When a visitor comes to your property, you have one opportunity to prevent them reaching your vines and introducing a pest, disease or weed. This relies on you gathering the right intel to start your risk management process.
Begin by seeking answers to three key questions:
- Who is coming onto your property?
- What are they bringing with them?
- Where have they and their vehicle/equipment/machinery been in the previous 29 days?
Once you have these answers, either:
- Deny the visitor and their items access to your vineyard; or
- Prior to granting the visitor and/or any items access to your vineyard, continue to gather further information to assist you to implement appropriate mitigation strategies to manage the level of risk they pose.
Use our ‘Biosecurity planning for vineyard owners hosting visitors’ fact sheet for further lines of questioning relevant to different scenarios, to assist you in minimising the risk of a pest introduction to your vineyard.
Why are these questions important?At their simplest, these questions determine the ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’ required to assess a risk.
Pests, diseases, pathogens and weed seeds can be picked up and carried on/by different vectors. These include footwear, clothing, tyres, grape material, soil, machinery or equipment. It’s therefore relevant to know what’s being brought onto your vineyard to understand the specific risk that item may present, what checks need to be done to assess this risk, and what activities can be performed, including pest-specific treatments, that can reduce this risk.
Grape phylloxera is one of the key pests at risk of being introduced to South Australia’s vineyards and warrants particular focus when managing visitor access. Phylloxera is only known to be present in particular parts of Australia – refer to this map. It is essential you know these locations so you can match them against the locations your visitors have been to in the last 29 days.
Phylloxera can survive in the absence of vine material and water for up to 29 days. This is therefore the time period of risk for this particular pest.
So remember to ask these questions: who’s coming, what are they bringing and where have they been in the last 29 days.