 My name is Kathy Flanders and today I want to talk a little bit about managing the stored grain insects with emphasis on wheat, because wheat harvest is coming up way too fast. It may not seem like it right now, but it is important to start making some preparations and think about what you need to do in order to have a safe and effective storage of wheat if you decide to store your wheat. It doesn't matter if you've got a small grain bin like this, or if you've got a really big grain bin, the kind of the principles for managing stored grain are all the same. Your goal is going to be to minimize the number of insects that you start with and then to make conditions within the grain bin unfavorable for the remaining insects to grow. That's the best you can do. You'll never prevent every single insect, but you have to do the best you can. So the fewer the number you start with and then the unhappier that you can make them with the various growing conditions, the better off you are. One thing to remember is when you get into a situation where inside the grain bin, where you've got all your grain inside, if you have insects in there, there is nothing that you can spray on top to get rid of the insects that are there present throughout the grain bin. The only way to really get rid, thoroughly get rid of the insects that are in the grain bin, you would have to fumigate. So that can be dangerous and it can be time consuming. Our goal really is to do everything we can to minimize the number of insects that we have. The principles that we have kind of boil down into keeping it clean and dry, keeping it cool, and checking it often. Keeping it clean, keeping it dry, and keeping it cool are all designed towards making the grain bins an unfavorable environment for insects to grow. So let me try to explain what some of these why we're saying these and what it means and what we're doing by doing these different things. So why do we want to keep it dry? The lower the grain percent moisture in the grain, the slower the insects reproduce. And so what this is, this is an old study from back in 1960, where they had granary weevils that they put in wheat and they left them at 80 degrees for five months. You can see that the number of insects that you have, there are more insects that were able to reproduce at 14 percent moisture than were able to reproduce at 9 percent moisture. For example, that's why for all the grains that we have, or if you look in my stored grain IBM guide, you're going to see some recommended moisture contents for storage of the different kinds of grains and for soybeans as well. Generally, the longer you plan to store a product, the drier we recommend that you get that grain to recognize that it's a trade off between getting docked a little bit for the shrinkage when you go to sell it versus the benefits you get when it's drier from not only insect control but also from the control of molds. So keeping it dry is very important. Look at those tables, understand that the longer you plan to store your grain, perhaps you need to be thinking about having it drier. Now, why are we talking about keeping it clean? Well, most of the insects that we have, most of them are home grown. There were a few that we fly, infesting in the field or flying in to find your grain bin later. But a lot of those problems that we have are from our own insects that are growing, that are right there on our stored grain facility site. You may not realize that even without food, some of these stored grain beetles can live for several years as adults. And if you leave just a little bit of food, well, that's heaven for them and they can spend the rest of the year, you take the grain out but leave some grain like you see right here, you don't clean that out right after you take your grain out. They're going to just be able to sit there and multiply in all of that leftover grain. And then all of a sudden when you go to put new grain in, you know, they just be sitting there waiting for the new crop to come in. So the cleaner you can be, the better. We recognize we are limited with some constraints and it's hard to clean. All the nooks and crannies in a grain bin and things do fall down to the floor and we'll get down under the floor but the more cleaning we can do, the fewer number of insects are going to be there to infest that grain and to start the new cycle. So we talk about not cleaning the grain bins and not just the grain bins but make sure you clean the combines and the augers and any of the grain handling equipment. One of the great places where we can build up insects is like in the tank of the combine if instead of it's important to clean that out at the end of the season and not just leave some grain in there to let the insects build up. So clean all the grain handling equipment and the grain storage areas that's involved sweeping, vacuuming, power washing, whatever you can do depending on the piece of equipment to just minimize the number of insects that are just hanging out around the grain, the farm and the grain facility. Try to get as best you can, this is an actual grain bin that was cleaned out so you can hardly see a grain kernel in here and that's just really excellent. That needs to be everybody's goal. I know it's easier said than done but this is super, super important. The sanitation that you can do is going to just pay off big time later on. What that cleaning is going to include going and making sure we clean on the outside. You don't want to have any grain laying around on the outside like this is an extension agent that was able to find some kernels of corn that had been laying around outside. Weeds, any excessive bits of equipment or pieces of... It's tempting to just lean something up against the grain bin and think I'll come back and pick up that piece of metal later. But anywhere where the insects can harbor outside, you just need to get rid of that. And so it's important to just keep the grain facility clean and uncollected inside and out. Now part of that keeping it clean involves applying an empty bin and insecticide