 Going to change topics and go to southern rust and some nematode issues in corn. I think most of you have been growing corn and probably seen southern rust in your corn. Very noticeable yellow to yellow orange pustules on the leaves, which also show up on the corn husks. They'll show up on the stalks. Pretty much all the corn plant is sensitive to being colonized by the southern rust fungus. We do have common rust on corn and the pustules are a little bit different color. They show up a little earlier in the season and the disease does not move nearly as quickly as southern rust does. Now southern rust is not a, for one thing, the fungus doesn't over season here. It's a buccaneous species. It comes in from either the Caribbean or from Mexico, probably Mexico. And we need certain types of weather patterns, particularly a frontal zone with a low pressure system moving out of the Gulf, coming out of Mexico and then coming into Alabama to bring a spore cloud into this area. The other possibility would be a tropical storm. An early season tropical storm would bring, again, bring inoculum into this area. The fungus is active in the wintertime in Florida where they grow sweet corn in extreme southern Florida. So there's actually a different track for that disease to move up into Georgia and into the Carolinas. It's not an every year disease in this area. Even down in Baldwin County where more or less is our rust center in the state. Maybe see serious problems every three to five years. If you go and look at double crop corn, which we do have some folks down along the coastal plant corn after weed or they'll actually plant corn after corn, that's almost an every year occurrence. It'll get into that corn pretty badly, that second corn crop. But normally speaking, our early corn, really not all that often. Now we did have a big rust outbreak in 2014. Primarily down here in Baldwin, Mobile County, right along the Florida Panhandle, it showed up when the corn was starting to tassle, which is typically that window where if it shows up in that timeframe it's going to really tear the corn up pretty good. The later it shows up, the less likely it is to have an impact on yield. There was a moderate amount of rust in this zone in the lower counties. There was certainly enough in that area to treat, particularly for those growers that were growing, that make 250 or so bushels per acre. For regularly early corn, there was no rust in central Alabama and none in the northern part of the state. However, again, we had some corn planted a little bit later in these areas and the corn hit it with both feet, so that delayed planting is going to be an issue. There's always a question as to how much impact this disease has on yield. As I mentioned before, the earlier it shows up, the more likely it will have an impact on yield. This is just a test this past summer in some May planted corn and two applications per ax or we made 150 bushels and in the control we made 109. So that's what 41 bushel yield decline due to rust in this particular instance. Bob Kimmelwright sent me the results of a fungicide trial that he had over in Georgia. He saw a year of the location and in his test he saw 70 bushel yield decline between the best fungicide treatments and the non-treated control. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. But basically from all indications, the earlier planting goes in, the less likely it is to have issues with rust. Now, it doesn't mean it won't show up, it just greatly reduces the risk. It generates some information on corn varieties. And the problem we have at this point in time is we had one gene out there in the marketplace that conferred a fairly high level of rust resistance in corn varieties. It was really only found in one line and that line is no longer available. So when we have ideal conditions for rust and this is ear rust, leaf severity rating, it goes up to 11 which is a dead leaf at black layer. We're having 7s and 8s on all these varieties. And it doesn't matter whether it's a pine ear variety, the cab variety, they're all sitting ducks when we had this much inoculant pressure and really ideal weather patterns for disease development. This is a test that was up at Bruton which is about 70 miles northeast of Fairhope. And there was a lot less rust pressure at this location than there was in Fairhope, though again some of the varieties had a fair amount of rust on that flag leaf. We did have one variety, it's a pine ear tropical corn 30F35H. And it basically had no rust on it. And it is the only variety that I'm aware of around here that has that RPP9 gene in it. So these other ones do not. But even there there's some differences in the rate of disease development on some of these other lines. And I mentioned the RPP9 gene, the only variety used to have it was pine ear 33M52. And it disappeared from the market this past year. In a lot of the trials that I ran you did see that this variety yielded a little bit less than the other 33M type variety. So there was a little bit of yield drag with that gene in it. The problem is we now have a race of the rust fungus that is virulent on varieties with this gene. So it's not as good as it once was. It's now called slow rusting rather than resistance. And the problem we have, the other problem we have with corn varieties is we can't really figure out what rust races we have anymore because the corn lines originally used to assess or identify races of southern rust have disappeared. So we just don't even have the genetic material to figure out what we've got out there in the field. There are a lot of fungicides out there and there are more all the time being registered on corn. We don't have a lot of information and that's what I'm going to talk about in a minute on the performance of these different products but the companies are coming out with newer chemistries now and you're seeing a lot more products registered in corn. The timing, again there's not a lot of information from field trials on the performance of these materials with respect to timing. I usually suggest to the growers they use a scouting program, look for symptoms usually starting around VT and