 Good afternoon appreciate everybody hanging in there. I'm sometimes known for going long so I got myself on the timer. I Probably hardly anybody in this room knows. I'm an Auburn grad 1995 War Eagle. I this is actually my first official visit back since then I Was pretty impressed. I wasn't far into the Alabama's on highways 78 and I had an escort except usually the escort supposed to be in front of you and this time the blue lights were behind me I was going 75 and a 70 Usually you're gonna get that grace, aren't you? Especially if you're driving a state truck Not this guy asked me what my hurry was Told him I was going to try and return back to Auburn going to give a talk egg talk. It's okay Just wrote me a ticket. I'm thinking he's an Alabama fan He probably probably wanted some tree poison or something from me Anyhow, I'm glad to be back. I'm gonna talk about sugarcane aphid and sugarcane beetles and I'm not gonna talk much about sugarcane at all These past are pretty major past one. We've had for a long time. It's a native past That's a sugarcane beetle and the sugarcane aphid which is a new past. I want to acknowledge some of the people listed on the bottom of this presentation Some of my colleagues in the Mid-South because they provided a lot of the data in some cases some of the slides already ready Ready made for me. I'm gonna start off with talking about sugarcane beetle in corn. This one's a little simpler to talk about since it's not new Sugarcane beetles native actually to the southeast pretty much Tennessee a little higher in Tennessee down there. You can see the distribution. It's kind of unusual. It's you know It's a scarer. It's a like a June beetle. It's like a Japanese beetle. They're all scarabs Unlike a lot of these beetles these scarabs that were used to dealing with it isn't the white grub that causes the problem It's the adult that causes the problem and they feed underground on the roots of corn and sometimes other plants Real quick on the biology of the sugarcane beetle. It's got one generation per year and that's it It overwinners as an adult in the soil primarily in grassy areas becomes active in the spring in my area That's going to be late April early May down here. It's probably going to be more early April It's not typically in the field at the time of planting when you plant a cornfield It's not necessarily going to be there it can be there particularly if there's some grasses in the field that are attractive to The adults when they're overwintering the eggs are deposited in the soil Takes almost three full months for those eggs to develop into grubs and then the next generation of the overwintering adults They do feed underground they spend most their time underground occasionally They'll get above ground when they're feeding which maybe gives you a little bit of a chance to kill one occasionally But you'll also know when a flight's going on a lot of times or at least a big flight because the adult beetle shows up at lights pretty frequently at night On the left here you can see a close-up of the adult beetle. It's a pretty good size beetle a little over half inch in length One thing to look for on those front legs It's almost got digging type spatula feet We call them phosphoryl it's because they can dig which makes sense if you live underground Also another thing to look at is kind of these striations on the back and that will help you separate it for some other June type beetles that you might see on the right you're seeing just some picture a picture of a corn It's been fed on this picture I took some time ago and you can see that very ragged feeding usually right there at the crown of the root and That's not good Just another picture from Angus catch out from one of his trials right there very typical sometimes they're going a little bit Sometimes they go halfway through sometimes they go all the way through depends on the size of the corn plant in some cases Obviously if they're getting on a bigger stock, it takes more feeding to do as much penetration So one of the things you look for with any soil feeding insect is dead heart That's a indication something wrong by the time you see a plant with dead heart You essentially have a dead plant. It's not necessarily going to die But it's not going to produce an air the end result is a lot of times You'll see and that's one of the things I look for when I'm scouting a field that that center leaf Unfurl and it's dead now early on you'll see it start to develop you see a wilting leaf coming out of the terminal Get your get your spade out get your pocket knife out start digging around a lot of times You're going to see root damage. It may not be sugarcane beetle damage and variably though It's it's almost always going to be underground damage I never go to the field scouting corn without just a little hand trial and you can see the sugarcane beetle stuck up there So this just an example Southern part of West Tennessee Hardiman County big production field Very typical result of sugarcane beetle you go out there and you see some healthy plants You see some plants that look a little bit less than healthy and then you see just dead and dying plants This is the one of the biggest problems with sugarcane beetle. We're not putting a lot of eyes on our field It's busy time in the air people are planting everything We don't have a lot of professional