ARBICO Organics

Over 30 years ago, Arizona Biological Control, Inc. (ARBICO) was just an offbeat idea Rick Frey had to fill the summers of his teaching gig doing high school biology. Friends were in town for the weekend, showing off their latest discovery-bugs that eat flies!

It took just moments and Rick was captivated; he travelled the country wearing different hats (and shoes) depending on whether it was a feedlot, a racetrack, a dairy, or a mink farm he was visiting.

The world was waking up to the possibilities of biological control and many of those facilities he visited that first summer are still with us today.

In following summers, as Rick attempted to source the bugs to fulfill all the Fly Eliminator orders he was generating, he began to run into the trouble that became ARBICO's ultimate opportunity-Fly Eliminators were in short supply.

Not to be thwarted (and equipped with a background in wildlife biology), Rick decided he would grow the bugs himself and The BugMan was born.

We've come a long way from those first days growing bugs in the back of a borrowed trailer, but for Rick, the core of what we do is still the same; Just imagine how many tons of pesticides we have stopped from going into the environment over the years. Sometimes I try to calculate it, but how do you measure what hasn't been used?