Money to continue battle with beetle tucked into bill balancing Oregon’s budget

But lawmakers didn’t send aid when the agency’s long-standing program to eradicate the Japanese beetle ran out of money last year, surprising specialty crop, grass seed and nursery farmers growing products most tantalizing to the bugs.

After an outcry from farm and nursery groups who warned tens of millions of dollars in crop value could be lost, lawmakers in the most recent legislative session slipped $1.8 million for two years of program funding into a bill meant to balance the state’s budget. Gov. Tina Kotek has yet to sign the bill.

The iridescent green bugs are particularly harmful to the agricultural economies of the Willamette Valley, where adult beetles eat leaves, flowers and fruits including blueberries and wine grapes, and the grubs eat the roots of plants including turf grasses and hops.

Without the funding and the program, state agriculture officials warned lawmakers last fall that crops coming from Oregon would no longer be certified as from a “Japanese beetle-free area.”

The agency spent the past several months working with Western states to help “facilitate the movement” of Oregon plant products with as little potential for beetle travel as possible, officials said in a statement, but California’s Department of Food and Agriculture revoked Oregon’s pest-free status and imposed new restrictions on products coming from Oregon.

The renewed investment should help growers return to “beetle-free” status.

Of the litany of creatures targeting Oregon’s crops that agricultural officials deal with, the Japanese Beetle “rates very high on our list,” Benemann said.

Japanese beetles were first spotted in a plant nursery in New Jersey in 1916. Since then, they’ve made their way across much of the U.S., but it took about 100 years for them to show up in large numbers in Oregon.

“It wasn’t until 2016 when we started finding numbers in the hundreds, and then we decided: We have a problem,” Benemann said. “In 2017, we found our largest population number to date, which is really what triggered and brought to the attention the need for the agency to establish the program as we know it today.”

That year, the agency captured more than 23,000 beetles. Since then, the number has declined 92%. Last year, fewer than 2,000 beetles were captured and most were on a single Washington County blueberry farm that the agency has been monitoring and spraying with an insecticide for several years.

Large infestations have been found mostly in Multnomah and Washington counties, with smaller populations found in Marion and Union counties. The beetles have not found their way across much of Oregon east of the Cascades, though Benemann said there are significant populations in Boise, Idaho, meaning they can thrive in arid climates.

An economic risk analysis produced by state agricultural officials in 2017, after large numbers of the beetles were discovered, projected financial losses of more than $45 million if the state did nothing and let the beetles spread and become established.

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