CORVALLIS, Ore. — Alexander Butcher’s passion for food — which led to culinary school and a 10-year career as a professional chef — has now brought him to Oregon State University to pursue a Ph.D. in entomology.
You read that correctly. We’ll let Butcher connect the dots.
“Working in the restaurant industry, I noticed so much food waste and it just really started to bother me,” Butcher explained. “That led me down a track towards agriculture and pest management and really trying to reduce food waste.”
As it turns out, pest management has a lot to do with food waste, Butcher said. It starts in the fields and the orchards.
“Pests destroy crops, causing agricultural waste,” he said. “But on top of that, there’s the quality of the product. When you have insect damage, food spoils faster, it’s less aesthetically pleasing, and it doesn’t taste as good.”
All that leads to food left on the plate and then thrown out.
Butcher’s research focuses on sustainable — both financially and environmentally — pest management solutions for mealybugs in vineyards. He’s a member of the lab led by Vaughn Walton, an Oregon State University Extension entomologist.
What is a mealybug?
A mealybug is a common pest that affects lots of plants, including wine grapes. It damages the fruit by feeding on the phloem, in addition to secreting a sugary liquid called honeydew onto the plant’s leaves and the grape clusters. Honeydew can cause mold reducing the plants’ ability to photosynthesize and impacting the quality of the grapes. A big concern with mealybugs is their ability to transmit grapevine leafroll virus.
The grape mealybug is the most commonly occurring mealybug species in Oregon.
Unlike the recently introduced Vine mealybug, the grape mealybug often isn’t perceived as a threat, which makes it dangerous. Since it doesn’t immediately harm the plant, it can sneak up on growers.
But once the harm to the plant passes a certain threshold, “it’s really hard to manage and causes a lot of damage,” he said.
The mealybug also causes long-term impacts on the wine produced from the grapes.
“A good amount of evidence shows the mealybug changes the phenolic compounds in the grapes. This means the quality of the wine that is produced off these grapes is really altered,” said Butcher.
Mealybug management
Current mealybug management relies on insecticides.
While this gets the job done, it’s not a long-term solution for the industry,” according to Butcher.
For example, federal regulations are getting stricter on some chemistries used in pesticides.
“So having alternatives is a good contingency plan,” Butcher said.
Also, pests develop resistance to insecticides. “It means that money, funds and resources have to go into researching and developing new products every couple of years,” said Butcher. “That's a huge impact. There is a lot of waste associated to that.”
Plus, sustainability is a central tenet of the Oregon wine industry. Relying on chemicals is not something many vineyardists want, especially if they are certified organic or biodynamic.
Butcher is the middle of a promising experiment on mating disruption which would “be an organic option ,” said Butcher.
It works by recreating the pheromones that insects release to mate, which confuses them. Male insects are not able to find females and are therefore not able to mate, lowering the population level.
Even if an insect becomes resistant to a pesticide, it will be unable to mate naturally. That also leads to the population going down.
While some Oregon fruit growers have been using disrupters, there hadn’t been research for wine grapes in Oregon until Butcher took it on.
Butcher has partnered with four vineyards in Roseburg, Newberg, The Dalles and Milton-Freewater to test the efficacy of mating disruptors. The results have been astonishing.
“Our most effective site also had the heaviest infestation. We saw about 70% reduction at probably a tenth of the dose that other studies have done,” said Butcher.
That means most of the grape mealybugs were managed with a dose of the mating disruptors that was a tiny fraction of what had been used before.
Butcher is working with companies to get the mating disruption dispensers for grape mealybug commercially available. “I'm not entirely sure on their timeline, but within this year or next year would be a reasonable guess,” said Butcher.
Butcher will replicate his findings next growing season and publish the results in late 2025. He is also working in the lab to improve a biological control option: A nematode that could act as a “disease” to the mealybugs. This is another organic option that provides more rapid control but is less far along in terms of getting it in the hands of growers.
