diamond rush south africa born desperation

New laws required growers to dig up and burn affected orange trees. Fueled by an endless supply of trees to feast on, the pests spread rampantly. Concoctions of kerosene, acids and other chemicals didn’t stop Icerya’s expansion. Throughout Southern California, ruggedly independent growers reacted to the insects’ assault by organizing themselves, in 1885, into the state’s first fruit cooperative, later calling itself Sunkist. Some 600,000 orange trees were growing in California, and the number that succumbed to Icerya is unknown, but it must have been high: In 1887, the state’s citrus export filled 2,000 boxcars, but only 400 the following year. The densest clusters of Icerya lurked on the tender underside of leaves, where they attached themselves with cottony fibers and extracted sap with their sharp beaks, causing leaves to wilt. The property covered roughly 165 acres in Los Angeles. Wolfskill, brother of William, surveys the orange grove at Wolfskill Ranch, c. In desperation, they even tried gunpowder blasts, but the concussive vibrations had no effect. No matter what they tried-washing the trees with whale oil, heating them with sheet-iron stoves and blistering steam, cutting off and burning infected limbs-the waxy, mold-riddled scales excreted by Icerya, which one horrified grower likened to a “hideous leprosy,” continued to infect more and more trees. The ranch had seen various infestations before, but nothing like this.

In 1884, Icerya reached Los Angeles, assembling most aggressively on the south side of William Wolfskill’s ranch-the first commercial citrus orchard in the state, one of the largest. By the early 1880s, it was ravaging San Francisco’s trees and quickly migrating south, its tiny red larvae hitching rides on anything that moved, even the wind. Its populations exploded in New Zealand in 1878 entomologists there identified it as the new species Icerya purchasi. How the cottony cushion scale, a virulent tree pest native to Australia, was unleashed upon the citrus trees of the world is a bit of a mystery. Then a fuzzy white bug suddenly appeared, touching off an environmental crisis.Īn adult Novius ladybug devours an Icerya in the Galápagos Islands. Nothing, it seemed, could stop what many were calling a second gold rush. Fruit traveling east was now worth $20 million annually, having increased by a factor of ten in as many years. The number of acres under citrus cultivation in Southern California increased sevenfold between 18, while the number of railroad boxcars exporting these juicy treasures doubled to nearly 6,000 a year, spurred on by the Southern Pacific railroad line, which reached Los Angeles in 1876, and by the Southern Pacific's use of train compartments cooled by huge blocks of ice beginning in 1888. And oranges, initially brought there by Spanish missionaries, had become California’s most valuable commodity. Soon these groves would become the proving grounds for the new science of biological pest control, pitting a rare species of ladybugs against an invading horde of pests in a battle for the future of citrus agriculture in California-and the world.Ĭommercial agriculture drove the largest economic expansion in California since the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. In the early 1870s, ambitious farmers were cultivating the first seedless navel and sweet Valencia oranges amid the bountiful sunshine of California’s citrus groves.

Diamond rush south africa born desperation