The pawpaw — the largest edible fruit native to North America, which grows beneath the forest canopy from eastern Kansas to Connecticut and south to Louisiana and the Florida panhandle — is finally finding a market, and just as it does, an invasive beetle is killing the trees. Ripe pawpaws last only three to five days, which is why the fruit was long left to rot on the ground and why Chris Chmiel built his farm, Integration Acres at Albany, Ohio, around value-added products when he opened it in 1996: frozen pulp first, now salsa, hot sauce, maple vinaigrette, spiceberry jam, fudge and soap base.

Chmiel, inspired by the related soursop he met in Mexico, launched the country's first pawpaw festival in Albany in 1999 to educate and build the market; festivals now run across Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia in the mid-September peak, and the 28th Ohio Pawpaw Festival is on 18–20 September, in Nelsonville for the first time. He gathers fruit from up to 50 landowners. "Some of my farming neighbor friends, they eat one or two a year," he said. "'You want any more? You can have them.'"

In the last six years he has lost almost 70% of his orchard to the ambrosia beetle, a small insect that bores into the sapwood of healthy trees, lays its eggs and deposits a fungus that spreads through the tree; the hatched larvae feed on the fungus, which stops the tree taking up water and kills it by dehydration, according to the University of Kentucky. The only way to be rid of it is to fell and burn the affected tree; traps help but do not stop it. Chmiel now plants new trees more often, suspects extreme rain has made recent years worse, and is amending his soil towards well-drained sand, since clay may favour the beetle.

Ohio State University is studying the pest. "The first piece is understanding the biology, the natural history of the pest you're dealing with. At what levels does it become an actual, what we might call an economic pest?" said Logan Minter, statewide field specialist and associate professor of specialty crops at Ohio State Extension. Because pawpaws are not grown at scale, he said, no company will invest in a chemical insecticide for them: "It's not something like corn that we've been growing constantly at a commercial scale for a very long time, or apples. So there's still some more of pawpaw to be learned."

The fruit's spread across the eastern United States is itself a human story. Native Americans cultivated pawpaw for centuries, and its range marks the past presence of the Haudenosaunee and Lenape, who lived in what is now Pennsylvania before colonisation and now live in upstate New York and Oklahoma, said Bronwen Powell, associate professor of geography at Penn State. "Society in general has this idea that plants are either cultivated or wild, but in fact, most of our forests have historically been managed by people," she said.

Source: Farm and Dairy