Mendoza Launches 90,000-Hectare Aerial and Drone Insecticide Campaign Against Grapevine Moth
19 October 2026, Mendoza Province: Argentina’s Mendoza province began a province-wide aerial and drone insecticide operation on October 14, 2026, targeting the first generation of Lobesia botrana, the European grapevine moth, across roughly 90,000 hectares of vineyards, with an additional 10,000 hectares covered by drones in plots too difficult for fixed-wing aircraft to reach.
The operation, announced October 12 by Argentina’s National Agricultural Health and Food Quality Service office in Mendoza, ISCAMEN, is the third stage of the province’s “Operativo Lobesia 2026/27” program, which is funded with provincial resources and assists more than 9,000 grape producers across Mendoza. The aerial campaign covers the Norte and Este oases and spans the departments of Lavalle, Luján de Cuyo, Junín, Rivadavia, San Martín, Santa Rosa and La Paz, with two consecutive applications planned over roughly ten days, subject to weather and operational conditions, and with possible retreatment extending the window by about ten more days.
ISCAMEN said the products used are registered with Argentina’s national agricultural health agency, SENASA, and fall into toxicological category IV, the agency’s lowest-risk “green band” classification, though the specific active ingredients were not named in the program’s public announcement. Applications are timed to begin once vine flower clusters reach five to seven centimeters in length, with crop protection expected to hold for at least 30 days.
The program says it prioritizes abandoned vineyards and plots at elevated phytosanitary risk, while complementing growers’ own on-farm pest control. No treatments are planned in urban or peri-urban areas, and the program operates under an environmental impact declaration issued by Mendoza’s Secretaría de Ambiente y Ordenamiento Territorial, with legal grounding in national law 27.227 and provincial law 9.076.
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Lobesia botrana has been a priority quarantine pest for Mendoza’s grape and wine industry for more than a decade, since the moth was first detected in Argentina in 2008, because larval damage opens grapes to secondary fungal infections and because several importing markets treat the insect as a quarantine concern affecting access for fresh grapes.
Provincial officials reported in July 2026 that the prior 2025/26 campaign, which eventually covered more than 130,000 hectares across the full season using a mix of pheromone-based mating disruption, low-impact aerial insecticide sprays, drones, light aircraft and pheromone gel applied to vineyard stakes, had cut moth detections by close to 70% compared with the previous season, in what the provincial production minister called the most successful campaign the province had run. That tender process drew participation from twelve aerial application companies, of which five were awarded contracts, according to provincial reporting at the time; the current October operation represents only the opening stage of the new season and is not directly comparable in scope to last season’s full-year total.
For this new season, the Mendoza government, ISCAMEN, SENASA’s regional office and industry groups including Fecovita and Bodegas de Argentina agreed in mid-2026 to continue a similar integrated strategy, with earlier procurement of control inputs so that treatments can be timed more precisely to pest emergence, and with additional attention to zones identified as needing differentiated treatment.
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