WSJ -- Need Maggots in Bulk? They've Got 'Em.
August 2, 2002
Bug-Eating Bugs Scratch Out A New, Growing Retail Niche
By BILL RICHARDS
Special to THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
VENTURA, Calif. -- Jan Dietrich got the call in April: Fox TV needed 5,000
maggots, ASAP, for a pilot of its reality show, "Truth or Consequences."
"But they had to be clean maggots," says Ms. Dietrick, general manager of
Rincon-Vitova Insectaries Inc. "They said, 'Are they sterile? The
contestants have to eat them.' "
Ms. Dietrick, a 56-year-old former dietician, got to work. "We said, 'We'll
wash 'em, put 'em in deli containers, and have them ready for you in the
morning.' "
The bug business is booming these days -- and gross-out TV shows are
just the tip of the antenna. Ms. Dietrick has handled calls on everything
from organic growers ordering predatory mites by the millions to a film
company needing gallons of ladybugs -- that's 72,000 per gallon -- to pour
over the actress Thandie Newton for her bug-ridden role in the 1998 movie
"Beloved."
The Association of Natural Biocontrol Producers, a Santa Ana, Calif.-based
trade group that represents the 30 biggest insectaries in the U.S. and
Canada, estimates that about $200 million in commercial bugs are sold each
year -- with demand growing about 10% annually. Behind the uptick: Bugs
that eat other bugs, in demand from farmers as an alternative to chemical
pesticides. More bugs are growing resistant to pesticides and more
consumers are buying organic. "We're moving toward a strategy of good
bugs eating bad bugs," says Maclay Burt, the association's executive
director.
David Bunn, assistant
manager of Crown Packing
Co. in Salinas, Calif., says
his company buys ladybugs
and green lacewings to
control insect pests on 200
acres of organic artichokes,
lettuce, celery and
cauliflower. "We've gone
from zero organic farming
around here to nearly 5%,"
he says of the rich farming
lands around Salinas.
In Hereford, Texas, Ralph
Diller uses an ultralight aircraft to spray 12.5 million wasps and lacewings
over his 1,100 acres of organic corn, wheat and soybeans. Mr. Diller says
the bugs repel moths that arrive from South Texas in flights so heavy they
can be picked up by radar.
John France, who raises 250 acres of organic mandarin oranges, prunes, walnuts and table grapes on his
ranch near Porterville, Calif., says he began buying bugs to control harmful insects nearly a dozen years ago.
"It was a massive decision," he says. "We kept some chemicals until we were sure it worked."
Now, Mr. France is a bug believer. "If we have a bug that needs to be dealt with, we figure out what kind of
other bug will do the job and buy it."
Recently, Mr. France and his work crew were busy scattering millions of tiny wasps, called Aphytis melinus,
through his orchards. The wasps, about the size of a pepper grain, attack California red scales, heavily
armored parasites that plague citrus growers. The wasps punch holes into the parasites, insert their eggs, and
the larvae feed from the inside out.
Mr. France says he used to spray his fruit with Lorsban, an
insecticide he calls "pretty heavy stuff." These days he and his
workers carry cardboard cups, each containing 25,000 of the
tiny wasps, and tap them out onto the leaves of his trees.
"It's not a real high-tech operation," he says, "but it works."
There is big money in bugs. Growers can charge as much as 40 cents each for some ladybugs, although
farmers can pick up 1,000 run-of-the-mill ladybugs for just $1. Some insectaries charge up to $1 each for
certain weed-eating bugs.
Syngenta Bioline's bug farm in Oxnard, Calif., sits behind a locked gate, marked only by a weathered sign.
Daniel Cahn, president of the unit of Swiss agrochemical concern Syngenta AG, says the low profile is to
discourage visitors who might be after his bug-propagation secrets. "There are people who think this is a gold
mine," he says. "They're tripping over themselves to get in."
Raising bugs is a fairly simple business. Mr. Cahn's greenhouse is filled with bean plants and spider mites,
which feed on the plants. While the spider mites are eating the beans, predator mites eat the spider mites.
The tricky part is collecting the 15 million predator mites Syngenta ships in a busy summer week. Mr. Cahn
declines to show a visitor around his greenhouse or to say how he collects the bugs. "They move upwards,
and we exploit that," he says.
Ms. Dietrick, Rincon-Vitova's general manager, is less secretive. The insectary, on the site of a former
farm-labor camp, operates out of a labyrinth of 26 pale-green cargo containers and a couple of flyspecked
workrooms tucked away among a field of oil derricks.
Ms. Dietrick opens a cargo container and out pours a rush of barley odor along with the musky smell of
millions of breeding bugs. The room is filled with six-foot-long bags hanging from the ceiling. In the bags,
cereal moths lay their eggs on barley kernels. The moth eggs will be fed to green lacewings, known as "aphid
lions" for their predatory gusto.
Ms. Dietrick refers to another line of odiferous storage bins as "fly alley." Inside, 14 million flies are growing
on a diet of bran, milk and sugar. In other containers, maggots grow in piles of woodchips and an army of
ladybugs feeds on a table of rotting squash.
Ms. Dietrick's father, Everett "Deke" Dietrick, a white-bearded former entomologist at the University of
California at Berkeley, started the business in 1960. Mr. Dietrick, now 82 years old, began by peddling bugs to
West Texas cotton farmers out of the back of his Chevy pickup in the early 1960s.
"I'd keep a box of bugs on ice to slow down their growth, and a box heated up -- to speed up the hatch and
show what they could do," says Mr. Dietrick. He competed head-to-head with salesmen from chemical
companies. On occasion, he recalls, competitors would swoop down in crop dusters and release clouds of
insecticide as he was putting his bugs through their paces in the fields.
"The chemical companies won the battle then," says Mr. Dietrich, who still pads around the place keeping
track of his bugs, "but we're struggling back."
Updated August 2, 2002
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