consultants looking at corn by the time you get to this stage It's worse than it looks you have all these dead plants Which don't realize is probably another 20 30% of the stand is damaged and on its way down You get besides just dead plants you get what I call sub lethal symptoms on the top left You see leaning and lodging that's real common Honestly most those plants that are leaning and lodging they're not going to make an ear They're pretty far pretty badly damaged if you get just a little bit of feeding that'll penetrate too far This is a real common Symptomology right here where the the leaves get kind of a streaking a white streaking often along the edges But not always along the edges. I really think that's just nutrient Deficiency and I think what's happening is that that root damage is interfered with the nutrient uptake in parts of that plant Often these affected plants will be small ears or very often if the damage isn't is bad enough They won't produce in here. So We're what are we going to do about this sugarcane beetle? It's a sporadic pest It's difficult to predict some areas. It's more common than the other One of the things we can do is consider at planting insecticides and that's something we routinely recommend and in fact Go try to find some seed corn that doesn't have an insecticide seed treatment on it. Good luck this chart is one that's pretty much pulled out of my insect control guide, but really it's fashioned after the efforts of Kathy Flanders and I think David Bunton in Georgia kind of first started this effort where we did a rating of all the various seed treatment options that are out There against all the various common pests and the the rows in the columns I have highlighted or just to make one simple point the standard rate For corn is usually going to be unless you special-order Poncho 250 or it's going to be cruiser or PPST both of those are thymothoxan this one's cloth anodin But 250 is going to be the standard rates. Those are pretty decent rates. They do okay But as you start looking across this chart, you see they're not perfect Those lower rates are not particularly good on sugarcane beetle Poncho is a little bit better than than thymothoxan and there's some things in there that they're not good at all on Like cutworms or western corn root worms not a big problem for most of us, but one that's out there So we can do better potentially with these seed treatments by either going with higher rates Or supplementing This is just to make a point I made on the previous slide. This is data from angus catch out in mississippi in 2009 just he had a natural infestation of sugarcane beetles in some of his corn plant plots there at v3 And he took a rating and this is something we routinely routinely see cruiser 250 cruiser 500 cruisers Not very good at controlling sugarcane beetles. The poncho or cloth anodin is considerably better, but it's not always great So do you need more than the 250 rates? Well, the first thing I'll tell you even if you're not talking about sugarcane beetles Sometimes you need more than the 250 rates We've seen that year in and year out. This is an example of a data set in tennessee from this past year Now these results aren't quite statistically significant, but all these treatments had poncho 250, but when we added Capture or smart choice or something to it We tended to increase yield and I see this pretty routinely probably the most common response I see is a bump with any kind of seed treatment or infero treatment But they're all about the same But every once in a while you see that a little bit more adds a little bit more And this is just another example from a little farther south in mississippi again angus catch out in mississippi In this case everything had poncho 250 included the untreated starter fertilizer added a little yield Capture added a little yield the both of them added a little bit more So a good statistical example of where a little bit more insect control mattered So how good are the seed treatments for sugarcane beetle? I've already alluded to some of this already I'm not sure who developed this technique. It may have been angus, but I think he borrowed it from somebody But literally we call it the pipe assay technique where we put these pvc pipes over individual plants and we drop beetles in there Of course, these plants have different seed treatments or infero treatments and we evaluate The mortality and plant damage and that's what i'm going to show you next This is an example from again angus in in mississippi way back in 2008 Showing you the number of damage plants per five plants which were infested the thing that should jump out of yet This slide is is again the cruiser was not particularly good There does tend to be a rate response as you move up to from poncho 250 to poncho 500 Not a real clear one. This is an example of one of mine back in 2013. There's your untreated It's very similar. I lost this for some reason. That's just the stats. However cruiser didn't do very well Poncho 500 wasn't great in this test poncho 1250 was clearly better or really any of the seed treatments supplemented with an infero spray of capture Or karate was the best thing in this trial and again, this is sugarcane beetle damage clear indications that The 250 rates particularly thiamethoxam or cruiser are not particularly good at sugarcane beetle But again 250 