The big guns

“Rycar is very effective,” says Michael Roe, co-owner of Windmill. “We use it against whiteflies, particularly on our lantanas. For us, it’s a silver bullet. We might try other stuff and then, when it doesn’t work, we’ll say, ‘All right, let’s pull out the silver bullet.’”

 

Windmill expands across 490 total acres, according to its website. Roe says that features 200 acres under irrigation, including greenhouses and shade houses. The company sells several core landscape plants, as well as branded varieties. They service the Southwest United States and Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma.

 

“Our best-selling crop is still roses,” Roe says.

 

But the nursery was frequently battling whitefly infestations, something that continues to present problems for the company’s biological-only approach. So, when an infestation hit the company’s lantanas particularly hard, Roe called in the big guns.

 

“We had a big whitefly problem” he says. “So we sprayed Rycar. I didn’t look at the crop again for 24 hours and then they were clean as a whistle. Rycar worked really well.”

 

He notes that Windmill probably applies Rycar once a month before rotating the biologicals in. “I would absolutely recommend that other growers use Rycar,” he says.