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at Oregon State University.
[program music]
Rick Hilton: I mean the nature of the orchards is changing.
The way we produce fruit has changed
and certainly the way we look at pesticides has also changed.
The insects themselves have evolved.
One of the big pests we have in cherries now
is the spotted wing drosophila.
One of the things we do is we're doing trapping
and trying out different traps.
This version with the wider lid
we're tentatively calling a sombrero trap.
It tells us if they're there,
when they appear, and when the different generations develop
so it would help you time your spray.
One big thing we work on when we get a good trap design
well then we can try to correlate the numbers in the trap
to the population density.
So you actually have to balance the cost of the treatment
versus the cost of the damage being done.
Woman: A leaf-brushing machine.
I think that's just about as technical as we get.
We just brush each end of the leaf onto the plate
to see what we have out there in the orchard
and see how the different treatments are affecting the trees.
And then count these tiny little buggers under the scope.
Sometimes it's a lot and sometimes there's just a few.
[clicking]
[ringing]
Rick Hilton: Right there.
[scraping wood]
Go down and peal the bark
because that's where mealy bugs really like to camp out
is underneath this loose bark.
It can be pretty painstaking when we're out here
looking for the female mealy bugs and the egg sacks
because you're just sort of on your hands and knees pretty much
the entire day.
It gives us the opportunity to assess the population
and we can tell what stage they're in.
We can see if their egg sacks are being laid, if eggs are hatching.
Are we seeing adult females
or are we just seeing the larval stages?
*** Ellis: The mealy bug showed up four years ago or so
and we were able to identify it,
start trapping, and take action to mitigate the infestation.
If we'd not done that we could've lost quite a bit of the crop
to the mealy bug.
The main reason you need a marriage of research and industry
is because we need to continually improve
the quality of our product.
In order to really establish ourselves as a wine region
we have to have really good wines
and really good wines can't happen without really good grapes.
So it is good to have researchers that are helping you
evaluate concepts and ideas
to improve the quality of the grapes.
This is our Syrah.
This won a double gold and a gold medal.
This is made in the northern Rome style.
[cork popping]
You taste some pear, you taste maybe some apple in there.
We're looking for complexity, subtlety,
a balanced wine that has a balance of acidity,
of barrel alcohol flavor.
All of those should be in balance.
You can't just put in a vineyard
and expect that you are going to get good quality grapes
and therefore good quality wine.
You need to understand how best to treat pests when you get them
and without a research and an extension service
you're left to reading articles in books or talking to people,
and you need that type of structured,
mainly applied research, I think is what's important here
because we sell to top-notch labels
and they're expecting top-notch grapes.
That's what we've got to make, what we've got to grow.
[program music]
[END]