in planting cover crop, or becoming more bee-friendly. There are tons and tons of resources out there. Really just paying attention and using what's available.

Kim: That may not be rocket science, but it's certainly very, very, very good advice. I insist that people write down some of those things because it's the best information I've heard in a long time.

Jeff: Amelia, we really appreciate you being on the show today to talk about what the growers are doing to do something other than pesticides in the orchards. It's been a pleasure talking to you on Beekeeping Today Podcast.

Amelia: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a really great chat with you guys.

Kim: I hope you can come back sometime down the road a little bit and see how this is progressing both with being used in the industry and what other industries are beginning to pick up on it. It's very encouraging.

Amelia: Absolutely.

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Jeff: It's really interesting to get the growers perspective on the beekeeping industry, and the tools that they have available to help control pests, as opposed to just what we always think as being spray and kill the insect.

Kim: To me, this is exciting. Like I said earlier, I've spent a lot of time growing apples, acres and acres, and acres of apples. I know the problems that you can run into, and the weather, and suddenly all my health isn't showing up. Suddenly it's raining and it's not supposed to be, and all of the things that can go wrong. If I could take all of those things and then reduce the pest population by 80%, I wouldn't care hardly at all about all the rest of the things that could go wrong. To me, this is exciting. I can see a lot less poison being put into the environment and a much better product being able to be reproduced by the growers.

Jeff: I kept wanting to ask Amelia, besides it's outside of her field, but it'd be great to have that meeting disruption approach available for the varroa.

Kim: I'm sitting here trying to think of how you would make that work. I'm guessing somebody out there is going, oh, I know how I can do that.

Jeff: It's called a brood break, I think.

Kim: When that person gets that idea, speak up, because there's somebody out there looking for something to do to fix varroa.

Jeff: They'll make 1 billion, that's for sure.

Kim: At least, yes.

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Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go. I want to encourage our listeners to rate us five stars on Apple podcast or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you'd like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews along the top of any web page. We want to thank our regular episode sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Betterbee for their longtime support of this podcast.

Thanks to Blue Sky Bee Supply and Northern Bee Books for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the Beekeeping Today Podcast listener for joining us on the show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments at "leave a comment" section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

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