to kill any of the insects that are there. And this helps you and provides you a little bit of protection from anything that might be crawling up through the grain floor or for whatever reason. So spray that insecticide. Tempo-Wessy altar is the most commonly used inside the grain bin, wearing the proper spray equipment. And then go outside and spray it around the base of the grain bin and three feet up on the outside of the grain bin. And that's also going to help reduce the number of insects that we're starting with. So keeping it clean, everything we're doing with keeping it clean is designed to minimize the number of insects that we're starting with. All right, so then as we're loading the grain into the bin, we've got it at the proper moisture content and we're loading it into the grain bin. Grain protected and insecticide that is applied to the grain as it's being loaded into the bin gets distributed over most of the kernels. It's another layer that's designed to reduce the number of insects that we have and slow the buildup of population within the bin. So applying an insecticide is not something, if you put it on, it's not something that's going to last forever, but it will last for a while. Usually, you get at least a month out of control and sometimes more. But when we're thinking about storing wheat, we're really thinking about a month or two of control from our grain protected. But it's especially important to use a grain protectant when you're storing wheat. Storing corn, you may be able to get away without using a grain protected, but storing wheat, it needs to be mandatory to put something on as you're putting it into the grain bin. We have several choices and I want to point out that we do have some new products this year that we can actually talk about. Storicide 2, which is a combination of a pyrethroid, delta-methyrin and corpair of osmethyl, which is an organophosphate, has been the standard for years. Sentinel was registered not too long ago. That's just the pyrethroid delta-methyrin. We recommend if you use that product, you tank mix it with an insect growth regulator called the Diacon IGR. Suddenly we now have available Diacon IGR+, which is a premix actually of the Sentinel and the Diacon IGR already mixed up for you. And coming very soon, if you look at the second one there on the list, is an insecticide called Sensat. It's the active ingredient, which is spinosin. That is going to start being sold. This spring, so you may be able to get hold of it this year or it may be something that to be looking for next year. It's not available at the time we're harvesting our wheat this year. I want to show you just a few results to sort of show you how effective a grain protecting can be. And this is some data from Dr. Michael Tays at the University of Georgia. This slide is kind of busy here and it's from Corin, but you get the same idea and the same effectiveness for some of these or the trends in wheat as well. So one thing that I just wanted to point out is that we want to keep the number of weevils or lesser grain borers that we have below two live weevils per kilogram. As above that is when the grain becomes officially infested and you start getting docket problems from having insects in the grain. One thing I want to point out is just to kind of follow through as time goes by, they started in October. There's December, February, April, and it went all the way to August. So it went through almost a year. Gradually what happens is the populations build up, the weevils build up. And it's kind of hard when the grain temperatures are fairly cool here. I think that's why this is sort of showing that there weren't many insects present right there. It's just because they weren't very active and didn't get in the trap. So I think that's kind of a sampling artifact. But if you look, we have more insects in that untreated control. Generally looking here at the end of the season, you're also gonna see that some of these insecticides, if you look at the IPM guide, say that you can spread them on the top, just put them as a top dress to kind of provide some protection. Using a top dress alone is doesn't really provide adequate protection. You end up with that, you can end up with a lot of insects by the end of the storage period. What I'm getting at here is that effective grain protectants. And then here, store-side two is not registered on corn, actellic, which is perimapost metal, is registered. That one, execute is now what's being sold as SENSAT. And then that combination that I talked about using the combination product, your sentinel and your diacon. And then here is just what's using your delta-methyr and your sentinel alone. So let's look at this one first, this bottom, this lower diamond here. If you look, that one is not perfect, as we note here in this slide, as Dr. Tay's notes, it's not perfect, but it's better than doing nothing. So that's a relatively cost-effective treatment, but it's not gonna provide you protection forever. You get greater protection from either using, in this case, the actellic on the corn or the SENSAT, the spinocid on the, those great protectants are gonna give you the best protection. The combination of the sentinel plus the diacon does a pretty nice job as well. So those are sort of the three best options there. So going back just to remind you, I'm just gonna go back. We've got these choices, store-side two for wheat, SENSAT will be coming soon, and then the combination of going with your Delta-Methrin plus your Methapyridic, it's gonna provide you with your maximum control. And that's kind of what you need, because it's, insects grow well in our warm summers, and so it's good to have the best protection possible for our wheat and small grains. One caveat for SENSAT is that, if you look in the label, their tolerances may not be established in all the countries, and so use this, it says on the label, and the crops and commodities intended for use in the United States, so that are going to a country that will accept this grain. So there's a little bit of a wrinkle there