 All right. Well, I'm Kathy Flanders. I'm an Extension Specialist here at Auburn University in the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, and today I want to talk about management of sorghum insect pests. Last month, Alana Jacobson did a good job talking about and giving an update on the sugarcane aphid, but I just wanted to provide a further update in terms of what we're seeing out in the field as far as sugarcane aphid goes, because that is our biggest problem right now, and our biggest key pest is this new sugarcane aphid. I'm happy to say that the populations that I'm seeing out are building up on Johnson grass right now, and but they're not as large as they were last year. So that 2016 picture over there, I haven't seen anything like that yet. About 20% of the Johnson grass that I've been looking at in Central Alabama is infested this year as opposed to 30% last year, and the number of aphids per plant is much lower. So I'm pleased about that. We still have to worry and thinking about managing sugarcane aphid and do everything we can to avoid having to spray, but unfortunately it seems to be almost inevitable that we have to scour and spray through this pest. But the best things to do are to pick the tolerant variety, use the seed treatment plant early, scout early and often, and apply an insecticide on threshold, and our best guess for a threshold is if we see about 50 aphids per leaf. If we look at an upper leaf, a middle leaf, and an upper leaf, and we see 50 aphids per leaf on 20 to 25% of the plants, then we would consider that that would be time to spray. You need to know what insecticides are legal and effective for sugarcane aphid, and this year is savanto, and then transform. We were able to get a section 18 label so we can use transform on grain sorghum and more sorghum. Use a high volume of water and protect your beneficials, so avoid using the broad spectrum insecticide. This is key when we're talking about managing these other pests that we have in the system, is that we have to avoid broad spectrum insecticides that are going to kill natural enemies and flare our aphids. So we want to go ahead and keep the aphids out of the heads and is a main goal. So another thing that we can encourage you to do is go ahead and get the Alabama crops app or subscribe to the Alabama IPM newsletter because if we have updates about what's going on as we're seeing some issues with this or other pests, we will get it out in those in those venues. So moving on to all the other pests that we used to have. We didn't have a lot of sorghum before a few years back when the price was good and we suddenly had a lot more sorghum than we've had in years and people had kind of forgotten how many different insect pests get on sorghum in the southeast. So it's not just one, there's a whole complex of different kinds of things that get on the crop. This slide, the courtesy of Dr. Glenn Studebaker in Arkansas, is just sort of showing you some of the other pests that you can have in addition to this sugarcane aphid. So there are other aphids out there. Yellow sugarcane aphid can be a problem and I've seen quite a lot of that on Johnson grass this year. Fire ants, chinchbugs, world feeders, different kinds of borers and a whole plethora of things that feed on the head, including the sorghum midge and then a bunch of these caterpillars, corn earworm, fallarmyworm, sorghum webworm, there's a looper out there sometimes too, and then also some stink bug problems. So I want to point out that for in terms of management thresholds and management tactics for these other sorghum pests, there's an excellent publication called grain sorghum insect pests in their management by Dr. David Bunton from the University of Georgia. So you can google that or and find that and the link is listed there at the bottom of the screen. Now a neonicotinoid seed treatment is going to take care of most of that early season insect pests. So it's not only going to help you greatly with sugarcane aphid, but it's going to help you against a lot of those things that are in the soil or around causing problems. Most of it on grain sorghum we find that all three of these materials are very effective. So it depends on what you can get on the the hybrid that you're buying from your seed dealer, imidaclopridclothianid and orthium ethoxam, that would be the either the main trade names to be goucho, poncho, and cruiser respectively. Those materials seem to be doing do a very good job and are recommended that your your seed have a seed treatment on it. Then we want to start thinking about all the different kinds of factors that are going to increase our risk for insects and we want to do the exact opposite. So light planting is going to like Austin was talking about earlier with the diseases. The later you plant the greater the risk you're going to have from a lot of these different kinds of insects on on grain sorghum. So planting late we're increasing our risk from almost all of our pests. As you can see that long list there. Double cropping behind cereal we get higher risk from all those pests plus tingebugs. Double cropping behind the winter cover crops again we're going to have a lot of problems from these pests. Continuous sorghum we add in a few other issues. We're going to have problems from we could have problems from billbugs sorghumage and possibly from sugarcane aphid. And the dry weather if we have dry weather we're going to have problems and seed problems with grass hoppers, lesser corn stalk borer, fall army worm and tingebugs. Now ironically it was dry earlier this year so I know people that planted corn and had problems with lesser corn stalk borer this year down in southwest Alabama. So wherever it's been dry we could see some problems from these other pests. Hopefully all this rain we've had recently is going to decrease the chances that we are going that we're going to have problems. But we can't do anything about the weather but we can certainly control how and when we plant our grain sorghum. And so generally later planted grain sorghum while it may fit into some of the crop rotations is going to be at the highest risk and it's better to plant it earlier in that recommended planting window for grain sorghum in terms of insects anyway. So going on again other things that are going to increase the risk from these insects. Reduce tillage, minimum tillage things, strip till, bunch