Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture recently issued a quarantine order for mushroom farms in Kennett and New Garden Townships due to phorid flies, writes Jeff Mulhollem for the Penn State News.
The pest has been threatening southeastern Pennsylvania’s mushroom industry, which produces 60 percent of the nation’s mushrooms, by destroying nearly 40 percent of crops and invading nearby homes.
As part of these emergency measures, mushroom farms in the two Chester County townships must implement steam treatment between crop cycles, using best practices developed by Penn State researchers, according to Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding. This includes raising the temperature in the mushroom-growing houses to a level where phorid flies and their larvae cannot survive.
Phorid flies have been a problem for mushroom farms for decades. Farmers used a pesticide called diazinon to control them, but in 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency deemed it toxic.
“Since then, Pennsylvania has seen year-to-year exponential growth of the flies in the Kennett Square area of Chester and Berks counties,” said Michael Wolfin, assistant research professor of entomology at Penn State.
Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture has allocated $500,000 in grant funding for affected farmers.
Read more about the phorid fly quarantine order for Chester County in the Penn State News.
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