Curly-Top Virus Wreaks Havoc On Tomatoes
June 19, 2013 Tomato and pepper growers in Fresno Valley, CA, are ripping up acres of plants due to curly-top virus, spread by the sugarbeet leafhopper.
The virus hit earlier than expected and spread, due to dry weather, from the foothills to the valley floor. The leafhopper passes the virus to the plant as it feeds.
“They’ll tend to stay up there longer, as long as that stays green but this year with little rain that we got they came early,” said Paul Brooks, a tomato grower for more than 30 years, to KFSN-TV in Fresno, CA. “They had to come in the early part of April.”
Brooks told KFSN “this is the definitely the worst I’ve ever seen since I’ve been out here. Normally we’ll have a little bit or have one field affected somewhat but never like this.”
Water shortages help compound the problem, said Brooks to KGPE TV “We’re (using) only 20% water. So water is like gold to us and we’re putting it on a crop that we’re not going to get full return on.”
“In drought years the (sugarbeet leafhopper) tends to explode,” said Fresno County Ag Commissioner Les Wright to KGPE. “We haven’t gotten a good handle on it because it just started making phone calls to figure out what kind of damage the growers are feeling out there,” Wright said.
Brooks told KGPE that the virus has infected 10% of his 2,000 acres, and that amounts to tens of thousands of dollars in losses.
He told KFSN that some of the local farmers suffered complete losses, “We’ve got fields from 3% all the way to 23% so I think it’s all over the board.”
Tomatoes for processing won’t be harvested until August, but Brooks told KGPE “We can’t do anything about what’s affected, and so we just got to move forward and hope next year’s better.”
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