poncho 250 isn't always going to get it done Great data set i borrowed from denise reginelli from mississippi state He's a county agent there where he did a large field strip trial in the black hills of mississippi where they have commonly sugarcane beetle infestations Everything on this slide had poncho 250 But he increased yields Because of the sugarcane beetle by adding any of these treatments to it whether it was counter lores band Aztec or force And if you still don't believe me that poncho 250 may not be good enough. This is just another example around this is lauderdale county tennessee back in 2013 This field was probably about 400 acres in size if you considered the one across the road and it was pretty much a total loss I couldn't convince the guy to replant it, but i talked to him later and he wished he'd replanted it with something else Bad situation here if you look in that field, what do you see? A bunch of grass growing in there. You know what that is. This was a bermuda grass pasture the year before This is ringing the dinner bell for sugarcane beetles. They love that environment So we do know something so here's my general corn recommendations. This is general for everybody. I said App-planting insecticides are a must whether it's a seed treatment or putting something down in the furrow Whether it's a liquid or spray and with most of our seed treatments We don't expect much cut worm control. So if we have a lot of green vegetation in the field Up within two three weeks of planting We're typically going to recommend a pyrethroid or something like that or pyrethroid for cut worm control The base insecticide seed treatment rates those 250 rates are pretty good, but they're not always good enough So I tell my guys in Tennessee and it may be Even more true here. The 250 is okay But if you have some risk factors, you really need to consider jumping up to the 500 or even the 1250 rates depending on those factors Or supplementing with some kind of in furrow treatment Number one risk factor any new production field take something out of pasture take it out of crp You got to go I would Typically probably try to go with a poncho 250 If I was using 1250 if I was using poncho 250 or cruiser 250, I would definitely supplement with an in furrow spray or a granular That's a very high risk situation Sugarcane beetle history They're sporadic by nature, but we have some areas of the state in Tennessee And I'm sure you do hear that get them more routinely than others If you're one of those areas, uh, I'd be more inclined to go with at least the 500 rate And if you're in a sugarcane beetle area You need to think about poncho cloth. I added and it's clearly better 500 or 1250 rates are better than thymothoxam If you're going to grow a pioneer variety or another variety that the base treatments thymothoxam Then you need to consider supplementing with a in furrow granular or a spray Delayed burn downs another factor. I don't get too excited about just reduced tillage by itself. Uh, I'm really Uh more concerned about the weed control. We want to have a good weed free period before planning My phone's blown up here I think I've covered all the points on this slide. Uh, I'm going to cross over and talk about Uh sugarcane aphids now the second half and I tried to leave a little bit more time for that since it is a new pest I can't see my timer Again a lot of credit To my colleagues probably should have contacted ron. I know he had some experience kind of like me Also, you get a lot of experience with this pest all of a sudden As it turned out it showed up in tennessee really in august early august is when it was first detected It was pretty obvious in hindsight it had been present in some areas of the state prior to that And somebody asked me you say how many acres of sorghum you got in tennessee? And I said well based on my four my phone calls about two million because Really on us they just got our late planted sorghum couldn't have been five ten thousand acres But I must have got a call or three calls on every one of those acres It was it was pretty impressive. It caught people's attention pretty well This is a close-up of the of the critter right there That is actually a predator predator feeding on the aphids, but it's a light or yellow colored aphid Similar to other aphids in size and appearance Now we're calling it the sugarcane aphid to be honest. I'm not a hundred percent sure we got identified correctly All evidence indicates that it is a sugarcane aphid. It's morphologically very similar to the sugarcane aphid Molecular technique indicates it's sugarcane aphid, but something's different about it The sugarcane aphid's been around a long time. It's been around actually in louisiana for I think 10 or 12 years But it's really never gotten on sorghum in any extensive way So something's changed either we've had a host jump from sugarcane To sorghum or we've had a new biotype somehow be introduced. That's my speculation anyhow But this slide is actually david currents from louisiana And I think obviously he must have stole it from these guys So where where's this thing from? Well, this is prior to the last couple of years the distribution of the sugarcane aphid worldwide You can see extensive in south america parts of africa and southern asia Mostly what you see is it's occurring on sugar sugarcane, but there's plenty of reports on