Posted on 12/23/2004 12:18:41 PM PST by neverdem
JUST in time to complicate spring planting, the federal government is preparing to issue what agriculture officials call the most sweeping restrictions on the shipment of nursery plants ever undertaken in the United States, to try to prevent the spread of a virulent disease that has killed tens of thousands of oaks and other species along the West Coast.
The restrictions, expected to be issued in early January, will affect millions of plants grown in California, Oregon and Washington, about one-third of the country's nursery plant supply. They will require inspection, sampling and possibly testing of all plants that could be hosts to the pathogen, Phytophthora ramorum, the cause of sudden oak death syndrome, before shipment across state lines. The disease has been spotted in 22 states.
The list of likely host plants has grown to include 64 species, among them popular ornamental plants like camellias, rhododendrons and azaleas. Agriculture officials caution that the list could grow as the range of host plants becomes better known.
The disease, caused by a poorly understood organism, ravages oaks and tanoaks. In other species, including bay laurel and andromeda, it causes leaf spots and dying twigs. Discoveries of the disease in the nursery trade have been isolated and few, but the potential impact of its spread leaves regulators little room for error.
"This is as big a plant regulatory emergency as I've ever experienced," said Dan Hilburn, the administrator of the plant division of the Oregon agriculture department. Nursery plants are Oregon's No. 1 agricultural product, and about 76 percent of them, about $589 million worth, are sold out of state. Mr. Hilburn compared the government's concern to that following the arrival of the gypsy moth and Japanese beetle in North America, problems that appeared in the early 1900's and lingered for most of the century.
"It's a megapest, as big as they get," Mr. Hilburn said.
Industry experts said that customers of retail garden centers could face shortages of some common garden plants for the spring planting season, especially if symptoms of the disease are found during the nursery inspections. Growers would have to stop major shipments if inspectors find signs of P. ramorum infection on their properties. Testing for the disease can take weeks to months for a confident result.
John Aguirre, the executive director of the Oregon Association of Nurseries, said that more than 50 percent of Oregon's nurseries would have to be inspected under the order. California ships about 20 percent of its nursery plants out of state. "If you lose the ability to get plant material from California and Oregon, it's going to be felt without question by the consumer," Mr. Aguirre said.
Nurseries in general have not yet raised prices on plants because of P. ramorum problems, but nursery owners cannot rule out price rises if supplies for particular plants become scarce. "With the most susceptible plants there could be a shortage, with rhododendrons and camellias especially," said Dave Fujino, the vice president of Hines Horticulture, one of the country's largest wholesale nurseries, in Winters, Calif. "I'm not hearing anything about an escalation of prices, but I'm not hearing there's a shortage" of particular plants, he said.
In September, inspectors found P. ramorum symptoms on rhododendrons at a Hines nursery in Forest Grove, Ore., which prompted regulators to track down 10,000 rhododendrons that had been shipped to about 50 locations in Connecticut.
Agriculture officials say they hope the new rules will prevent the sort of widespread disruptions of plant shipments that began last spring when the disease was found on camellias in a large California nursery, though the officials cannot guarantee against future disruptions.
Retail garden centers typically place orders for spring a year in advance. Consumers were largely unaware of last spring's disruptions because most of the potentially infected plants found were confiscated and destroyed before they were sold. With thousands of plants held up in California, retailers scrambled to substitute plants grown elsewhere.
Bob Jacobson, a senior director of Home Depot in Atlanta, said his company faced some plant shortages last spring, especially in the Atlanta area, but was able to use other suppliers. "In all honesty, it was a pain in the neck," Mr. Jacobson said.
Owners of smaller garden centers are watching the situation warily. James Harwell, the president of Harwell's Green Thumb in Montgomery, Ala., said he feared the impact of a quarantine. "In springtime they could shut down a whole nursery."
At first the federal government took steps to prevent the spread of the disease from affected plants in California, where it has devastated entire forests. But four states imposed wider bans unless the nurseries could certify that their plants were disease-free. Thomas Johnson, the plant pest administrator in Alabama, said he had imposed a ban broader than the federal government's to protect Alabama's diverse plant life and its nursery industry, the state's second biggest agricultural commodity, after poultry.
