agriculture

There is still a lot of uncertainty about which crops to plant in parts of the southern High Plains of Texas. Cotton prices are down, sorghum faces a significant threat from sugarcane aphid, and corn requires more water than these other two crops. Many factors are involved in making planting decisions this year, and this article is strictly focused on the insect part of the equation, and the insect part is admittedly relatively minor as compared to available water, aphids and market prices. Given that our pest pressure from caterpillars like the fall armyworm and corn earworm goes up as the season progresses, and that we have a range of Bt corn technologies with respect to their price and ability to kill these pests, there is room to save money on the front end of the season. Ed Bynum, Extension Entomologist in Amarillo, and I are suggesting that early planted corn can be non-Bt or one of the older and less expensive Bt technologies that has fewer toxins. On the southern High Plains, f...

You can't listen to the national news without hearing stories of Zika virus, and it is proper that people exercise caution this summer. Last year's hordes of mosquitoes are still fresh in the minds of those of us who work in the field, and if the rains come again this year we will be in a similar situation. But even a few mosquitoes can be a bad thing when they have the potential to carry a serious virus. Mosquitoes on the front of a truck that left Plainview clean and arrived in Lubbock like this, spring, 2015. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story about US-based insect repellent manufacturers adding shifts and running factories around the clock in expectation of exceedingly high demand in the southern USA this summer. This was a week before the news broke in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that said the geographical ranges of two known mosquito vectors of Zika, Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegypti , may be much broader than originally thought.  A. aegy...