New project tests falcons in Yuma Ag fields

This week in our Home Grown, agriculture segment we take a look at a new project happening in Yuma to see if falcons and hawks help keep our produce more safe.

“We just started this project based on falconry here in Yuma to protect our agricultural crops from nuisance birds,” extension specialist in food safety and wildlife, Paula Rivadeneira said.

The project is funded by the Center for Produce Safety.

“It started in January and it’s going to go all the way through December 2019 and the purpose of the project is to see if we can use trained birds to keep nuisance birds out of the field because nuisance birds are huge problem for crops here in Yuma, they come in and they cause damage by eating the crops or they just fly in and they poop all over the crops and that’s a huge food safety issue,” she said.

Falconry is popular in vineyards and orchards but not as commonly used in leafy green fields. This is why they are testing these birds out in our agriculture fields.

“We want to see if we can actually make falconry economically feasible so it’s a really expensive endeavor especially if just one or two farmers are using it and then you push birds into your neighbors field, so we want to figure out how we can make it economically feasible on a large scale for all of our growers in Yuma to be able to use falconry and have it make sense financially,” she said.

Also a part of this project, they plan to install owl boxes to attract native owls to our agriculture fields to help decrease rodent population.

“I know that are they are using owl boxes in Israel extensively, so we are modeling our owl boxes after theirs,” she said.

Where are these birds coming from?

“We hired Sonoran Desert Falconry, they’re out of Scottsdale and they have purchased some birds and are breeding them specifically for this project,” she said. The falconers are living on site in Yuma with the birds while they are being used here.

This is a two year project and so far Rivadeneira said it has been successful.

“We have seen that when we do come out with the birds within minutes they [nuisance birds] are all gone,” she said. “We know they’re going to come back at some point but that’s why we keep coming back to the field to make sure they stay gone but now that we’ve been out here for a couple weeks there’s been no birds so it’s pretty amazing,” she said.