Our work with Dr. Nicholas Manoukis and Melissa Johnson at the USDA office in Hilo was selected for the USDA-ARS Daniel K. Inouye U.S. Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center Innovation Fund.

Our project, “Development of New and Improved Surveillance, Detection, Control, and Management Technologies for Fruit Flies and Invasive Pests of Tropical and Subtropical Crops,” was one of twelve winners of the fourteenth round of the fund, and among the top 10 applications out of 37.

The project received $25,000, which will go toward making the Best Beans app more commercially viable through the integration of weather data from a Smart Yields sensor network. It will also support parallel development of the app for both Apple and Android devices.

The objective? To develop new methods for invasive pest control including reduced-risk insecticides, new practices for insecticide resistance management, and new components and programs for IPM for tephritids and other tropical plant pests of quarantine significance for Hawaii and the U.S. mainland. The project will also validate the effectiveness of coffee berry borer pest control techniques in the context of a comprehensive IPM system to enable economically viable control.

This will ultimately promote the unimpeded movement of fruit and vegetable exports.