The South African cotonet is a pest that is seriously affecting Spanish citrus fruit. EDYPRO is therefore interested in informing our customers about the tools they can use to combat it and how we can collaborate in this fight with our biotechnological solutions.
In some of our friend José Rivera’s farms, the cotonet has been causing serious damage to the crop. To put an end to this problem, he has been working with Koppert and its biological control solutions since last year.
Last Thursday, 29th April, we gathered a group of our customers from the citrus sector who are also being affected by this pest and we travelled to Torres Torres, to Rivera’s farms, to see first-hand how the physical and biological solutions work.
In José Rivera’s crops, Koppert is fighting the South African cotonet from two sides: on the one hand, through a physical barrier, Pegafit. This is a paste that is applied to the trunk of the tree and prevents the insect from moving from the ground to the branches of the tree and vice versa, from moving from the fruit to the ground. On the other hand, envelopes with the natural cotonet predator Cryptolaemus Montrozieri have been installed to test their effectiveness in controlling the pest.
The results obtained are very encouraging. When these experiments were started in the middle of last summer, the damage to the fruit still to be harvested on the affected trees came from the previous year. These solutions have significantly reduced the pest population to an almost non-existent level and have eliminated it from the tree mass. This means that the next harvest the fruit will come out clean, unblemished and undeformed.
To prevent the pest from spreading to other farms that have not yet been attacked, these solutions have been applied as a preventive measure. For the time being, with these precautions, the trees are clean and free of the pest.
In view of the success of this control method, Serviagro Rivera S.L. implemented the Pegafit application service in all the fields it manages.
At EDYPRO we have recommended complementing all these actions with a strategy based on biotechnology. Our products and solutions reinforce the immune system of the trees and allow them to be more resistant to possible external agents.