to just be aware of. Now, one more thing I wanna say about using those grain protectants, as I said, it's very important, especially for growing wheat, for storing wheat in the summertime or other small grains, to use those grain protectants. But if you have a grain dryer and the way your system works is that you're putting this grain in, while it's hot from the dryer right into the grain bin, don't put the grain protectant on that hot grain because it's gonna break that protectant down. So it's kind of a trade-off, and you do kill a few insects by the drying process, particularly the higher the temperature is possible. But just know that there's a little bit of a conflict between those two management techniques that if you've got hot grain that you're putting into the bin, don't try to put a protectant on it. So you need to be putting that on cool grain, those grain protectants. Okay, so that brings us to our next management tactic, which is gonna be to keep that grain as cool as possible. We wanna keep the grain temperature below 60 degrees Fahrenheit whenever it is possible. The aeration fans, we can blow cool air through those grain bins and it is a great management tool. Why is this possible? Why does this work? Well, most of these stored grain insect problems, these stored grain insects that we have are pretty cosmopolitan around the world and they tend to be from warmer areas and they just do not grow below 60 degrees. If you can kind of look at this little schematic here, this is where we started out with a certain number of adult insects and stored them at three different temperatures for several months. And if you look at this, you can see at 85 degrees, they were very fruitful in multiply, whereas at 55 degrees, we were just left with those original adults. They were still alive, but they had not reproduced. So keeping the grain below 60 degrees is a wonderful management tool. Easier said than done when you're in the South in the summertime, which is why it's such a challenge to store wheat and why when you're stirring wheat, you just gotta pull out all the bells and whistles. You really have to make sure that everything's clean, clean, clean. You put on your empty bin treatment, put your grain protectant insecticide on your wheat, that's gonna give you your greatest chances of success. But because we don't have this keeping it cool tool that we have available as we do for corn. Lots of information about aeration can be found. We actually have a guide on our website that Dr. Ronald Noyce prepared for us for some stored grain workshops years ago, but it gives you some guidelines on the principles of aeration and some advice on aeration. If you go to AlabamaCrops.com and you click on store grain, you will be able to find this publication and a lot more information about storing grain. It's easier to aerate if you have an automatic aeration controller on your grain bins. And it's even easier if you've got one of the fancy new grain bins with the thermocouples that are going up and down through the big grain bins that's constantly monitoring your temperature and moisture in your grain and that you have got these computer systems that will turn the fans on and off as needed to maintain those optimal temperature conditions. This is actually just an actual example of a bunch of the progs that were in a single grain bin starting in October. You can kind of see how they ran those the aeration fans were run and they kind of stepped that temperature down and it got that temperature until it was down below 60 degrees which is where we wanted to maintain a personal safe grain storage. So these new computerized bin management systems may get a lot easier to effectively use that aeration as a management tool for keeping your grain cool. It's important to know when you're running aeration fans that it doesn't just do any good to just turn the fans on for a couple of hours a week or something like that. It take, depending on the power of your fan it can often take overnight or 24 hours with our fans that most of the fans we have in the Southeast are pretty powerful to kind of blow what we call that cooling front through the grain to kind of move all that cool air through the grain. So it's important as you're aerating too if you don't have thermocouples to follow it up with getting a grain thermometer in there and just taking a temperature knowing what that grain temperature is to make sure that your aeration is effective. It can take days in the upper Midwest they use so much weaker fans because it saves the electricity but it can take three days for them to run the cooling front through a grain bin. So it's important to know the power of your fan and how long it takes to run that. And as I mentioned, a lot of that thinking is done for you with these new management computerized management systems that you can buy with your thermocouples in your grain bin. It's important the last sea that I had on there we were keeping it clean and dry we were keeping it cool and then the last sea was to check it often. That means monthly. Generally these generation time for these insects is about a month which is why you want to be checking it at least monthly to see what kind of insects are there. There are different ways to do some checking. One is to use these little pitfall traps that are called store guarded WB probe twos. You can get them from trustay.com. It costs about $28 I think the last time I checked for a set of three. We recommend you put three to five in a grain bin in each grain bin, leave them for a day, come back, look to see if they're these little pitfall traps. So when you set them up, you drive them into the grain vertically down until you can't see them anymore except the very top and you come back and you get them in an after a day and then the insects that we're crawling through the grain bin will fall into the holes and will be trapped and you have to see what is out there crawling around in your grain bin. We also have, I don't know if I have a picture, I don't. The old fashioned big grain probes that you can drive