Here they are again, just slaying through all conditions 💚

Despite all of our planning and hard work, we’ve got a brand new challenge this year.  We have Beet Curly Top Virus, which affects the majority of crops we grow.  It is spread by the beet leafhopper, which is very specific.  There are hundreds of varieties of leaf hoppers.  We first started seeing curling, wilting, and ultimately a crunchy death of our first succession of beets.  As the field team knows, we salvaged what we could and terminated that succession.  I also tilled in the second succession of red beets and am curious if our gold and chioggias will make beets, even though many of them have symptoms of the virus.  We are also seeing symptoms in our beans, celeriac, celery, napa, squash, carrots, etc.
This virus is not spread by us, or our tools.  It is only spread by the beet leafhopper, especially to tender young plants.  Their little mouth parts have to reach the phloem of the plant.  Phloem is the living transport tissue in vascular plants that moves food—mainly sugars like sucrose and amino acids—from the leaves where they are made to other parts of the plant that need energy or storage. This two-way movement process is called translocation.  The Phloem is deeper on more mature plants and harder for the leafhopper to infect.
The symptoms we are seeing now are probably from transmission in late June when the first wave of leafhoppers likely came through. Heat and general stress makes it move along faster, which may be why we feel like it’s blowing up after last week.
Unfortunately there is little we can do now.  We can use neem oil and pyganic (certified organic insecticides) on our final successions that are still tender to see if we can repel the leafhoppers and these crops can come to fruition.
Dylan used sticky traps and spent all day Sunday counting hundreds of leafhoppers under the microscope.  We learned that they exist everywhere in the field and are extremely mobile and impossible to actually control.  His mapping did show the most beet leafhoppers on the south end of the field.  After talking with the specialist on leafhoppers from WSU, she thinks it is most likely that they came from the old hemp fields that are the first fields to our south (half mile away).  This year there is no hemp there and so they are on the move.  They also over winter in russian thistle (tumbleweeds), which are plentiful in those fields.
They love heat and sun and dry ground, so the drought is to their benefit.  They also like open ground, so our paths and open crops, which we strive for because of space, water, sun, airflow, etc, are perfect conditions for them, versus a closed canopy crop, like a solid field of something.  Everything about this farm and this year is very pleasing to them.
The leafhoppers have caused millions of dollars in crop failure in the Columbia basin, so we are not alone.  In California, they spray a heavy duty insecticide called Malathion on the rangelands above the agricultural valleys.  This regional management has evolved because they have had such a hard time with the virus in their high value crops.
It is worth noting that the devastation of our rangelands from overgrazing and frequent super hot fire cycles have converted millions of acres from native range species to weeds that are really conducive to the beet leaf hopper.
We are really feeling the effects of climate change and poor land management of our public lands right here in our fields, quite possibly in the most profound way that I’ve experienced in my short 17 years of experience.
So what are we going to do?  Protect our tender stuff and keep on farming.  I am afraid this will be a major financial blow, but maybe it won’t be as bad as I think it will be.  I spent a great deal of the weekend trying to gather information to make a plan for the path forward.
For next season we will be monitoring our sticky traps, covering our tender crops, roguing out any plants that are starting to display early symptoms.  We are going to work on our field edges to control weeds that they like.  We are going to focus on cereal cover crops instead of legumes since they don’t seem to prefer monocots.  We will see about planting more densely while weighing the problems with that.  We may consider living paths (grasses) and less cultivation, though I’m pretty concerned about weeds on our scale.  How do we create a field that they would prefer to go around instead of thru? How do we minimize spraying, because certified organic sprays are generally broad spectrum and are hard on our beneficial insects, of which there are many in our fields.  We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to make this a bug friendly place.
So any ol ways.  Thats some real talk for ya.  We are not isolated here.  We are just as much a part of the world community as everyone else, for better or worse.