agriculture

Blayne Reed, Extension Agent IPM, has just published an excellent article on considerations for planting corn or sorghum in ground treated with yellow herbicides in anticipation of cotton planting. The full article is here:  http://halecountyipm.blogspot.com/2015/05/planting-sorghum-or-corn-in-yellowed.html Here is the first paragraph: It is no secret that we have had a devil of a time with weed control these past few seasons.    In response we have been getting better and more aggressive in our use of pre-plant herbicides in our primary row crop, cotton.    This is making for an interesting dilemma with such a long (yet welcome) period of wet weather delaying most cotton plantings.    Any more delays in cotton planting and many of us will be outside our window for our full potential of profitable cotton crop.    This leads many of us to consider alternate crops that do not require as large a production window such as corn or sorghum planted ...

Some cotton growers are considering planting corn or sorghum if they can � t get all of the cotton acres planted by the insurance cutoff date. This article is meant to provide a few insect considerations when thinking about corn and sorghum. Dr. Dana Porter, Ag Irrigation Engineer at Lubbock, is preparing an article on irrigation considerations for release here in a few days. Corn The three biggest pest threats to late-planted corn on the southern High Plains are fall armyworms, spider mites and mycotoxins (which are affected by fall armyworm and corn earworm). Any corn planted in June is considered to be � late corn � from an insect perspective . There is still time to reach maturity with some of the less-than-full-season hybrids, so by late I mean only as applied to insects. The first and perhaps most important suggestion is to plant a good Bt hybrid ; fall armyworm numbers increase as the season progresses and this insect can cause significant yield loss to non-Bt corn and Bt corn ...

President Obama has established a task force to save the honeybees. A White House Blog entry on May 19th announced, " New Steps to Promote Pollinator Health ", and this was quickly picked up by the National Media - with varying interpretations of the issues affecting bee health. It is accepted that honeybee decline is a complex issue that involves factors such as varroa mites, pathogens, stress on bees due to movement of hives, neonicotinoid insecticides and other things. So I was surprised to read the first sentence in the Wall Street Journal article today, "The White House is backing efforts to scrutinize the link between pesticides and a dramatic increase in honeybee deaths." ( Full article , subscription required.) Within two hours of the White House blog post, EPA sent an e-mail providing much more detail. Given that there will be widespread press coverage of the pollinator health issue I thought it might be a good idea to provide links to factual information. ...

Fall armyworm trap captures for the last two weeks are averaging around 10 times normal for this time of year. Click for a larger version. Normal captures would be in the range of 40 - 50 but we are now seeing weekly captures over 400, and this has been sustained for two weeks. I am not sure what this means in practical terms, but the moths are laying eggs somewhere. Potential early season crop hosts include alfalfa, wheat, grapes, strawberries and some vegetables. Other hosts include several of our weed species. The abundant rainfall has meant no shortage of early season hosts for these insects and it is looking like it might be a "wormy" year in our row crops.