Sorghum Stalk Nutritional Quality and Sugarcane Aphid Damage
(Because FOCUS on Entomology has a different readership than our Sugarcane Aphid Newsletter , this is a reprint of an article recently posted on the sugarcane aphid news site.) One of the questions as we end the season is what kind of affect does sugarcane aphid damage have on the nutritional quality of sorghum stalks that are used for stover. We conducted two experiments this season, and both were designed to look at leaf damage and its affect on grain yield. However, in conducting these experiments we ended up with many plots with discreet levels of leaf damage, and The United Sorghum Checkoff Program asked us to harvest stalks from the various plots and send them for nutritional analysis. To be clear, the results that appear below are for grain sorghum, not forage sorghum. One experiment was conducted at the Lubbock Research and Extension Center using a sugarcane aphid-susceptible hybrid grown under moderate furrow irrigation, and the other was conducted at the Helms Farm near ...