then come back with a second application if you need one. There's a growth stage which is basically when the corn hits tassel and go ahead and make the first application follow with the second one about two weeks later. There's also some early calendar programs where we're looking at either applications maybe as early as V6 or V8 and then coming back at VT or blister stage to make that second fungicide application. This year it was able to get in some different growth stage trials to look at what we're seeing with the timing of the products as well as their efficacy among products. If you look at ear rust severity the controls were blasted in this test down in Fairhope. At V6 there was a little bit reduction in rust but as we got later in the season the rust control got a little better with a single application at VT and then you saw even better rust control with two applications which you would expect to see. This test did have some issues with nitrogen variability but there really wasn't that much difference in the yield response whether as far as timing is concerned or the number of applications. We almost got as much of a yield gain out of a treatment with the V6 as we did with the two applications later on and there's about a 50 bushel yield decline in this particular trial with rust. And these are the Stratigo headline and headline I'm sorry the Quilt XL were about the best treatments out there. When you're rating rust you really look at color and the yellower they are the worse the rust is. And we're looking at the ear leaf not the lower part of the plant but that's still an indication as the amount of rust pressure there is out there. Another test at Fairhope there's still a lot of rust activity in this test. Some V6 applications didn't get a reduction in rust but we did with VT and then the best treatment out there as a standard was two applications of a high rate of paraxor and there was virtually no rust out there at all. Did get a yield boost with most of the treatments we had. I'm sorry not here these are actually statistically the same as the control. Here's the paraxor at about an 80 bushel yield gain in this particular location and these are the remaining treatments in the tests. Some V6 VTs and some other timings out there. The later the sprays were the better the control and then more consistent yield gains with those two spray programs as compared with the ones. There's also a difference in fungicide efficacy. Just because they have a registration doesn't necessarily mean they all work the same. And George Jean mentioned that on SCAB the same thing holds true here. The generic products in this test at Bruton which was planted in May did not work very well and the yields were the same as we saw with the non-treative controls. There were a number of other treatments kind of in the middle where we got fair not really good control a pretty good control moderate yield gains here and then we had four different treatments the paraxor, headline amp, headline and quilt XL gave a very high level of control and very good yield gains from those treatments about 65 bushels in this particular instance. And these are just what some of these treatments look like. Here's the control it's burned up well up into the top of the canopy whereas the paraxor is nice and green. So we got a good control with that treatment and quilt XL and the headline amp. So you looked at the summary of the trials we had. The single applications actually did better than what I would have thought. I wouldn't think that a V6 application would have provided any control out to the point of black layer but they did slow the disease down at least enough so that yields oftentimes came up a bit. So you know we'll see I'll try these again this coming year and see how they perform I intended to get more consistent control and particularly if you know these are insurance policies when you're buying a fungicide you're probably better off spending a little extra money to make sure you get a little bit better control at the end of the season because you never really know what the weather is going to do at the end of the year. And fungicide choice did matter it looks like the generics don't work very well. I know generic tab is it's actually more expensive to buy the surfactant than it is to buy the fungicide now but it just doesn't seem like it works well. So the name brands were better and there are some of those products hopefully we can get in another year of data that look like they're better than some of the other ones. Talk a little about root knot and nematodes in corn. Historically we don't think of nematodes being that big of an issue in corn here but now we're growing high yields and it also turns out that root knot that we see in cotton also goes to corn. And I did a rotation study down at Fairhope. I'm not Fairhope down at Plank breeding unit about five to eight years ago and one of the things that showed up was when we had corn behind cotton it tended to stay green much later than the continuous corn plots and it turned out we had very high levels of cotton root knot in this area and almost none here when corn was cropped behind peanuts. And this is just some of the data out of this study showing that as populations of root knot juveniles go up the yield goes down and overall in the study it looked like we got about a 25 to 30% reduction in yields of corn when we had very high levels of cotton root knot juveniles out there in this field. The other nematode that we've had some issues with is stubby root. This is down at the field crops unit at E.V. Smith and there's a noticeable stunning of the plants and uneven stand when we have stubby root nematode. It almost looks like it's a nitrogen deficiency or maybe a hard pan in these areas it gives you the same type of symptom pattern. The one thing is these large nematodes feed on the root tips and you get these basically a witches brooming of the root tips into these very odd patterns which is not what you'd expect to see with a healthy corn root system. And as I mentioned before rotation makes a difference. This is just some of the numbers out of that study with corn after cotton, corn