Fruit fly discussions skirt around climate change

Tim Jones wasn’t talking about climate change, but he may as well been.

Tim Jones - Wandin Valley Farms:
"If we don't get together,
we are pretty stuffed."

The director and sales manager at Victoria’s Wandin Valley Farms told a Shepparton meeting on Tuesday night that “If we can’t get together, we are pretty stuffed.”

Wandin Valley Farms grows cherries – “It’s all we grow, it’s all we know” Tim told more than 200 orchardists and others who gathered at Shepparton’s Macintosh Centre to hear about the latest Goulburn Valley outbreaks of Queensland Fruit Fly.

Tim, a big no-fuss fellow and obviously a man of action, talked about the complications for fruit growers in not playing their part in controlling the pest, indicating that government involvement hinged on a determined effort by growers to control this infestation.

His call for a co-ordinated response to this present flush of fruit fly outbreaks reflects a broader community need to respond to climate change.

Climate change was not an obvious point for discussion on Tuesday night, but it seems it could have easily been that case for among the myriad of matters worsening the Queensland fruit fly outbreaks, were the noted changes in weather patterns in the Goulburn Valley, particularly in the past three years.

And it is those changes to weather conditions that allow for and encourage the establishment of Queensland fruit fly in areas to which they had been previously unknown.

Among the quartet of speakers was a NSW Department of Industry and Investment as a Research Horticulturist studying postharvest market access strategies for fresh Australian horticultural commodities against Australian fruit flies, in particular, Bactrocera tryoni, Froggatt (Queensland fruit fly), Andrew Jessup.

Andrew, a quiet, considerate and studious man, was the only speaker to mention climate change and did that in passing when discussing the complications growers in the Goulburn Valley face as weather patterns change because of climate change.

Talked with later, Mr Jessup explained that fruit fly doesn’t like clear heat, but find comfort in the humid and warmer conditions the frequently align with climate change.

Fruit fly are sensitive to temperature, mating at about 16 degrees Celsius and because of the vanishing extreme cold of GV winters are finding it possible to live through those months in which their populations were usually desecrated.

The sudden and heavy downpours associated with climate change promote growth between trees in orchards and because the ground is wet and so orchardists are subsequently unable to access their orchards to trim back weeds and grasses that provide a warm refuge for fruit fly.

Fruit fly is not in and of itself the epitome of the worst of climate change, simply just another of the symptoms that are evidence of our disrupted atmosphere.

But of course as Tim Jones says: “If we can’t get together, we are pretty stuffed.”