 Hello and welcome to the commercial horticulture webinar series. My name is Ayanava Majumdar and I'm extension entomologist for vegetable crops statewide. Today I'm going to discuss about conventional insecticides. We get a lot of questions about the conventional insecticides or the modes of action. So today I'm going to discuss some of the main ones that I think farmers can pay attention to. And remember, a lot of these conventional products also are available in the home garden and the home market, so for gardening purposes. So please read the label and if you need more information, you can find it on our website, alimabigningfarmer.com and also on the aces.edu slash vegetable IPM page. So what you will hear today is from the 2020 vegetable crop handbook. Remember that this handbook is revised annually and it's important to get the latest addition from your extension agent. You can contact your county extension office and a regional extension agent if you're in Alabama. If you're in any other state, you can contact the extension agent there, the county office to get a copy. But it's important to get the latest addition and also the some of the recommendations change over time. So if you're watching recordings, please contact your extension office and get updated information and read the label. Just to give you an overview, we have seen some trends in synthetic insecticides. And and we have seen we're familiar with some of the older insecticides, for example, Zeta sapramethrin malatheon that are still in the market. And you can see them as pretty popular products. Now these were short chain insecticides. They have excellent contact action and that's why they're very popular and over time they're also very cost effective compared that to new insecticides. For example, in doxocarb, spinotrum that are on the right of your screen. These are long chain molecules. And what happens is once the insecticide penetrates the body of the insect, they're activated by insect enzymes and then become target specific. So they're a lot, a lot more safer than some of the older insecticides that have a non selective action. So we're seeing the market shift from non selective general purpose insecticides to more of the selective insecticides. And many of them have contact ingestion, stomach action, they can be applied systemic. So there's a wide variety of of action with these newer chemistries. There are four or five major insecticide modes of action. And this is a page out of the vegetable handbook, which has a list of insecticides. It's difficult to read on the screen. It's much better in your handbook, but there are overall there are these five categories of insecticides. For example, insecticides that affect the nerve and muscles. Insecticides that affect the growth and development of insects. The insects that affect the cellular respiration. And then there's one insecticide group, which affects the mid gut. And that is BT or dipel, that's the stomach insecticide is very popular organic product. And there are products that have unknown or non specific mode of action. And we go a little bit through these different groups. And you can see the majority of these conventional products we see in the market today. Are act on nerve, insect nerves and muscles. And they have excellent contact systemic or trans laminar action. Again, this is a page out of the handbook that has the different insecticides listed. And you'll see the chemical class on the left of the page or on this screen. And when you see a number like one A, one B, those are the chemical classes. And the reason they're mentioned or organized by numbers is farmers can rotate the products. So it makes selecting products from different groups easier when you see the list with those numbers on there. And then on the list, you'll also see different, some of the major insect pests on the top. And then there's a rating system that entomologists have developed. And most of the products here that are listed are have good, fair or fair, good or excellent category. So they're effective products in non effective products or products that have been out of the market are taken out of the handbook. So let's go through quickly the modes of action, the major ones. Of course, we have the big group of the old products, the class one A, one B, which includes products like malatheon or teen, dimethylate seven, which is still sold in the home garden market. And most of these products are contact insecticides. They have a broad action and they affect the insecticide nervous system. And with their long term use, we have seen insecticide resistance build up. And that's why a lot of these products have a fair to good rating. And the longer we use the products, the insects are becoming resistant to these products. The next big group is the synthetic pyrethroids, the very popular group three insecticides. They also affect the insect nervous system. They have a very quick knock down, which makes them very popular. And within this chemical class group three, we have seen newer products like bifenthrin, which are much more photo stable, which means they are much more tolerant of sunlight. So and they're retained better. They have better persistence. Once again, because they have been around for a long time, insecticide resistance is common to these products. The next group is the popular neonicotinoid group, class 4A, insecticides. Now these have systemic as well as contact action. And some of the newer insecticides within the 4A class have very good contact action. They're also translaminar, which means they go into the leaf and they absorb in the leaf tissue. And they have a pretty long residual compared to class three insecticides. So that's why they are very popular plus they give you the flexibility of different application system. You can apply many of them through the drip irrigation system. They're very good early season products to start with and a lot of farmers use them early in the season to get a long long term protection and then followed by a need based for your applications of insecticides. The the other one that I wanted to highlight is the is the four class 4D, which includes spinosid based products. We have we are familiar with Blackhawk. The organic version is called Entrust. Now these are derived from microbes, but they don't have the microbial cells. And they're extremely toxic to insects, very good insecticides. The one that we have tried in Alabama for a long time and is found very effective against caterpillars is Radiant. Radiant is very good against caterpillars and thrips and some other insect pests there. It's a good product for rotating with and these are again have organic version and the chemical version. And the organic version is called Entrust. The next group that I want to highlight are the insect growth regulators. I really want growers to pay attention to this group because the insect growth regulators, for example, Rhymon, Intrepid. These are great products for caterpillar control and they're very selective and they act only on the caterpillars. They would not kill any of the moths. So we never target the moths with these products and we are targeting the early early instars of these caterpillars. And these products like Intrepid and Rhymon, they're extremely effective early in the season or with timely applications and very good rotation partners. So if you are using synthetic parithroids and you get into a drought situation as we have seen in Alabama, we are getting prolonged droughts or we're getting flashed droughts. In those situations, synthetic parithroids can flare up spider mites. It's always good to rotate them with other chemical classes and this group of insect growth regulator products are very good rotation partners in an IPM strategy. The last group I want to mention is this emerging group of insecticides that includes popular products like collagen. And we have seen some more products come in the market and they have very unique chemistry and they can be applied systemic and also foliar. They're mostly very effective as systemic poisons early in the season. Just quickly showing pictures of use of Intrepid, which is insect growth regulator in a stress environment. This is 2016 research in Clinton. 2016 was a prolonged drought, extremely hard drought. And you can see the control was hammered with caterpillars. And the products treated with Intrepid look great in comparison. You do see some stink bug feeding, but overall the product looks great. And here's some pictures in the picture of of tomatoes sprayed with with Rhymon, which is also another insect growth regulator. So again, the point is under stress situations, we need to carefully plan our IPM strategy and avoid getting sparamites. So we need to have a good rotation for with chemical insecticides and also save our natural enemies. Make sure you look for the warning labels on the warning language on the insecticide labels. For example, look for the pollinator mark on certain insecticides and follow those recommendations. Finally, make sure you're using or integrating cultural, mechanical and other pest management tactics first before you use chemicals. Using success at the last resort, not the first resort. Think broadly of why insect outbreaks are happening and do not apply or over apply insecticides rotation is very important. So please contact your extension agent and develop a well written IPM plan. And the IPM plan should be unique to your farm. And then read and understand the pesticide label because label is the law. Thank you very much.