Chestnut production in the Third reduced due to pest

A chestnut production on Terceira island in the Azores was reduced this year due to the pest of brown-crumbs, not having enough to deliver to the Fruter cooperative, today revealed its president.

“From what some producers tell me, in the area of the Earth Chã and even in the Biscuits, the production is practically for self-consumption and little more ", in statements to the agency Lusa, the president of Fruter, Paulo Rocha.

In a good year, the cooperative received between three and four tons of chestnuts, especially the Viana variety, which is most common on Terceira Island.

“ We used to send a lot of chestnuts to San Miguel. Here we received several tons of chestnut, but in recent years production has gradually declined,” said the cooperative’s manager.

Between 2020 and 2025, there was a 90% drop in the chestnut delivered to the cooperative, mainly attributed to the pest of brown-crumbs.

“ This has been getting worse for some years. First a disease was detected, which was the ‘Gnomoniopsis [smithogilvyi]’, and then with the wasps of the chestnut cane, things became increasingly complicated,” explained Paulo Rocha.

The plague was detected by Fruter in 2020 in imported chestnut trees on a farm in Praia da Vitória.

The Agrarian Development Services of Terceira Island were alerted and, in collaboration with the University of the Azores, solutions to the problem were studied, but only in June this year began to be introduced a parasitoid, which attacks the plague.

The president of Fruter understood that there had been “some care” with the introduction of the parasitoid, taking into account the climate of the Azores, but called for “several dropouts” of this organism and a monitoring of the plague on the island.

“It is a work that has already been done in Madeira and the continent, but it has to be a continuous work that takes several years. The process needs to continue and people also need to renew the orchards, because a young tree always has more resistance to diseases ", he stressed.

According to Paulo Rocha, there is also a lack of livers who graft the varieties of chestnut that exist on the Third.

“There is a plan for the development of fruit farming, hopefully some incentives will come out for both production and replanting. I think it was important also to have some support for the formation of nurseryists, so we do not lose the variety of the chestnut Viana ", concluded.