Good morning!
Today I want to tell you about a problem that can only be seen with a magnifying glass, but which is enormous in scope.
In other newsletters, I've told you about unwanted insects. For example, we've talked about the Mediterranean fruit fly and how it attacks fruit when it's at its peak sugar content.
Or aphids, for example. Luckily, they do have a natural predator that is highly efficient. My fellow farmer, Clara, talks about it in an article on our blog. And I'm going to tell you which insect eats all the aphids, but wait...
Because first, we need to talk about a little bug that's the equivalent of a lot of headaches: thrips.
Thrips are very small insects, practically invisible to the naked eye; you have to use a magnifying glass to see them. They usually live on the leaves or fruit of plants and feed on the plant or fruit.
There are many types of thrips, and today I'm going to tell you about three. The third one is what has made my persimmons, and those of many other farmers, look like this:
Let's start with the first one, which is from here, from Spain. In our lands, there was an endemic thrips that was quite easy to treat because in spring it would make a small patch around the peduncle (where the fruit is attached) but nothing more. The fruit was not excessively marketable, but eventually, people got used to it and it could still be sold.
Over time, we have had an import of two types of thrips that we did not have here and that have been quite harmful. And I mean, very harmful.
The first one was about three years ago, the orchid thrips, as they call it. It is more aggressive than the local one and has the particularity that it breeds in the fruit clusters. What does this mean?
When an orange is on the tree, it's not alone on a branch; you have a cluster of oranges, and it's there, between one orange and another in the cluster, that they breed. For example, thrips could breed between these two oranges:
What these insects do is create a blemish on the skin, on both oranges, making them unfit for commerce. It doesn't affect the fruit, but it looks bad. Thrips usually don't harm the inside of the fruit, only the skin.
But of course, we are used to seeing things pretty, and when the skin is stained, they don't want it.
Now we come to the real problem, which is a pest that has appeared this year.
It's a new, much more aggressive thrips pest, whose control and combat methods are still unknown: the South African thrips.
This affects not only the fruit but also the leaves. It eats them, causing them to wrinkle and form grooves. This, in turn, prevents the tree from photosynthesizing properly, weakening the tree.
Furthermore, as soon as the fruit emerges, it already has very pronounced grooves and blemishes that render it economically worthless.
There has been a significant attack in the northern part of the Valencian Community, and it is already appearing here as well. This year we have experienced some impact, especially on persimmons, as I showed you above.
But the real problem is that it is anticipated to affect oranges next season as well.
One way to eliminate a particular pest is to let its natural predator into the crops. Earlier, I mentioned aphids. Well, their natural predators are none other than ladybugs. A single ladybug can eat up to 50 or 60 aphids in a single day.
However, in the case of thrips, for now, there is no way to combat them because they don't have a natural predator, and because nothing is known about them: neither their cycles nor when they are susceptible to treatment. We have a rather bleak outlook on this.
As I always tell you, the challenges we face in the countryside are many, and every day we might encounter a different one.
But I also know that we always get through it because nature teaches us that life always takes its course. We are confident that next year we will also be able to harvest the best Valencian oranges.
That's all for today, if you're eager to read more, I recommend this article on how organic products are grown, which not only better explains how biological pest control works but also techniques like crop rotation and fallowing.
See you next week.
A big hug!
