At the Beef Improvement Federation Meeting, Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, spoke with the president and CEO of the Texas Cattle Feeders Association, Ben Weinheimer, to get a detailed update on the war against New World Screwworm (NWS). Weinheimer represents feedlots in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.
Since the NWS pushed through the Darién Gap in Panama and made it into Southern Mexico last November, the U.S. has been working hard to help Mexico push them back, but time and time again, the pests have broken through attempted barriers and are now only 700 miles south of the Rio Grande.
The barriers were established by releasing thousands of sterile male flies into the wild population each week to keep their numbers down.
Weinheimer and his cohorts have been watching the NWS saga unfold for about a year now. “We have since learned that the Panama facility, the COPEG plant, had some supply chain issues during the course of even the pandemic, there was some issues around the libido of the flies, of the genetics they were using in the plant, so some of those things worked collectively against them down there to allow the flies to escape out of the Darién Gap area,” Weinheimer explained.
One glimmer of hope is that the NWS population seems to have stalled its northward progress for the past five or six weeks. “That’s not because it is naturally stalled out,” Weinheimer clarified. “That is because of the very intentional effort of USDA and the production of the sterile flies in that COPEG plant that are all being dispersed on the frontline of that fly line down there in Southern Mexico.”
The geography at the “fly line” aids in the fight due to the narrowness of the land. “The more we can do to keep it in that geography, the fewer resources it takes in terms of the number of sterile flies that they drop per nautical flight mile, the less total sterile fly production that we need,” Weinheimer detailed.
However, encouraging the recent stall in the flies’ northward movement is, Weinheimer continues to support efforts to increase sterile fly production capacity with additional facilities. Repurposing a fruit fly production plant in Chiapas, Mexico, is one area of interest; another is establishing an entirely new sterile fly production plant in Mission, Texas.
Despite Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins’s announcement of the U.S. contributing 21 million dollars to repurpose the facility in Mexico, it is still likely a 12-to-18-month project to produce its first sterile fly.
The proposed facility in Texas, because it would be a new facility built from the ground up, would take even longer, and funding is still being discussed with the USDA.
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