The Worm in the Apple

I read a memoir titled The Orchard last week.  Written by a woman who currently lives in Wisconsin, it is about her short marriage to a man who grew up on an apple orchard in Iowa.  The story is typical of many of the memoirs being written these days -- lots of angst and dysfunction; she & her husband were very young when they married and struggled to find their feet within the marriage. The time was the late 1970s through about 1990.  Farming was different then, every type of farming.  Strong chemicals were being used, often without benefit of protection to the person using them, or those going into the fields after application.  Regulatory agencies (EPA) were working to change that & discontinue use of some of the worst chemicals, but those changes were slow in coming.  The husband developed a fast-growing cancer and died at about age 35.  The author blames the cancer on the pesticides being used -- and she could certainly be right since I suspect that they were spraying DDT (it is never named in the book).

Unfortunately, she got so much wrong about the pests that her book cannot be taken as a serious work.  It is strictly her memory of parts of her life, told the way she wants it interpreted.

I can't speak for every orchard, but I know what is being taught at conferences and workshops, and I know what other orchardists tell me at those meetings.  What went on in the 1970s & 1980s does not happen anymore.

In The Orchard the author tells about her husband showing her where the Codling Moth -- a major pest to apples -- are boring into the tree trunks.  Codling Moth do NOT bore into tree trunks, not ever.  They are a real and persistent problem -- the proverbial worm in the apple -- but they bore into the apples themselves, lay eggs inside the apple that hatch into worm-like caterpillars that then bore their way through the apple leaving brown trails behind -- and often the process hasn't finished by the time the apple is ripe, so the caterpillar-worm is still in the apple when you pick it.

A pest that does bore into the trees is Dogwood Borer -- another real and significant problem for apple trees.  [There could be other borers that I don't know about  that infected the author's orchard.]

As scientists have learned more about the life cycle of the Codling Moth, they have also developed ways to deal with the moth rather than spraying a broad-based organophosphate pesticide that kills everything in its path, good and bad alike.  Farmers have learned more about the inter-connectedness of nature and are concerned about taking care of the soil and the water, and still making a crop that can be sold to earn their living.  There are 'organic' sprays (remember, gentle readers, that organic label on your food does not mean no chemical sprays have been used).  The trouble with the organic sprays for Codling Moth is that they must be sprayed every 10 days from May through September, as well as after every major rainfall.  And they often don't work as well as 2 well-timed conventional sprays.

There are also pheromone disrupters.  This past year, Farmer Bill & I tried a codling moth pheromone disrupter for the first time -- with pretty good success.  Pheromone disrupters for Codling Moth come in various shapes and sizes.  We used one that is similar to a giant twist-tie.  At the beginning of the Codling Moth season -- determined by the number of degree-days recorded that year -- we sent a crew out to the orchard to twist a disrupter onto every tree, and extras on the perimeter trees.  The pheromone scent imitates the scent of a female Codling Moth and excites the males.  The males fly toward the scent, planning to find the female and copulate with her, so she can bore into an apple, lay her eggs, and complete the circle of life.  But with pheromones coming at them from absolutely every tree, the males get disoriented -- and the premise is that they will get completely frustrated, not be able to find an actual female, and not be able to fertilize her eggs.

For years we have had a pheromone trap hanging in the orchard.  This trap has sticky stuff on it -- the pheromone lure draws the moths in & traps them in the goo.  We hang the traps in April and check them weekly.  When the number of moths in the trap hits a threshold, it is time to spray the orchard.  In 2011, once we'd hung the disrupters in the orchard we never saw another moth in the trap -- they were all flying around trying to find those elusive females elsewhere.  And we had virtually no Codling Moth damage to our apple crop.  While not cheap, the disrupters are less expensive than the organic sprays available, and similar in cost to the conventional sprays.  If they work over the long term -- multiple years -- they will be far less costly than any spray program in terms of their impact on the environment.

I guess my point in telling this story is to remind my readers (all 3 of you) that you can't believe everything you read.  No one fact checked this author's book before it was published & she got her facts wrong.  I don't believe she was intentionally wrong, she just didn't know.  And she wrote about what happened on farms 25 - 35 years ago by the time the book was published.  There is a tendency among some groups of the public to vilify conventional farmers en masse.  But I don't think Farmer Bill is a villain.  He uses chemicals judiciously and sparingly.  He sprays early in the day or late in the day when the 'good' bugs are less likely to be active.  He wears protective garb and a ventilator mask and doesn't allow staff into the fields before the interval proscribed by the label.  We eat a lot of apples at our house, and a lot of our friends and family eat them, too.  We're not interested in poisoning any of these people.  We are interested in making our farm profitable -- and wormy apples are not saleable.