This tree could save Michigan’s $54-million tart cherry industry

Larry Gut, an entomology professor at Michigan State University (MSU), ambled onto the small stage. His presentation was displayed on the screen over his shoulder. After giving an overview of the threat, he then presented the audience of farmers with different suggestions for how to control SWD: don’t start spraying insecticide too early in the season; alternate insecticides to avoid creating resistance; Mustang Max, Warrior II, and Imidan have worked well.

He ended with his own personal assessment of the pest: “It’s horrendous. This is definitely the worst insect I’ve dealt with in my 40-year career.”

Native to Southeast Asia, SWD was first spotted in the Western United States in 2008 and spread quickly across the continent. The fly, with females capable of laying 300 or more eggs during their lifespan, was detected in Washington and Florida in 2009, Michigan in late September of 2010, and New England in 2011.

This miniscule and destructive invader is on the mind of many in Michigan’s tart cherry sector, which is responsible for 75 percent of tart cherry production in the U.S. In 2016, the most recent numbers available, the fly took out around 21 percent of the state’s cherry crops.

“Right now, it has top priority for the Michigan Cherry Committee,” says Nikki Rothwell, an extension specialist at MSU who talks frequently with cherry farmers, industry groups, and government entities like the committee. “I know for sure that for cherry growers it is the top priority.”

Gut, talking after the conference in his office at MSU, is as blunt about the threat of SWD as he was on stage. “It’s the first insect that I know of that’s an industry killer. This pest is so difficult to deal with that it’s already posed a threat to certain crops in the world,” he says.

While researchers across the country are working on solutions to combat SWD, a potential answer for Michigan’s $54-million tart cherry industry vulnerability stands in a 200-acre orchard roughly 25 miles from DeVos Place. There, nestled between thousands of other trees, stands a seemingly fragile mass of sticks and roots: a small cherry tree that may be key to saving the Michigan tart cherry industry from its most pressing threat.

For tart cherry farmers, the idea of an early-ripening tree used to be unfavorable because it had the potential to interfere with sweet cherry harvest and processing. That’s one reason why Amy Iezzoni, horticulture professor at MSU and a tart cherry breeder, didn’t initially target those kinds of trees in her research.

But SWD changed things. Now, the idea is to find an early-ripening tree that also blooms late. That way, the tree will avoid any frost damage while also reaching harvest-ready condition early enough to avoid the “summer surge,” when SWD levels are at their highest. In Northwest Michigan, home to the National Cherry Festival and much of the state’s sweet and tart cherry crop, some cherry harvests and peak SWD levels overlap in the month of July.

So, in thinking about how to avoid that overlap, Iezzoni came up with a novel idea in the land of plant breeding. Rather than selecting a tree for the quality of its fruit or resistance to a certain insect, she instead looked for a tree that would mature early and avoid the brunt of the pest altogether. She went first to the farmers: “I said, should I add this as one thing that I’m trying to do? And they said, ‘yes.’”

Iezzoni and her team then combed through her inventory of around 400 late-blooming trees, looking for desirable traits. “That’s the biggest part of a breeder’s job, is to walk and taste and test,” says Audrey Sebolt, a research technician for Iezzoni’s breeding program who helped with the process.

The team did find one tree that both blooms late and ripens early, the Prunus cerasus. But Iezzoni suspected that there needed to be a break in the genetic linkage to achieve this, a random event that might occur in only one seedling out of 100. Though it might sound like that randomly acquired trait would make the tree’s late blooming, early ripening feature hard to replicate, Iezzoni says it actually makes breeding easier because the two traits have a high probability of being transmitted to the tree’s offspring.

“So yeah, I was pretty happy to find it,” she says.

One of the hardest things about combating SWD is how relatively little we know about them, although scientists are racing to fill in the gaps. At the Great Lakes Expo, almost one-fifth of the research posters (write-ups of academic studies) displayed were dedicated to the pest—more than any other one topic. They touched on SWD’s winter morphing, when the fly gets bigger and darker, different insecticide spray programs, and SWD’s preference for various types of yeast. Last year, MSU researchers received $300,000 in grants to study the pest.

Promising research at other universities includes the idea of releasing sterile males into the SWD population, similar to some plans to eliminate Zika-carrying mosquitos. But for now, effective and expensive pesticides, exclusion netting used to protect the plants, and modified harvest schedules remain some of the only defenses against SWD.

In the early years of infestations, California’s conventional raspberry farmers were reporting as much as 50 percent of their yields lost to SWD. In recent years, however, producers have deployed two strategies to combat the pest: first, apply pesticides; and second, harvest the raspberries more frequently. Those methods have seemed to work: a 2017 study published in the journal Pest Management Science reported a yield loss of less than 3 percent for California farmers.

But, the key word here is “conventional.” Raspberry farmers using conventional farming systems at industrial scale have the option to spray large amounts of chemicals to combat the flies. But for organic raspberry farmers, that isn’t an option: the same 2017 study reports that organic producers have seen annual losses between 5 and 15 percent, with no reduction like their conventional counterparts have experienced.

While Michigan tart cherry farmers are using insecticides, harvesting more frequently is not a possibility—cherry trees are harvested only once per season using a large hydraulic shaker. And while high-value crops like raspberries might be able to make up the losses (for now), some tart cherry farmers (who sell most of their harvest to processors to be turned into cherry pie fillings, juice, and preserves) are already hurting. And the worry is that large pesticide bills will eventually drive some of them out of business. Imidan, one of the most common pesticides used by tart cherry farmers, can cost between $22 and $25 an acre, before calculating in labor costs.

Harvesting early and avoiding one or two pesticide sprays might help tart cherry growers in Michigan in the short term, but their longer term prospects are more uncertain. It will probably be a while before Iezzoni’s tree—or a version of it—is ready to go into their orchards. Development is a long and unpredictable process. Right now, she isn’t thrilled with the quality of the tree’s fruit. It’s too small for cherry processors.

“The seedling itself is unlikely to be successful,” Iezzoni says. “I’ll have to cross it with different things to get other traits, then you never can predict exactly what you’re going to get.”

Still, her finding could be the first step toward something promising. For now, Iezzoni says she is waiting until first bloom later this month.

“It’s a difficult prospect but if I have indeed gotten that combo together—I have a roadmap to get where I want to go.”