A Plant-Level, Spatial, Bioeconomic Model of Plant Disease Diffusion and Control: Grapevine Leafroll Disease

Shady Atallah, Miguel I. Gómez, Jon M. Conrad and Jan P. Nyrop

American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2015, vol. 97, issue 1, 199-218

Abstract: Grapevine leafroll disease threatens the economic sustainability of the grape and wine industry in the United States and around the world. This viral disease reduces yield, delays fruit ripening, and affects wine quality. Although there is new information on the disease spatial-dynamic diffusion, little is known about profit-maximizing control strategies. Using cellular automata, we model the disease spatial-dynamic diffusion for individual plants in a vineyard, evaluate nonspatial and spatial control strategies, and rank them based on vineyard expected net present values. Nonspatial strategies consist of roguing and replacing symptomatic grapevines. In spatial strategies, symptomatic vines are rogued and replaced, and their nonsymptomatic neighbors are virus-tested, then rogued and replaced if the test is positive. Both nonspatial and spatial classes of strategies are formulated and examined with and without considering vine age. We find that spatial strategies targeting immediate neighbors of symptomatic vines dominate nonspatial strategies, increasing the vineyard expected net present value by 18% to 19% relative to the strategy of no disease control. We also find that age-structured disease control is preferred to non-age-structured control but only for nonspatial strategies. Sensitivity analyses show that disease eradication is possible if either the disease transmission rate or the virus undetectability period is substantially reduced.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ajae/aau032 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:97:y:2015:i:1:p:199-218.

Access Statistics for this article

American Journal of Agricultural Economics is currently edited by Madhu Khanna, Brian E. Roe, James Vercammen and JunJie Wu

More articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().