On November 20th, 2019, over 45 concerned pest control advisers, growers, and owners who manage vineyards in Lodi's Jahant AVA joined together to establish a neighborhood network through which growers can communicate and collaborate to solve neighborhood challenges. At this meeting, the group agreed that because pests and diseases do not respect borders, roads, or property lines, "a neighbor's problems are also my problems". 

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The group's first goal was to establish an area-wide vine mealybug (VMB) monitoring program. While VMB is widely known to cause economic damage in vineyards at high populations, moderate to low populations also pose a severe risk as vine mealybugs are incredibly efficient vectors of leafroll viruses (namely, leafroll-3). This virus, for which there is no cure, can cause reductions to yield, poor vine growth, and uneven ripening in infected vineyards. To monitor VMB in the Jahant sub-AVA over the last four seasons, geo-tagged pheromone-baited sticky traps have been placed in vineyards across the region. Each season, traps are managed and monitored on a bi-weekly basis, with a tally of male mealybugs per trap shown on a map and emailed to grower members. While trap count data is not direct measurement of vine mealybug populations, the results are interpreted by the group as a possible indicator of VMB mating activity. The data is also contextualized with management practices such as pheromone mating disruption in an effort to evaluate the efficacy of pheromone mating disruption as an areawide strategy for VMB management.