Pepper weevil is a difficult pest:
- it is not endemic to New Jersey;
- we have had sporadic outbreaks but not understanding why or how these outbreaks occurred and because of this we have little experience managing it on farm or in preventing it being spread farm to farm;
- we lack an appreciation of its life cycle and how well it is adapted to exploiting our food distribution network;
- and finally, the realization that management recommendations from Florida and other southern locations are not very helpful because of different production practices and climate.
This year particularly, we don’t know if the numbers of weevils being caught on the pheromone traps represents an exceptional year, or if this is ‘normal’, since we have never trapped so extensively or so early in the year.
The most troublesome concern is that we have a lot of weevils with the potential to infest south Jersey pepper fields early in the season, with the onset of flowers and small fruit of the first plantings. Infestations now produce the highest risk of severe yield loss and will cost the most to control.
There is no easy way to proceed in managing these weevils and growers have so far responded either in applying preventative insecticide applications or adopting a wait and see attitude. By the end of the season we will have a better idea of what was the right approach and revise our recommendations accordingly. We should learn a great deal about pepper weevil this year.
We will continue to provide updated information on the trapping of pepper weevil in the weekly Vegetable IPM Updates.
