 Hello everyone, welcome to the commercial horticulture webinar series. My name is Aina, I'm an extension entomologist working on vegetables. And today I'm going to provide you an overview of what happened in 2019. Based on our field activities. My contact information is on the screen and a lot of our resources are on the website album beginning farmer dot com. Why are we talking about IPM or integrated best management is very simple and vegetables. You can have a lot of crop loss right during the harvest time are close to harvest time. So, and that's called the yield gap. So, to reduce losses towards the end of the season, which can be very rapid in case of vegetables, not only crop loss quantity loss but also quality loss. We need to adopt the IPM practices and we're going to touch on some of these today. So what happened in 2019. So you're looking at the drought map from 2019 and it clearly shows majority of the state of Alabama in some form of drought and some regions were normally dry. So we had a drought definitely last year. What we're calling that drought now is a flash drought because we did not have a season long drought we had a major reduction in rainfall towards the end of August and then September. We definitely had almost complete loss of rainfall and the temperatures were extremely high. And you're looking at the temperature and rainfall measurements at three locations. And if you just look at the central part of the state, for example, Montgomery, September was the hottest as well as the lowest rainfall period. So we had about four to six weeks of no rainfall. And we're calling that a flash drought compared to a prolonged drought when that we have seen for example 2016 when we didn't have rain for a number of months. Now remember, these are some of the common sting bug species that get really bad on vegetables. And all of these are favored by high temperatures and the drought. Especially when it's drought, they tend to seek out their host plants and constantly move between fruits and vegetables and weeds and many other crop species. And one of the ones that we have seen dominate in vegetables is the leaf footed bugs. Those leaf footed bugs have leaf like expansions. They form about 70 to 80% of the species mix now. But we do see the other species like the brown sting bug, of course, squash bugs on cucurbits. And then we have seen the brown marmorated sting bugs on our vegetables as well. And that's an invasive insect. So many of the new invasive insects are also sucking insect pests and they all are favored by the weather patterns we are seeing in Alabama. Insects, we use a variety of traps. Now remember the first step to integrate pest management is not when you start spraying. It is when you start monitoring and recording their numbers. And we use various types of traps. The cheapest one that we use right now statewide are the sticky wing traps. We are very good in generating long-term graphs where we monitor insect pest fluctuations and that helps us to kind of forecast insect outbreaks. We are also testing automatic traps like the Z-trap and the smart trap. The smart trap, it's made by DTN that used to be called Spencer Technologies. And this smart trap actually is a camera trap that takes pictures of the trap bottom. So they all use the sticky bottom. And you can see a picture of the sticky bottom with the moths and then the camera actually counts the insects and puts it into a software, the DTN app software, which is cloud-based. And we also enter all our sticky wing data manually and then we are able to compare the effectiveness of these traps. And we have done it for about three, four years and you can see some blog articles and magazine articles I have done explaining some of these technologies. So it's pretty exciting to see more technologies developed for improving scouting and monitoring practices. So what happened in 2019? As I indicated before, we had a flash drought in September, end of August and the entire month of September, across Alabama. And right when the temperatures hit high and the rainfall dropped, the insect populations peaked, the activity peaked. And you can see the spikes in the graphs. And each time we have a spike, I have indicated with a red arrow, those are the high points. So that indicates the peak activity of these moths. And you're looking at about eight moth species. And I'll tell you that lesser corn stalk borer, which is a major peanut pest, and the squash vine borer are excellent indicator species of impending drought. So those are the species we monitor closely and they tell us what the condition is in the soil and in the environment. And most of these insects with the peak activity, you can almost be sure that there's outbreak coming. So you should be looking for egg masses and caterpillars and be ready to take control measures, appropriate control measures when you see a peak. And this is just a summary slide showing the total collection insect collections. And here I have given four years of data, and it clearly shows the, the ups and downs in the populations. And as I said before, the lesser corn stalk borer, squash vine borers, those extremely high numbers are strong indicators of drought and we saw the flash drought. So again, that affects the drought and all these weather patterns affect how we practice IPM. And that's the importance of this slide show. So as you as you listen to it. I'm thinking how you can improve your IPM practices. So how do these droughts affect IPM. Well for sure drought increases pest reproduction the life cycle. The developmental rates so you may see more generations of pests and more overlapping generations, which results in higher feeding damage on the crop. Now plants become widespread in drought. So you have these army worm outbreaks which is almost county wide large areas are affected when we have drought, because all plants are stressed, no matter what the species is. And then the high heat and this kind of activity reduces beneficial insect populations which is the flop side of this and when we beneficial insect populations and the activities low best insects get worse. And if we are using too much pesticide doing this drought. We are just giving rise to spider mites, because the beneficial spider mites are destroyed by pesticide use overuse of pesticides. So we see more spider mite infestations, and those investables are much more expensive and much more difficult to tackle than the caterpillar so a good planning can avoid spider mite attack. And then again, as you do these go through a drought, you have to think if you're using other strategies for example trap crops trap crop is a great way of deterring insect pest feeding. In a drought, as the pictures show the even the trap crop is stressed and you're looking at sorghum and get 300 sorghum that we use at a perimeter trap crop on a very sizable scale. In our research demonstration fields in Clinton and the head of the sorghum is affected by the drought. And that affects the overall effectiveness of the trap crop against leaf footed bugs. So again, the point is adjust your alternative IPM systems plan much better and then do your best to improve your crop quantity and quality to improve your quality doing harvest. Overall, this is how I approach organic systems. For example, if you are producing organic open field crops, then trap cropping is a very good solution along with the bio insecticides. But if you're a high tunnel property so then exclusion system like the permanent pest exclusion system, along with bio insecticides and natural enemies is a great combination. And that truly is a true IPM tactic. And if you want to look at the some videos on how to do high tunnel pest exclusion system. Please look up the YouTube channel. And you can find our basic videos there and then give us a call before you design a system. Going back to the basics of IPM definitely in case of vegetables pest prevention is better than cure. The cure is often very expensive. Managing sex when they're small or low in numbers. When the caterpillars become too big or there's more more aphids and your plants are covered the damage is already done and oftentimes it's ineffective to even control. So, especially with organic methods could be very expensive and very difficult to control outbreaks. Protect or augment natural enemies, learn to use natural enemies, how to release them correctly, and then protect them from excessive use of of insecticides and then integrate the true integration is very important as we get ahead in the previous slide. You can use combination of trap crops and that helps with biological control improves biological control. You get ecosystem or ecological benefits. So again integration helps tremendously for more information you can always look up the Alabama IPM communicator newsletter and the website is www.aces.edu slash IPM communicator and you can subscribe yourself online. We also have the online farming basics course for beginning farmers. It's a great introduction to IPM and many other crop production methods. And last but not the least, you can call a commercial horticulture regional extension agent through our app. It's called farming basics mobile app and it's available both for Apple devices as well as Android. Thank you very much.