of these soil insects in the mix, as well as some of the sugarcane southwestern and European corn borers in different parts of the states. We have different problems with those different borers. Planning into sod or newly tilled ground, cupworms, we worry about sugarcane, beetles and grubs. Planning into burnt cereal, stubble or conventional tillage on a light soil. If it's hot and dry again I mentioned that lesser corn stock borer. And proximity to Johnson grass is a big thing because it is a sorghum species and it lets things build up like yellow sugarcane aphid and a sorghum midge. So as I mentioned controlling these other insects in our grain sorghum is complicated by the sugarcane aphids because any of the broad spectrum insecticides such as those pyrethroids are going to kill those natural enemies. Without the natural enemies these sugarcane aphids will be worse. So again we want to try to avoid spraying the pyrethroids at other broad spectrum insecticides such as lurespan and some of the other ones if at all possible. So let's go through and kind of talk about some of the things that we can scout and spray for. A lot of those insects, the soil insects and things we need to rely on a seed treatment to help control it. We can scout and spray for the headworms if we have a problem with them as well as what we call the worldworms. They're basically the same same insects. The cornea worm, the fallarmy worm and the sorghum web worm are generally going to be the ones that we have trouble with. So if we have them, if we find them we're going to want to use something that's easy on the beneficial insects and in this case I would choose brevathon, blackhawk or diamond. Again avoiding those broad spectrum insecticides. So our threshold is two or more larvae of the cornea worm and the fallarmy worm per head or for the webworms if we have four or more of the webworms per head are found. The other thing that we have to worry about and people have kind of forgotten about because we hadn't grown grain sorghum for a while is this sorghum midge. And this slide is showing the sorghum midge adult that's a little fly that goes out there and she lays her eggs right there on those flowers and causes problems. Here are some here are some midge adults that are trapped in the in the spider web. You can see how small they are relative to the grain sorghum head there. Here are the little larvae and here are the little if you look at the little silvery colored things those are actually the pupal skins where they have bolted from one stage to another right there on that on that sorghum head. So if you get a lot of midges you get very poor poor seed set. So how are we going to control it? We've already talked about some of the stuff we're going to plant early, rotate our crops, control our johnson grass and if possible plowing is a good thing from an insect point of view to bury those overwintering larvae. Some people don't have a lot of problems with sorghum midge and other people have a problem sort of a chronic problem and so also how many of these tactics you need to employ sort of depends on sort of what your history is with sorghum midge if you know it. So the only way to control it is to control if we're going to use an insecticide is to control the egg laying adults and so obviously the timing is going to be critical we've got to put the spray out at a time when the when these adults are out flying around because they're not feeding and they're not going to be coming into contact with these insecticide otherwise so we have to be putting our insecticide on when they're out there. It's important to understand that the biology of this insect is that these adults mature in the morning and they're out there in the morning so we need to sample and spray in the morning. So in terms of sampling fields it's recommended to start when the plants reach 20% bloom and sample every few days and stop when the plants reach 90% bloom so inspect the sorghum panicles for the adults. It's important to Dr. Bunton recommends that you sample at least 20 sorghum heads for each eight acres of field that you have so obviously it takes a lot quite a while to sample and you you know you can't sample everything but that's sort of a recommendation to make sure that you're getting your representative understanding of what's out there in the field. So you can either look for these adults or you can shake those adults into a plastic bag and then look for the midges in the bag. Our threshold is as if we find one sorghum midge fly per panicle when 20 to 30 percent of the panicles are in bloom. Now it's important to spray immediately after after scouting and not delaying because you you don't know if you wait what's going to be out there in another on another day or in the afternoon so when you find them get out there and spray check that field again within a few days to verify that control and if necessary you might need to put on a second application five to ten days later uh that might be needed for so effective control. So choices for if a midge spray is necessary I mean if you absolutely have to um you might just have to break down and use a pyre three but um worse ban advance is reasonably effective although it is a broad spectrum insecticide. Blackhawk which is a spinosin product has a section 2 E label to use on sorghum midge although not all insecticide tests have been consistent about how it performs. Lanate is another broad spectrum insecticide but we mention it because it tends to have a very short residual so it sprays what is there and so it might have a little bit less of a risk to some of our other beneficials if those beneficiaries happen to not be in the field during the spray. So our choices aren't great for sorghum midge and we may end up disrupting our sugarcane apid control if we have to spray so it's also important to keep on scouting these fields and for any other insect pests that might develop even after we control our sorghum midge. That's sort of a whirlwind tour through the grain sorghum pests um some information on managing the pests and to try to include some thresholds and some information and the current insecticides that we have for use is that you can be found in the 2017 IPM guide for Alabama and if you go to alabamacrops.com and click on the IPM section I think it's actually the top link on the left it will take you to a section where you can can find this guide.