sorghum and also rice Very little bit on maize or corn and then it's not it previously wasn't present Except for in the united states except for these little pockets right there So this shows you the current distribution essentially and I think it's mostly up to date of the sugarcane aphid Obviously there's holes in there that could be filled in but this is where it's been verified the lighter color green Is where it was found in 2013 2014 is represented by the dark color green and I got to be honest with you This thing was really a problem down in here and here in 2013 and I said it's going to be a southern thing a louisiana thing Well then in 2014 it started marching And I said that's not going to get here Well, then it got pretty close and then it got about early august and it was right across the river from memphis Scott said he better go for a drive I made it two miles from my office in jackson tennessee I wasn't even out of the city limits and it just so happened at first sorghum field I pulled in there was a hot spot right there In fact, it was the only spot in the field best I could tell but it was wrapped up And so scott had to get busy right in section 18 So what about identifying this critter really there's four common aphids that you might find in sorghum The one that's most likely to occur in large numbers besides the sugar cane aphid is the corn leaf aphid I'll show you a picture in a minute But I don't think you're going to confuse this with the corn leaf aphid because the corn leaf aphid is Is dark green almost blue in color the green bug does occur in sorghum, of course It's a light green with that darker green stripe down it It doesn't tend to occur in these great big masses that tends to occur in lower numbers And the same's true with the yellow sugar cane aphid It tends to occur in low numbers. You don't usually see great big colonies Now if you have a hand lens to me, these two are probably the most likely to be confused But with a hand lens, they're not that hard to tell apart because you can see the little hairs on this one and the little bumps It's really pretty characteristic So there's a side by side comparison of a of an infestation of corn leaf aphids and sugar cane aphids Again, the colors are pretty much a giveaway. These big colonies tend to be yellowish in color They can be more whitish in color. Whereas the corn leaf aphid is going to be green A little bit about the biology Like a lot of aphids this thing has a lot of population growth potential It reproduces asexually. In fact, there's really no sexual form known Gives birth to live young 30 to 60 females or 30 to 60 females that are all females per female It feeds like most aphids on sap or flume of the planet excretes honeydew Uh, it primarily feeds on the underside of leaves. You will see it on the stems. You will see it occasionally on the tops of leaves They're unlike the green bug or the yellow sugar cane aphid. There's no known toxin associated with this feeding There's nothing real acute anyhow You will see some discoloration on the leaves and you'll see plenty of pictures of that Like a lot of aphids also it seems to do well when it's hot and dry or release dry And it also there's some anecdotal evidence that it's worse when sorghum populations are a little bit lower That may be related to being a little drier in those environments And it also tends to be worse on field edges. So all those things may relate a little bit But there's clearly edge effects with this insect not all the time but some of the time So there's some possibility that edge treatments may be in order if you catch infestations early enough A little bit more We really don't know about the overwintering of this insect This is a picture I took in in Tennessee at the agri-center in Memphis It's not really thought to have an overwintering sexual form which means it if that's the case It's going to freeze back to the coast or the warmer environments every year and then come back up We don't really know if that's true and the other thing we do know is now It's much more widely distributed across the south. So there's a lot more potential for it to blow up much more quickly So I think the threat potential is higher than it's ever been and it was pretty high last year It will get on grain sorghum. It'll get on sweet sorghum as I mentioned It'll also get on Johnson grass. In fact, that was the first detects I had of it in Tennessee after I found that first field of infected infested sorghum and it's also difficult to control with insecticides You can see it does have a number of beneficial insects that you're all familiar with lady beetles being very common but a lot of the lady beetle Predators that you've seen on the the hover flies the the or the flower flies the lady beetles They're all over these things. One thing I have not seen with it is the a fungal disease Like we see with cotton aphid leads to any extent and I haven't seen much or any parasitism at all Which is a big difference. Apparently our local parasitoids haven't shifted over to this like they might on Like they do on some of our native species Just a couple pictures you're going to see some sticky honeydew on the leaves where you get these hot spots very characteristic You might see very low populations and then just a hot spot where the aphids blew up You'll see this on the tops of leaves those white things