Central Washington’s Wenatchee Valley is an excellent place to grow pears and apples, with warm dry days and cool nights. Around Peshastin Creek, a tributary of the Wenatchee River, a handful of family orchardists are carrying on the work started by their grandfathers and great grandfathers. But this generation of pear growers is experimenting with gentler pest management strategies — strategies that seem to be working.

Dr. John Dunley is a Washington State University tree fruit entomologist, and the scientific names of bugs and words like “organophosphates” roll smoothly and quickly off his tongue. His work has involved ploys that foil the reproduction of one of the key pear and apple pests: codling moth, which he describes as “the proverbial worm in the apple.” By bathing fruit trees in female codling moth sex pheromones, somehow – and no one really knows how – codling moth mating is delayed and the result is fewer fertile eggs. This happy discovery means that there is less need for chemical insecticides.

This codling moth mating disruption program has now been effectively applied on half of the acreage in Washington. In 2000, John set out to build on this integrated pest management success story. He wanted to complement the mating disruption approach with strategies to increase the populations of beneficial insects that eat codling moths and other pests.

John explains, “A lot of the natural enemies — or good bugs — come from the surrounding natural vegetation, so if everyone went to a soft (low pesticide) program, we could create avenues for movement of natural enemies over an entire area without any pesticide barriers.” When high levels of pesticides are used, both the bad and the good bugs are killed. John was still developing his idea when the Peshastin Creek Growers Association got wind of it. Says John, “I was going to take another year to further develop the theory and the economics of it when these guys heard about it and gave me a call.”

Dennis Nicholson would be a contender in a Hemingway look-a-like contest. He is a third generation orchardist and a member of the Peshastin Growers Association that is made up of ten third and fourth generation orchard families. Dennis explains, “There are a couple things going on here that made us willing to try this. One thing is the creek that flows through the area. We know that we don’t want a lot of pesticides dumped in the creek. Worker safety is another thing we are concerned about. Finally, we have high visibility because of the highway; a lot of people come through here and they want to know what we are spraying.” A third of the acreage had previously been certified organic.

Even before they met John, the Peshastin Creek Growers Association had been proactive, implementing water conservation measures that allowed them to give back a quarter of the water rights they were originally allocated, increasing flows in Peshastin Creek. John and the Association began meeting weekly about his ideas. He recalls, “You don’t really know how much it’s going to cost, if it’s possible, if you’re going to cause more problems than you’re going to solve. We weighed the potential benefits versus the risks. Eventually we came to a consensus: everyone agreed that we’d give it a shot.”

In the beginning there was a lot of concern about whether or not there would be economic damage in the orchards due to pests coming in and harming our crops to the extent that they couldn’t be sold. Dennis says, “In some situations that did happen because people were not on top of things. That has been part of the learning curve: you have to farm a little differently in a soft pesticide program than you do in a conventional program.”

All the orchardists were surprised by the additional time required. Soft insecticides actually require more frequent applications because they target specific life stages of specific insects, rather than killing all bugs all at once. “It was a steep learning curve for me,” Dennis admits. “I was used to putting on one spray and walking away for about 30 days and not having to worry about spraying a second time. It turns out we are probably spraying about four times in that 30 days with the softer and organic programs. So it’s much more management intensive. It took me a while to get up to speed and to start looking for the signs of when we needed to spray and having myself prepared and ready to go.”

The extra work is paying off, as other pear farmers are finding that broad spectrum pesticides are no longer effective with some pests. John says, “If you go over to our conventional orchards we use for comparison, in some of those orchards we have put on a large number of broad spectrum insecticides, and they still are suffering significant economic damage. These guys are sitting pretty compared to the rest of the valley.”

Now half of the 310 acres managed by the Peshastin Creek Growers is organic and the rest is managed with a soft program. Says Dennis, “It’s gotten to the point where the soft program is very effective. The spray I am currently using for the soft block is exactly the same spray as I am using for the organic blocks. The only significant difference between the organic and the soft block is that we are able to use herbicides, rodenticides, and fertilizers.”

The Peshastin Creek Growers market collectively under the “Gently Grown” label and received the Food Alliance sustainable agriculture seal of approval in 2002. Finding markets for their unique product that is not quite organic and not conventional has been a bit of a challenge. Says Dennis, “Last year for the first time we found a customer in California who was willing to pay us a premium for the Gently Grown label, so there are niches out there that are willing to pay for a pesticide-free or low pesticide fruit.”
 
“One of the things that might be different about our group is that we all started out as conventional farmers, and our fathers were conventional farmers,” adds Dennis. “We had to come into the idea of a soft pesticide or organic program from our fear of insect resistance, our fear of polluting water, our fear of regulation, plus our motivation to raise a superior product and do it in a kinder, gentler way. That’s where the Gently Grown label comes from; we are trying a more 'gentle with nature' approach to growing our product, and basing our inputs on need.”