Controlling pests in Mexican raspberries

05/08/2021 - Raspberries have become a star crop in Mexico thanks to the quality of the fruits and the high agri-food safety standards adhered to during production. To optimise yield and quality - and ultimately profitability - growers need to keep on top of three potentially challenging pests - spider mite, thrips and broad mite.

Pest pressure on the increase

While these pests can appear in the crop at any time of the year, when temperatures rise conditions are perfect and pest pressure tends to increase and remain high throughout the summer months.

Look out for …

In the case of thrips and broad mite, the main signs to look out for are discoloration of leaves and apical buds.

All mobile stages of spider mite feed on plant sap causing yellow dots (mottling) to appear on leaves. Left unchecked, leaves eventually turn yellow and die reducing plant growth.

Voracious predators

Biobest has a range of beneficials to help control these pests and optimise crop health.

To control spider mite we recommend deploying our Phytoseiulus-System. Each adult Phytoseiulus is capable of consuming around 20 spider mite eggs or larvae, 10 nymphs or 5 adult spider mites a day.

To keep thrips at bay we advise a dual predator strategy – Orius-System and Swirskii-System – plus Bug-Scan^® sticky traps.

Adult Orius are oval and the females can kill up to 20 thrips nymphs, while Orius nymphs can each easily devour 30 thrips larvae. The second predator, Amblyseius swirskii, is a generalist and provides efficient biological control of young thrips larvae and whitefly eggs and larvae. To optimise the strategy, we advise introducing Bug-Scan^® sticky traps for the timely detection of pest outbreaks and to aid control.

To combat broad mite, we again recommend introducing Swirskii-System.

Monitoring key

Biobest technical specialists advise growers to monitor their raspberry crops careful and respond quickly with the appropriate beneficials to stop these potentially troublesome pests getting out of control.