down into the grain and you can open them up and you can get a sample of the grain that then you can run through a sieve or a colander or an official grain sieve to kind of shake it out and kind of see what insects are in there with the grain. Insects are really small relative to the size of the grain so if you ever open up your grain bin and you look in and you can see insects crawling around, you are in big trouble at that point. So, but anyway, another thing that people do because you can't with all these things you're poking around in the top of the grain bin, you really can't see what's happening at the bottom and the bottom with that bin, kind of that bin sweep area can be where we often have problems because of the insects that have been that we didn't get at through the cleaning in the spring and all that, that may be some that were harbored under the floor or something like that. So some people will unload some grain, try to get some of that grain out to take a look and sort of see what that grain looks like. But checking it is very, very important but it's also very important to understand what a dangerous environment a grain bin can be. Make sure you have a safety harness on when you're in there messing around, sticking traps in or probing around in the grain area. Make sure someone knows you're in that bin. Just take all the precautions necessary in terms of grain bin safety. But checking it often is very important. This is just an example to show when we were talking about that every 30 days because every 30 days in the summertime you get about a generation of these insects. This is a particular insect called the lesser grain borer on the left hand side. You're gonna see it says number of insects for 15 trap days. Well that means that I took my, I had five of those little probe traps that I showed you when I stuck them in and left them for three days. Five times three was 15. Then you can kind of see that. We put this grain in. This didn't have a protectant on it. And this one in particular, you can sort of see that we got through the first couple of sample periods, okay, and then between July and look like in early August or mid August we started being able to detect insects and look what happened one month later how rapidly that population had increased because of each generation they're just building up and so their growth is basically happening exponentially at this point. So another month this would have gone even further up but what happened is we actually fumigated at that point. So when the population went down but you can use these straps to kind of get a signal of what's happening in your grain bin. And find problems before they get to be economic problems. Another thing that you could do if you saw you were starting to build up it might be mean that that's the time you maybe want to market this a little bit earlier than you'd planned but if you're monitoring, if you're out there it allows you to be more proactive than just not knowing what's going on until it's time to sell the grain and you go out and then you find you've got bugs in it. So monitoring is a good idea. So keeping it clean and dry, keeping it cool and checking it often are our main recommendations. As I mentioned, be sure you're safe when you're out there wear that safety harness, make sure people are out there and know that you're out there in that grain bin. Be careful on those ladders. If you're thinking about building bins think about building ones with a nice spiral staircase they're not that much more in the general scheme of things when you're putting in a big grain system and they're a lot more pleasant to go up and down on than these vertical ladders. Now, if you end up with insects in your grain and it's necessary that you get rid of the insects the live insects within your grain the only thing we really have left to do is to fumigate with aluminum phosphide. Might be possible if you have the capability to move your grain from one bin to another to re-treat it with the grain protectants you go through but a lot of the couple of the worst pest insects that we have are developing kind of inside those kernels and you may not be controlling those as you're doing that movement from bin to bin. So mainly the thing to do when people find too many insects in their grain bin and they have to get rid of them is they're gonna have to fumigate. So aluminum phosphide is a very dangerous product unfortunately it needs to be treated with respect. Lots of times people get their hands on it and used it improperly and then we get unfortunate headlines at this where we have this toxic gas that killed four children. So I always have to be cognizant of using and respecting this particular chemical. Here was another one that one that I just showed you was just last year at Christmas time I hear we had one from 2007. So unfortunately these headlines happen. People you really need to be careful if you're using this product you need to be aware of the properties of aluminum phosphide that are gonna affect safety and efficacy. You need to be sure you read that applicator's manual make a fumigation management plan and keep it on file. Yeah I should have put in here also you need to be sure that you're sealing your bin. If you don't seal your bin you're just throwing your money away and getting an incomplete fumigation. So there's just a lot involved with this. So it's better to rely on these other practices that we're doing to minimize the number of insects we have by keeping it clean and dry, keeping it cool and checking it often and using fumigation as a last resort. This is this showing the alabamacrops.com website. If you click on stored grains on there on the left hand side there'll be lots of information about stored grain. You can also access that stored grain IPM guide by clicking on the IPM we can test up on the upper left there and then clicking on stored grain you'll get right to the stored grain IPM guide which has all these different insecticides labeled that are labeled a list of who provides some tips on managing your stored grain.