Peach moth (Carposina sasakii) is a major pest of apples & an occasional pest of peach throughout China, Korea and Japan. It is also a pest of jujube, another important tree fruit crop in China.
Jujube is a fruit that looks like a small granny smith apple and is eaten fresh, dried and as juice.
In China there are 2.2 million hectares planted to apples, and 1.5 million hectares planted to jujube, so this makes peach fruit moth an important beast.
Pest status
If uncontrolled, peach fruit moth can cause 40 to 50% crop loss in apples and higher than this in jujube.
Russians claim that this pest can take 100% of a pear crop but this does not appear to happen in China.
When we first started working in China, peach fruit moth was considered the number one pest of peaches, responsible for all the peach fruit infestation.
The presence of high numbers of infested shoots was a give away. OFM turned out to be the main pest of peaches in China—as it is in Australia, and the major pest of pears as well. (I will write more on OFM and codling moth in China in a separate article).
Control of peach fruit moth
For several decades, Chinese farmers have bagged their apples and peaches individually to protect from various insect pests including peach fruit moth.
Insecticides for control of peach fruit moth have always been used in jujube where bagging is not an option.
For many years, Chinese orchards were small, typically half an acre. In most regions, trees were trained to low vase shapes that allowed all operations including bagging of fruit to be done from the ground . This is changing.
The rural population in China is aging. Children are moving to the cities where jobs are better paid and life is more exciting than ‘down on the farm’.
Farms are amalgamating into larger units and adopting western tree training methods and practices that result in higher yields.
Rural labour is now relatively in short supply (the inevitable outcome of the one child policy) and expensive. Labour intensive practices such as bagging, are on the way out.
Attract and kill system for peach fruit moth (continued next month)
See this article and photos in Tree Fruit June 2017