"We have a lot of plants in the East that they don't have in the West," Mr. Johnson said.
Nursery owners and agriculture officials said they hoped the new rules would reduce the confusion caused by state bans against plants from California nurseries, some of which exceeded the federal inspection order. Little is known about the pathogen's behavior outside the mild foggy forests of the West. As a precaution, however, plants thought to be infected are handled as if they were hazardous waste.
California nursery growers estimate that the bans will result in sales losses of at least $50 million this year. Claude R. Knighten, a spokesman for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in the federal Agriculture Department, called the new restrictions "one of the most comprehensive and challenging plant health programs undertaken by our agency in recent years." He said the rules, to be issued under the Plant Protection Act, were awaiting a final legal review by the department.
Most upsetting to regulators and scientists is how little they understand P. ramorum. It is one of about 100 species of Phytophthora, Greek for "plant destroyer" and commonly known as root rot or crown rot. The first symptoms were found withering a tanoak in Mill Valley, Calif., in 1995.
In 2000 P. ramorum was isolated and identified by Dr. David Rizzo, a professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis, and Dr. Matteo Garbelotto at the University of California, Berkeley.
"We're just getting started," Dr. Rizzo said. "This is an organism nobody knew existed four years ago."
One point of consensus among experts is that the epithet "sudden oak death" is misleading. The disease can linger for months and does not always cause death. It is not known to affect all oak species.
Until last winter Dennis Connor had little reason to think that the disease would turn up in his nursery, Monrovia Growers, in Azusa, Calif., one of the country's largest purveyors of garden plants.
The disease thrives mainly in wetter northern parts of the state, where it has caused thousands of trees to bleed an ugly dark sap and die seemingly within weeks. The nursery sits nearly in the desert outside Los Angeles. Sudden oak death "didn't seem to exist in dry areas," said Mr. Connor, the general manager of Monrovia Growers.
But on March 8, California state agriculture inspectors found P. ramorum on six kinds of Monrovia's camellia plants. The company had just shipped 158,000 camellias to 900 retail garden centers in the United States and Canada. The plants had to be tracked down to stop their sale and planting. Monrovia had to destroy 1.3 million camellia plants, which took about four months, because hazardous-waste handlers could take only so many at a time.
"We basically ended up dumping our camellia crop," Mr. Connor said.
He estimated that the company had lost at least $9 million in destroyed plants, sales lost in states that banned shipments and reimbursements for infected shipments.
Since April the Agriculture Department's inspection service has spent $15.5 million to test nurseries for signs of the disease. For 2005 the inspection service has requested about $3 million to continue its control efforts.
Dr. Rizzo of the University of California said he marveled at the sheer breadth of the new rules. "This is the widest host range ever to be quarantined," Dr. Rizzo said. "We're up to over 60 different species. Given the fact that this involves so many hosts, can we really stop this?"
Keith Parker
VICTIMS An oak forest in Marin County, Calif., where a plant pathogen has struck.
Top, Garbelotto Lab; bottom, Steve Tjosvold
SYMPTOMS Sudden oak death syndrome, spotted in 22 states, is signaled by sappy bark lesions, top, and by leaf rot.
More about Phytophthora ramorum
--this sounds like it could be worse than the chestnut blight of about sixty years ago or Dutch Elm disease which started forty or so years ago--
: )
If some Indian 'guru' or Haitian voodooist or Native American spiritist wanted to have a ceremony to protect these trees, there would be adulation and mutual worship of Mother Earth. If somebody like Jerry Falwell were to offer to come to the blighted area to pray to God for the trees, the media and Greens would attack him for being a publicity hound and being a simpleton for being superstitious.
I say, if the Oaks are being killed mysteriously, it's time to call in Miss Maple to solve the case...if she has a prayer....
This may be a key.
Isolate the gene/s responsible for the resistance and incorporate them into susceptible species.
In the mean time, get ready to cut and split a great deal of firewood.
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Meanwhile, virtually NOTHING is done about plants imported from overseas.
