Pepper Weevil (Anthonomus Eugenii) is an unconventional pest that a regular Integrated Pest Management (IPM) system cannot maintain and cannot be spotted by humans which makes it nearly impossible to catch early on.
Once the pest spreads, it is essentially a death sentence for the crop as no beneficial bug is strong enough to combat it and sprays just irritate the pest forcing it to reproduce more.
Cam Lyons, Research and Development and IPM Technician at NatureFresh Farms, realized that there had to be a solution and conducted countless development sessions.
“Dogs are a very intelligent animal. Many worker dogs are trained to recognize and discover scents associated with drugs or bombs, so it seemed possible to train a dog to recognize pepper weevil.”
After a lot of research, NatureFresh Farms adopted Chili, a 15-month old female Belgian Shepherd who was bred as a working dog. Chili underwent 8 weeks of training and was certified by The American Working Dog Association who verified that Chili was the first dog certified for pest related scent detection on a farm.
This certification also allows Chili to work in the farm without any food safety concern.
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