or peanuts and in three or four years we got higher yields with corn behind peanuts than either of the other two crops and that's that root knot talking out there. There are some situations where we need more than rotation to manage these nematodes and this is the list of nematocyte treatments that we have in corn at this point in time. Two of them are seed dressings which come on the seed it's a custom applied treatment that you order at the time when you order seed. The other two are some old insecticide nematocytes they've probably been around for 50 years. Granular treatments put out in furrow and in those rotation studies and some other tests I have worked a lot with counter and by and large when we have nematodes present we get a nice yield boost with countering corn. Maybe up to about 20 bushels per acre. There are some instances where we have, no we have root knot out there we don't get a yield response with counter it's not 100% effective but it tends to be pretty good. Started to look at some of the nematocyte seed treatments and see how well they performed in comparison with counter and two of these treatments the cruiser this is the fungicide component the cruiser and poncho are just insecticides they're widely used on corn here are your two nematocyte treatments as the main plots didn't have any effect in this test on root knot reproduction no effect on seedling weight again you're looking for that difference in growth with a nematocyte treatment as compared with a control and no impact on yield. In this case this is the counter treatment which was a sub plot treatment to these other nematocyte the seed treatment nematocyte insecticides didn't have any effect on root knot reproduction but we did get a bigger plant with the counter which translated into a 14 bushel yield gain in this particular test. This second test was done at Bruton the other one was a plant breeding unit a much higher rate of nematode reproduction here but none of these treatments had any effect on plant growth the counter sub plot we did get a reduction in root knot reproduction and the plants were twice the weight of the non-treated plants so they were much bigger and this slide illustrates that point here's the evicted duo corn down here here's the evicted duo plus counter those plants are much larger here's the poncho votivo in the foreground there's some nematocyte treated plots in the background you can see the difference in the plant height and then here is these adjoining plots treated with counter so they were much larger plants with the counter than without this is the yield response and it was kind of odd it was a little different than what I would have response than what I would have expected on the cruiser treated corn seed we did not get a significant yield gain with counter numerically it was higher but not statistically with the evicted duo corn the two yielded the same regardless of whether we had counter out there or not which was a bit of a surprise but with poncho votivo or poncho the yield gain was 21 bushels here and 22 bushels in this particular instance so as I said counter's not effective in 100% of the cases but here at least with this particular seed treatment we got a sizable yield gain so overall it looks like and near some other studies I've done that the nematocyte seed dressings on corn just don't seem to work and we're not seeing a yield gain with those treatments with root knot in corn the counter doesn't always suppress root knot reproduction but that may be because we have a much bigger root system but we tend to see 10 to 20 bushel yield gains out of that treatment one of the things I haven't done at least at this point in time we haven't gotten corn into the 200 bushel yield area when evaluating these materials and that's something I need to take care of this year plus I haven't found a location with stubby root nematode where I can put in some trials Kip Balkam's got that area right now and I need to get it away from him I don't know how he's going to feel about that but we'll see I haven't, but I didn't get him off of it last year let me put it that way so if you're going to use counter use it in fields with established root knot population I've done some other trials with counter where I don't have root knot out there I don't get a yield response from it so specifically it is a treatment in those fields where we have some root knot issues if you've got some soil insect issues then you might see a benefit from counter or mocap but I have not shown a yield bump in any of the trials that I've worked on so if you have any questions I'll be glad to answer them both of these we're working on both the corn rust issues maybe it'll show up again this year like it did last year which is good for me, bad for you and we're still working on the corn nematodes and we'll have some information summarizing these research trials on the internet by the spring or late winter, I haven't got to it yet so if you have any questions I'll be glad to answer them it's not labeled it does have activity the difference is you've got some propochonazole in the Quilt XL in the Quadrus it's just the azoxy strobe component but the strabine and fungicides do have good activity against rust it's just usually most of the formulations have a triazole in there with them or the newer products have a carboxyamide type fungicide to give them a little more kick no, we're not rigged to put it out that's the problem we have with our equipment and you'd have to have pictures about Dow Chemical to get any tell on that I mean they won't cut any loose even for research purposes I had to spray it twice it's about, the only year I've never seen rust on Lake Corn was 2013 every other year I put out Lake Corn we've had a lot of rust issues and two applications of headline amp or headline parax or they'll do a pretty good job Stratego yield generally does better than it showed here too but I actually put it out at VT and R2 I've done a couple of tests down in Bruton and unfortunately every time I keep increasing the number of fungicide applications my yields keep going up with Lake Corn June yeah it's June, it will be planted after a week