FORT VALLEY, Ga. — For the last five years, George Mbata, head of Fort Valley State University's biology department, says he and a team of researchers have worked to fight tiny pests.
"The burrower bug, what it does is it attacks the parts while they are still underground and scares the surface," Mbata said.
He says the burrower bug is native to Georgia, and attacks the peanut crop from the bottom up.
"It costs farmers money, and also increases the risk for people consuming the peanuts," Mbata said.
In 2014, the Georgia Peanut Commission gave Mbata and other researchers an $11,000 grant to find ways to fight the relentless burrower bug.
"Some years, when the infestation is heavy, like in 2011, the drop in price of infested peanut was greater than 50 percent," he said.
Mbata says the goal is not to kill all of the pests, but reduce them.
"It's so difficult to eliminate the infestation completely and to reduce it in such a way that it's not going to impact a severe drop in price for farmers," he said.
Mbata says what he and the entomologists came up with is combining a fungus and roundworms with an insecticide to spray on the plants.
So far, the findings are promising, but they are still looking at ways to improve it.
"We are looking at an array of the roundworms," Mbata said.
He says the next step is to test the solution in an actual field of peanut crops.
Georgia is the nation's number one peanut producer and, in an average year, raises $600 million worth of nuts.
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