This is a story about phone calls that come in to my message machine. Yesterday I got 3 calls from PCAs (Pest Control Advisors) and two from growers.  The two from growers were from a Papaya grower and the other from a dragon  fruit grower that I am working with to develop an industry here in Santa Barbara/Ventura.  One is in Carp the other in Montecito.  The PCA calls were from two that work on avocado and the other from a citrus grower.  I either get a call from an avocado grower direct because they can't afford a PCA or from the manager or the PCA of larger farms.  From citrus it is usually the manager or the PCA.  These are more developed industries and the grower usually lets the workers take care of problems because they are so familiar with the operations.  When it ‘s a new crop, the owner steps in. They want to know all that can go wrong with this new crop. 

Blueberries are expanding now along the coast and when we first started working on them 15 years ago, our collaborators were in touch with us constantly.  Now it's the managers who call.  Its now a developed industry.  The same for coffee.  When we started working on it we worked closely with out cooperators, now there is a coffee cooperative that takes care of itself.  We work with new things.  One of the calls from an avocado PCA was about a farm that is being infested with bagrada bug.  Everything in the area has dried up from the drought.  The bagarada bug normally goes after plants in the brassica family (cabbage, mustard, etc.), many of which are native and growing along streams and on hillsides.  The streams and hills have dried up and the bug is now going to the new avocado leaf tissue and the PCA wanted the bug identified and to provide a solution to the problem. 

Sometimes the weather works for us and sometimes against us.  We've got a parasitic wasp for controlling olive fruit fly. We went out all over southern Santa Barabara county to groves of olive trees to determine where to release the wasp and could find healthy olives, but no olive fruit.  No where to make to make releases this year.  The weather plays tricks on us.  But we keep looking for solutions.  Maybe next year we will be able to study if and how the wasp controls olive fruit fly.  It does in France.