Last July we had a rancher from Mason come talk to us in San Antonio. Among the mistakes he made some number of years ago was dragging a chain to break off the pear and "kill it." He ended up with 900 acres of pear.
Twelve years ago he started with Holistic Resource Management of Texas and the results have been pretty spectacular with regard to cutting his expenses. One of the surprise byproducts of the HRM methods was the return of the cocheneal bug.
Cocheneal eats pear. It is a white fluffy looking thing that sucks the juices from the pads and eventually kills the entire plant. Apparently cocheneal needs to spend part of its life cycle in surface litter. If you have bare soil instead of tall grass and a litter layer, you will not have any large numbers of cocheneal.
If you pile the pear up, be sure to get every last shred of the plant or you'll spread it big time! If you don't have molasses but you do have manure, you can pile the pear, cover it with manure, and it will compost nicely.
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