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National & World Ag News Headlines |
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California Battling with Deadly Citrus Disease
USAgNet - 04/23/2012
The worst disease known to the citrus industry may have arrived in California. A graft of pomelo was the likely source of the state's first documented case of huanglongbing, a citrus disease with no known cure, say researchers involved in the investigation. The suspected plant shoot, or budwood, was passed freely
among San Gabriel Valley church friends who loved to garden and experiment with hybridization, according to residents.
According to the Los Angeles Times, California was the last major citrus-growing region in the world to avoid a scourge that has decimated groves in China, Brazil and Florida. The disease arrived the way experts had long predicted: in a tree in a Southern California yard. Now, agriculture officials are scrambling
to slow the disease's march north and save a $2-billion industry based in the Central Valley.
Authorities launched a massive containment effort involving quarantines, pesticides and public hearings when a lemon-pomelo tree in Mary Wang's lush Hacienda Heights yard tested positive for the disease on March 30. The sickly-looking tree was quickly removed for study.
Larry Hawkins, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said it has not concluded how the state's first case of huanglongbing, also known as greening disease, arrived.
Officials at the California Department of Food and Agriculture have long been bracing for the arrival of huanglongbing. It is spread by the Asian citrus psyllid, a flea-size bug that can feed on an infected tree and transmit the disease to others. Once the first bug arrived in the state in 2008, the clock was ticking.
State workers have monitored more than 10,000 traps in Southern California neighborhoods, testing hundreds of thousands of bugs.
The highest concentration of the bugs was in neighborhoods near Dodger Stadium. Officials also closely monitored the San Gabriel Valley, once the orange capital of California, before the industry moved to Central California. Only one bug so far has made it to the Central Valley, the heart of the state's commercial
citrus industry, and it did not test positive for the disease.
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