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Tate township has lost 75000 trees since the 2011 discovery of the Asian Longhorned Beetle in this small farming community. The USDA preferred treatment for this infestation is to remove the infested trees and treat and/or monitor the uninfested healthy trees. Instead, they insist on spending tax $$ and valuable time killing healthy trees that might have a beetle in them some day, and bypassing the known infested trees. Of those 75000 trees killed by the USDA, only 16000 of them actually had infestation. They have been in Worcester since 2008, and are hardly any closer to a declaration of eradication.
They will be here in S/W Ohio for ten years, and most likely still have not taken down enough trees to please themselves. They are convincing these property owners to allow full host removal (all 13 tree genera) by offering them deals that they can’t pass up, like additional culvert pipes into the fields, removal of fencerows, new driveways, total land clearing for further development, and anything else they can bargain to get property owners’ permission to kill the healthy trees.
Pictured above is a typical example of the USDA work. There were 24 known infested trees on this 69 acre parcel of land previously known as H– Woods. The USDA spent 3 months and hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to destroy 2400 trees on this property. They wasted this valuable time while thousands of known infested trees were bypassed on other properties. They could have accomplished the removal of those 24 known infested trees in less than 2 days, saving not only 2300 plus healthy trees, but also those hundreds of thousands of tax dollars that were spent stretching this abomination into a 3 month ordeal.
There are dozens of other similar examples. The current USDA focus on destroying healthy trees while ignoring infested trees needs to stop.
The PPJ Gazette 