INDUSTRY NEWS
Retirement calls...
research continues but research
Senior research scientist with Agriculture Victoria David Madge is retiring after spending the past 14 years investigating almond industry pests. He ' s pictured here collecting nut samples for damage assessments during early carob moth mating disruption trials.
14
A SENIOR research scientist with Agriculture Victoria who has dedicated the last 14 years of his career to investigating pests in the almond industry will retire at the end of this month. David Madge joined the Department in 1983 and started working in integrated pest management around 1988, mostly supporting the grape and citrus industries. During the mid-2000s, following his interest in sustainable agriculture, David obtained industry funding to produce an organic production manual for each of those industries. Since 2011 he has worked solely on almond pest management. While many people strive to retire with an empty in tray, Mr Madge concedes there’ s unfinished business in the almond integrated pest management arena. having a trap that is really good for catching the Carpophilus species that does all the damage, Carpophilus truncatus, and we are now in the precommercialisation phase with that trap.” Damage to almond kernels can be reduced by about 50 per cent using high density trapping, which is about 16 traps per hectare, but results from this past season indicate that eight traps per hectare provided similar results. Mr Madge said it’ s possible that somewhere around six to eight traps per hectare may be the sweet spot for reducing damage levels.“ There’ s going to be work happening in the not too distant future looking at extending the life of the pheromone septa in the traps and we’ ve already shown that we can leave the modified co-attractant in the traps twice as long as previously, so reducing the number of traps and extending the life of the components is getting us to a point where this could be a commercialisable attract and kill solution,” he said. It may also be possible to transition away from a trap to avoid the need for ongoing maintenance, and instead the lure and a pesticide might be packaged
Combating Carpophilus Beetle“ With Carpophilus, the really sophisticated chemical ecology work was done down in Melbourne at our Bundoora labs, and we did all the field work to test prototype pheromone blends and co-attractant mixtures from our lab base at Irymple” he said.“ We got to the point fairly quickly of in a different format to still achieve
In A Nutshell- Winter 2025 Vol 26 Issue 2 mass attract and kill of the beetle.“ Almost every week we are having discussions on the commercialisation angle, what the data is showing, how the numbers are looking, so that is an ongoing process.” Mr Madge is often asked when the trap might be available to purchase but said that’ s beyond his control.“ We stick with the science and try to make sure the science is right,” he said.“ The commercial angle is looking at everything like potential market size and coming back to how does the science look, how do the costings look, so I wouldn’ t dare put a number on that.” This season a carpophilus beetle monitoring network was established to help growers become familiar with monitoring the beetle and for researchers to learn more about the pest. While Mr Madge and the team at Agriculture Victoria are in the early stages of reviewing the data, interesting trends are emerging in the different almond growing districts.“ Whether we get an entomopathogenic control agent, or growers use sprays or mass trapping, the actual timing of emergence of the beetle, its activity at different times of