Spotted Wing Drosophila, Crop Insurance and Alice Wise

On November 29th, we took a short road trip to Cumberland, Rhode Island to attend a seminar hosted by the University of Rhode Island Cooperative Extension's Peggy Siligato. The owner of Phantom Farms generously provided the venue. The topics under discussion were the spotted wing drosophila (SWD), crop insurance and a talk given by Alice Wise from the Cornell Extension. Richard Coles spoke about the spotted wing drosophila. The female SWD has an ovipositor that is saw-like and can damage pristine fruit in the process of laying eggs. This penetration into the fruit allows other organisms such as fungi and bacteria to have an entry portal. The occurrence of SWD in our area coupled with the wet weather conditions during harvest may have lead to the high incidence of sour rot that was observed. SWD can tolerate extremely cold temperatures but succumbs to high temperatures. Richard Coles and his team are looking into ways of managing SWD.

We were mostly interested in meeting Alice Wise because our intention was to go to Long Island to meet her and talk with her, but we were surprised that the spotted wing drosophila talk and the crop insurance talk were also relevant to grape growing in our area. Alice's talk was on "Practical Considerations For Ecological Vineyard Management". Her newest experiments on Long Island compared conventional spraying protocols, low impact spraying and organic 1 (some conventional intervention) and organic 2 (totally organic) spraying programs. She also made references to the work done by Barbara Shinn who farms Shinn Estates using organic and biodynamic methods.
There were a lot of people at the talks and we saw Paul Nunes from Newport Vineyards and Steve Sawyer from Preston Ridge Vineyard.