Efforts to eradicate the Asian Longhorn Beetle from southwest Ohio seem to be paying off. The director of the Ohio Department of Agriculture says a quarantine zone in Clermont County has gotten smaller. Brian Baldridge says an area around East Fork Lake and south of William H. Harsha Lake are no longer threatened.
Other parts of Clermont County were found to be beetle-free in 2018 and 2022. Baldridge says today’s announcement reduces the zone by about five square miles.
“That program … it was going through and identifying these areas and figuring out where these pests were, and the damage they were doing to our hardwoods in the area,” Baldridge says. “A number of different species of trees could be devastated from this beetle. We’re just glad. This process has taken quite a while, I know, unfortunately. There were a lot of trees cut down.”
The Asian Longhorn Beetle was first found in Clermont County in 2011. Since then, more than 118,000 trees have been destroyed.
Baldridge says the quarantine, which calls for a ban on moving plants in or out of the area, worked because the beetle hasn’t been found anywhere else in Ohio.
“They’re not a quick mover,” he says. “We know that they came in from overseas on wood products.”
Twenty-two square miles of Clermont County are still under quarantine orders.
“There’s been a lot of opportunities for people to realize the impact to their trees and their yards and so forth by identifying those holes — smaller-than-a-dime-sized hole that you can look at and see how that pest has bored through the tree and ends up killing that tree.”
The Ohio Department of Agriculture says Ohio’s hardwood forest industry is worth $2.5 billion in standing maple timber alone. The nursery industry employs about 240,000 people and is worth $5 billion.
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