North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Alan Haigh <alandhaigh@gmail.com>]

The brown marmorated stink bug really has me worried.  Good Fruit Grower has
an article in this months mag that portrays this pest as something straight
from hell that makes plum curculio seem almost angelic in comparison.  I'm
talking about peach growers doing 11 sprays in west VA to try to control it
and still losing most of the crop.

I'm actually worried about the future viability of my business which for
those of your who don't know is running a bearing age fruit tree nursery and
managing scores of home and estate orchards in the SE NY area.  Once this
pest is established here, managing home orchards for fruit may become
extremely complicated.

Right now I can control most important insect pests with only 2 or 3 sprays
of best synthetic materials.  If I have to spray all season long I may just
get tired of this business altogether.

Sure hope the early reports are overly alarmist and either an affective
predator emerges of some reasonable management strategy is devised.  I know
that there are very good people working on it.