Ian Walters pointed to a termite-infested wall outside a makeshift lab on a longtime Army airfield southeast of Los Angeles.
The lab belongs to the US fruit fly sterilization program, which dispatches four jets most days to release millions of sterilized male Mediterranean fruit flies over the LA basin. The aim: Slow a record surge of insects threatening produce in California, the country’s top grower of fruits and vegetables.
Walters and his staff coordinate the effort from a collection of old, dilapidated portable trailers, connected by decks corroded by dry rot. Two units that housed the sterilized flies and supplies are unusable after their roofs collapsed. Replacing them isn’t an option.
“At this point we’re in Band-Aid mode,” Walters said, standing outside the lab one July morning.
As Congress returns this month, lawmakers face fresh calls to boost funding for agricultural research and support programs that for years steadily dwindled.
The agriculture spending bill includes a modest $1 million proposal for the federal arm that supports Walters’ program, still working from so-called temporary trailers that arrived 30 years ago. The bigger target is the $1.5 trillion farm bill under negotiation, which gives legislators an opportunity every five years to establish new programs or target hot topics, which could mean hundreds of millions in new research and preventative funding.
Both are stalled by partisan gridlock.
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Few question the need. Nearly 70% of public agricultural research facilities critical to anticipating future threats to crops were already “at the end of their useful life” four years ago, according to one study. At the same time, climate change is amplifying the threat of invasive pests by enabling them to settle in places they once couldn’t, a coalition of nearly 1,000 scientists warned Congress in a plea for more funding.
“Farmers and ranchers are on the front lines of a deepening climate crisis — drought conditions are squeezing producers across the country, from Texas to Washington, Michigan and beyond,” they wrote in a letter last fall.
‘Cost of prevention’
As globalization and climate change push species into new corners of the world, approximately $70 billion in crops are lost annually to pest or disease, according to the United Nations.
The US’s fruit fly infestation rate rose higher this year than it’s been in 70 years, threatening the food supply that’s already seen a surge in prices.
The reasons might vary, but scientists say many invasive bugs simply enter the country in a backpack or a suitcase.
Farmer A.G. Kawamura, who served as California’s head of agriculture under former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, recalled seeing evidence back then of how pests slip through the border hidden away in an exotic fruit carried by travelers or migrants. Once they settle, these minuscule insects lay their eggs inside fruit and vegetables, which their offspring devour, rotting produce from the inside out.
“The cost of prevention is so much cheaper than having to deal with eradication,” Kawamura told Bloomberg Government during an interview on one of his farms.
The flyover program starts with Walters’ team sterilizing millions of male fruit fly larva with gamma radiation, covering them with purple dye, and dropping them once full-grown over a 1,750-square mile area where fertile pests have been detected.
Later, field inspectors collect traps around the release areas and inspect caught specimen under a microscope, trying to confirm their contact with the purple, sterilized flies.
Since the government began the drops in 1996, medfly infestations in the area plummeted by more than 90%, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture. An “unprecedented” outbreak there this year ultimately was contained, the US Agriculture Department said, but the pests are likely to resurface, Walters says.
The recent uptick of pests goes beyond the medfly and is sowing concern. California’s agriculture department warned third-generation citrus farmer John Gless in January of a nearby Oriental fruit fly infestation, and he agreed to partake in a voluntary quarantine program with traps to slow the pests’ spread.
For a few months, Gless was unable to pick his ripe oranges and grapefruit on that corner of his Riverside, Calif., orchard. He estimates he lost “about $375,000”—approximately a fifth of the farm’s annual income—in market worthy crops.
Research commissioned by the state’s current head of agriculture is underway at the University of California, Davis, to determine whether factors including climate change and globalization may have contributed to the infestation increase, according to the CDFA.
Camiel Doorenweerd, an entomologist at the University of Hawaii involved in that research, said many of the new fruit flies have come from Asia. More investment in research around the region is critical to anticipating other species that could damage US agriculture, he said.
US Agriculture Secretary
But California’s fruit fly program was ranked last on a list of similar sterilization facilities around the country USDA slated for repairs or replacement back in 2016, and progress won’t be made without more money, according to Richard Johnson, national policy manager of USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
“Secretary Vilsack has repeatedly pointed out to Congress and other stakeholders the challenges we face across the Department when there are directives or new program authorizations to expand our work and prioritize new areas of work, but Congress does not adequately fund that new effort,” Johnson said in an emailed statement.
Environmental advocates warn other department priorities, such as hubs connecting scientists with farmers to help them adapt to locale-specific climate change, have also suffered from inconsistent funding over the years, driving an effort to codify them in the farm bill.
“Just about everybody says the pest control and research and development—those two parts of the farm bill are underfunded massively relative to other focuses,” said Dan Sumner, an agricultural economist and professor at UC Davis.
Future Funding
As Walters worried over funding, citrus and grape industry groups served by his team’s work this year convinced Rep.
“A million dollars is not enough to solve all their problems,” Valadao said in a phone interview, “but there’s a lot of other facilities across the nation that are probably in the same situation.”
The spending bill that includes that provision is stalled, as is the farm bill, which lawmakers have already delayed passing by a year. This session, the Republican-controlled House Agriculture Committee, led by Chairman
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The Senate Democrats’ proposal for a farm bill would make researching invasive species a “high priority initiative” and classify pest infestations as a “natural disaster” for tree growers seeking federal assistance. By comparison, the House farm bill would establish a research center and grant opportunities dedicated to eradicating invasive species.
Both chambers are also proposing more money to modernize research facilities in the farm bill—$100 million for fiscal 2025 in the Senate, and $2.5 billion over the next five years in the House.
But partisan divides over more expensive areas of the farm bill and disagreement over how to fully pay for it threaten to derail the legislation.
Omanjana Goswami, a scientist studying US agriculture at Union for Concerned Scientists, hopes lawmakers still prioritize passing the farm bill in an election year.
“The importance of dealing with this issue sooner rather than later is the fact that climate change, our growing conditions, and reality won’t be the same five years later,” Goswami said.
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