Charlottesville Area Masters of Real Ale

My dad has decided to become a hop farmer.  I'm currently taking care of the house, and there are 9 new hop plants growing in a row next to the neighbor's corn field...  They are Galena, Cascade, Nugget and Perle according to a map of the garden.

Does anyone have any concise instructions on how best to care for them?

They currently range from about 7' tall to less than 2' tall.

Catepillars -- one of the resident fauna are rather exotic looking, brightly-colored, spiny catepillars.  Anyone ever seen that?  Is it bad?

Health -- One of the plants (the tall one) looks quite healthy.  In no particular order, I'm seeing this :

dead vines - some of the vines have wilted / died.  I assume it's a good idea to cut them off?

leaf color - a few leaves are an aneamic yellow-green color.  is that bad?

bugs - there are a variety of bugs living on them, and I have no idea what the bad ones look like.

white spots + leaf damage - some of the leaves closest to the ground have small white spots on them, and the leaves with white spots are also generally riddled with holes.

trellis -- my dad strung a rope about 10 feet off the ground between 2 trees in a clearing with one end through a pulley system which ends in a freely hanging weight.  The idea is to enable him to easily bring the hops down for inspection.  At this point, as the hops grow up the leads from the top runner, they're gradually pulling the runner down, which strikes me as bad from what little I know about fungus growth and hops.  I think I'm going to add some weight.

I'm no expert, but I've had hops vines for a long time, and I think I've been as much lucky as good.

Pests haven't been an issue and the deer, rabbits and Japanese beetles have left mine alone.  It seems like aphids and spider mites are major enemies of hops.  Sometimes I plant marigolds around the base of the vines once the hops are established.  Those help to ward off the nasties.

This is an old, but still relevant, article: http://www.brewingtechniques.com/library/backissues/issue2.3/montell.html

Cut off the bad parts and keep those from spreading to the rest of the vines.  Give them deep, but infrequent waterings and you should be fine.

I thought about doing a pulley-like system, but I feel like I would damage the vines more than I would help myself.  And I can harvest four or five times a year from my old nugget hops, and the wear and tear would be too much for the vines no matter how gentle I am and no matter how much I undo their shoots and tentacles.

Thanks!

Any advice on harvesting or determining ripeness?

I found this :
http://www.crannogales.com/HopsManual.pdf

which, after a quick overview, is a nice guide to organic hop farming from start to finish.

This is a pretty good post about whether a hop is ready to harvest.

http://www.fermentarium.com/content/view/336/58/

I look for papery dryness and a little bit of browning.