SWARMS OF WHITEFLIES BUGGING FARMERS.

Byline: Rachel Uranga Staff Writer

Ventura County farmers and scientists expect a summer onslaught of greenhouse whiteflies - matchtip-size pests that reduce strawberries, beans and flowers to a sappy mess.

The whitefly infestation threatens crops on the Oxnard plains, and some fear the bugs will spread south, past Thousand Oaks and north up the Ventura coast, ruining farm crops and home gardens.

``The population has exploded over the past three years,'' said David Buettner, the county's chief deputy agricultural commissioner. ``We are talking about hundreds of insects per leaf.''

The pests already have begun to take a toll, with some growers in Ventura County, where agriculture is the top industry, reporting substantial damage last summer.

``It's devastating to those growers that are affected, when you lose 30 to 40 percent of a crop,'' Buettner said. ``It's also increasing cost of production overall.''

A similar whitefly wave devastated the Imperial Valley in the early 1990s, causing $100 million in crop losses.

``There have always been plagues,'' said Nick Toscano, entomologist at the University of California Riverside. ``But, here it's destructive - lowering yields and making lower quality fruits and vegetables.''

Much like gnats, the pests travel in swarms so large that some farmers compare them to field snow. They attack everything from strawberries to citrus, cactus to tulips. The bugs sit underneath leaves sucking out all the nutrients and excreting honeydew that produces a sooty mold.

An infestation could wallop the county's strawberry growers, California's second largest producers of the sweet fruit, growing 208,000 tons annually and raking in $231 million. Consumers, in turn, could see strawberry prices rise.

The county's $5 million lima bean crop also is vulnerable. Last year, 30 to 40 percent of the county's lima beans were ruined.

So worried are locals that a private group of officials, farmers and scientists formed a task force last year to examine the problem and are now asking growers to pay $3 an acre - about $500 on average - toward finding a whitefly cure.

They've also established what Ventura County Agricultural Commissioner Earl McPhail is calling the state's first voluntary abatement district for the greenhouse whitefly. It covers 32,000 acres, mostly farmland, roughly running south of the Ventura Freeway from Newbury Park up through Oxnard.

``I don't think we are going to eradicate them,'' McPhail said. ``But what we want to do is knock down their numbers so they don't travel like they have been in the last couple years.''

The effort, he added, would take two or three years and cost ``several million dollars.''

In the mid-1990s, Los Angeles County officials wiped out another whitefly - the ash whitefly, which devours gardens and shrubbery - with a stingless wasp from Israel.

But the greenhouse whitefly has proved more elusive. Its sheer numbers have overwhelmed growers, and the bugs have proved resistant to pesticides and other parasites normally used in eradication. Rain washes them out, but sun draws the bugs out again.

Buettner said that, so far, the commission has focused on a three- pronged approach to curb the destruction: tilling the soil immediately after harvest, and then using a combination of predatory bugs and pesticides. But with the population exploding exponentially, even those methods aren't enough.

``It's really disappointing; there's not really anything to control it,'' said Hector Gutierrez, production manager at Reiter Brothers Inc., a Ventura County-based strawberry grower that produces 22.5 million pounds annually. ``Unchecked, it could probably take us out by as much as 50 percent.''

Last year, the pesky insect wiped out 20 percent of the company's strawberry crop and is believed to have had a similar impact on other strawberry growers, though the county's agricultural commissioner keeps no official count.

Unlike the hundreds of other types of whiteflies, the greenhouse whitefly isn't finicky and will eat nearly any flower, vegetable or fruit. The tiny bug is attracted to coastal climates and thrives in those locations during the spring, summer and sometimes into the winter.

Year-round crop growing provides a bountiful food source, fueling the bug's population explosion. It merely jumps from one crop to the next for dinner.

The insect also appears partial to the Camarillo Premium Outlets, where some shoppers and store owners last year complained about swarms of bugs. Scientists say they will return in force this year.

``We got a lot of letters from people who had been at the outlet complaining about the masses of whiteflies,'' said Charlotte Craven, Camarillo mayor. ``In fact, I can remember one letter saying, 'We breathe them in.'''

Craven, who considers herself a weekend gardener, said whiteflies started appearing on her bird of paradise plants in February.

``It looked like ashes after a big fire,'' she said. ``I thought, My lord, it's been a long time since there was a fire, but it was the flies.''

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) This closeup of a greenhouse whitefly on a strawberry leaf is given scale when one knows that beside it is a human fingernail.

(2) Hector Gutierrez, manager for Reiter Brothers Inc., a farming business, is bracing, like other farming professionals, for an onslaught of greenhouse whiteflies to attack his crops of strawberries.

Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer