Bavarian hop growers face pests and shrinking pesticide options

Bavarian hop growers are dealing with pest damage and too few crop-protection products, while heat and drought have also affected the crop, BR reports.

The harvest has finished, and the amount of hops produced was not poor, farmer Silvia Merkl said. But quality suffered, particularly the level of alpha acids used in beer production. Yields varied depending on rainfall and pest damage.

Flea beetles, aphids and red spider mites, as well as fungal diseases, damaged hop gardens. The pests caused hop cones to die. Merkl said the pressure was extremely high, and treatments against flea beetles had not been sufficient. She said growers have few products with different modes of action to rotate, which can help prevent resistance.

Max Merkl, Silvia’s 17-year-old son, showed BR dead, brown-yellow hop bines and leaves riddled with holes. He said only one treatment is available against flea beetles in spring, and it must be watered onto each individual plant rather than sprayed. It can be used only while plants are up to 50 centimetres tall. Spraying is permitted only at night, outside the hours when bees are flying.

Grower Martin Merkl said he takes care to avoid attracting bees early in the season by ensuring that nothing is flowering. He said treatments need to work through the plant or its leaves over an extended period as the hops grow. Drought may have disrupted the flow of sap through the plants, he said, giving pests an opportunity to spread.

Bavaria’s agriculture ministry told BR24 that only a few suitable active substances and groups of substances remain for some pests. This makes it harder to rotate treatments and increases the risk of resistance, the ministry said. Emergency authorisations for products are becoming more important, but they are granted or renewed one year at a time. The Merkl family said that made it difficult to plan.

The ministry said Bavaria had about 15,000 hectares of hop fields this year, around 1,000 hectares fewer than the year before. With Bavaria producing about a third of the world’s hops, prices are tied to the global market. Falling beer consumption worldwide and lower craft-beer sales have created a global surplus and pushed hop prices down, the ministry said.

Max Merkl is training as a farmer on another farm and hopes to take over the family operation. He said he could switch to organic production, moving away from mineral fertiliser and toward organic crop-protection products.