You will note in the top photo: That is a riparian corridor with surrounding firs on the left and madrone on the right (the left side probably faces north or east). The dead trees are Lithocarpus densiflorus (tanoak). Oaks don't do well down in a wet shady gully like that, particularly shaded for part of the day by taller trees. They are as much victims of fire suppression and succession having allowed massive overstocking. That raised the average humidity, increased the duration of fog, reduced aeration, and increased accumulated and acidic litter (which would kill those trees eventually anyway when Armillaria gets into the cambium breaks caused by girdling roots due to the litter). Higher average humidity and shorter hours of sunlight greatly aid the disease in infecting a tree (tanoak is particularly susceptible because of its thinner bark than most oaks).
These species were selected over the last few thousand years having become accustomed to regular fire. Regular fires would have prevented the conifers from being so dense and shading that zone. Regular fires would have consumed the litter and provided those trees nutrition. There is no way that a stand now in that stocking density could survive a fire.
This disease started in Marin and Santa Cruz Counties, two of the most heavily regulated and overgrown counties in the whole state. I live in Santa Cruz County. Unlike my nieghbors, I have done the hard work of thinning my forests. In the seven years since Phytophthora ramorum was identified, I have lost ONE tree. The trees in that photo are more victims of how that land was managed than they are of the disease (which was likely imported from Europe with rhododendrons, btw).
Phytophthora ramorum produces spores. That means it is spread by birds. There is NO WAY any regulatory body is going to stop it now. All this action accomplishes is to kill a legitimate (although badly run) horticultural industry that we need for re-establishing native plants. The only way they could have prevented the disease was to take action on screening imports (particularly from Mexico), which is the one thing they don't do. So if that doesn't seem likely, ask yourself why.
--you obviously are an authority on this. As it is species-specific, can we then assume that it won't wipe the continent clean of oaks, such as almost happened with Dutch elms?
BTTT
Phytophthora ramorum is not species specific. You will note in the bottom of neverdem's photos are leaves from a California Bay Laurel tree. P. ramorum is not fatal to bay trees but they are a host. It is not fatal to redwood or fir either, which show little to no symptoms at all. It is fatal to virtually all species of oak trees and many shrubs but to varying degrees.
Now that it's here, all we can do now is to make certain the land is as healthy as it can be so that its individual constituents might survive. AFIK, there is no way to truly prevent the spread of this pathogen, although we might delay it for a few years. There is a treatment out there, but it is prohibitively expensive for all but the most valuable of ornamental trees. While the original predictions for how the scope of this infestation were very dark (some were saying we would lose 70% of all oaks in California), I have seen no indication that the reality is so threatening.
That doesn't mean I'm not royally pi$$ed that this pathogen was allowed into the country. If we hadn't learned our lesson after Dutch Elm disease we should this time simply because the next one could be worse. To allow foreign goods into the country without a rigorous means to protect native habitat from imported pathogens is to massively subsidize imported goods. The sellers and buyers don't pay for that risk; the landowner assumes the entire risk of the eventual consequences. Thus the risk of infestation is an economic externality of the importation transaction. When those consequences hit, the damned government agencies land upon those who are suffering the consequences (not that the horticultural industry is blameless, they did after import those rhododendrons). Thus, as far as I am concerned, the free ride that imports get is a result of corruption in government.
There are ways to manage such affairs without the heavy (and dirty) hand of regulatory government. Perhaps when I've raised a little capital (and when my patent for one such system finally gets a first office action) I'll get going on that.
Naah, there's no coincidence to that.
CA: USDA Acts to End Fight Over Plant Disease ( View from California on national problem )
They're still trying to do that with chesnuts and it's been how long since the blight eliminated them from forests? Unless they can get the new pest quarantined, you can kiss most of the oaks goodby. The effect of the loss of the mast crop isn't being considered but it will obviously affect everything from wild turkeys to squirrels and deer.
Missouri and Arkansas denuded of their Oaks.....this is serious....
BTTT!!!!!!!
"Just the facts, ma'am..."
Just damn.
If you want on the list, FReepmail me. This IS a high-volume PING list...
Although the chestnut tree was devastated, pockets of the tree survived. I bought some stock a few years ago and planted them on my property. It is one slow-growing tree, let me tell you. If it keeps growing the way it is, I'll be about 125 years old before I get my first chestnut to roast over that open fire.
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