I just wanted to show that because I've had five times a year somebody asked me what those things are And it's the shed skins of an aphid. You know a lot of times you just blow on it And they'll just blow away. You can see the leaves are shiny You can also see lady beetles and late in the season When the bees were getting a little hungry for sugar water They were feeding on the sugar water on the tops of the sorghum leaves So I do see wasp and bees associated with these things If you find that leaf the one above it's loaded with aphids. They've been raining honeydew down on it So what do they do? This is a great great picture from a colleague in lsu The only difference in these two sides of the fields is one was treated for sugarcane aphid and one wasn't So obviously we see some stunning and delay caused by this aphid I got a little video embedded here. This is actually sweet sorghum at the Memphis Agri Center We had several fields in several counties of sweet sorghum that really took it on the chin They essentially lost them and part of it is those guys really aren't plugged into the main ag community So they weren't following some of the updates and they were caught off guard. Hopefully this thing will play Or I think somebody else had the previous luck, didn't they? I guess we won't play it But you can see this on that one point I was going to show on this is they Hit the edge of the field It just so happens the edge of the field was also thinner stands aphids are pretty much gone at this point They've crashed but the the entire edge of this field was essentially yellow bronzy essentially dead Another good example of picture from angus catch out pre-boot injury and grain sorghum in mississippi So these things can do some incredible damage This is just a graph david kerns some of his research at lsu eggs And are looking at yield and bushels per acre versus number of aphids per leaf And if you start getting above the hundred aphid per leaf Number you start seeing some pretty drastic reductions in yield 40 50 60 And and you'll see some more data along those lines. Here's another example of some of his data's his data Where he's looking at yield response versus number of aphids again Dramatic 50 plus percent yield losses in some cases. So this this guy's the real deal if it if it goes unchecked And this is just a visual verification of that. This was one of the first pictures I saw this david kerns was showing this around after 2013 of a field Where an aerial applicator forgot to make the last swath or whatever and that sorghum and that swath didn't fare so well One of the big issues you hear about this besides the yield loss in the stunning and sometimes plant death is it causes harvest issues Honeydew and mold may interfere with the glyphosate uptake when you're trying to desiccate it the hunt the aphids Can clog and the honeydew can clog up combines I mean we've had examples even in tennessee where guys have to make a few passes and then wash off the Combine header to get the sticky off of them. Otherwise their belts get too hot After you desiccate these aphids tend to start moving up because they're trying to find something green to feed on And so that that makes the problem worse and this last bullet's from david kerns Also, but he says you can lose as much as 50 percent of your grain Harvest during this time and that is by the way all aphids looks like almost dust on that combine header Is a picture of some sorghum heads in in tennessee I just threw this slide in here to make me make a point because I'd forget it otherwise The insecticide seed treatments have some value for controlling sugarcane aphids at least early on This is data from mississippi david kerns has some very similar showing you yield and bushels per acre for a Sorghum that had an insecticide seed treatment And I don't know if it was either it was either poncho or cruiser, but I don't know which versus one that did not So right away with this data you have some indication that the neonicotinoid insecticides may have some activity This was one of the first initial test data that I saw came out of louisiana 2013 Documenting this insect was not easy to control transform provided very good control A lot of our standard products that are labeled in sorghum dimethylate Lorsban or chlorpyrphos. That's what newphos is not good at all and truter, which is good on cotton aphids Has consistently been poor on this aphid same with carbine. So we got to be careful not everything Kills this insect and as you'll see later on some things make it worse Data from gust Lorenzo. I'm going to throw a lot of these at you pretty quickly Kind of showing the same thing. This is showing you an aphid rating. This is really on a zero to three scale You'll see this several times somebody came up with this I don't know who it was but a zero means there was no aphids One means there was somewhere between one to one and a hundred per Flag leaf two means 200 to 300 and then three means above 300 So if you get up here, they got a lot of flag leaves got over 300 aphids per leaf What didn't do well cobalt advance the untreated check dimethylate Interestingly, lorsban advance in this test was noticeably better than the cobalt advance. So I don't know if that that Pyrethroid in the cobalt made them worse that much worse or not transform looked pretty good indigo Admire pro and again transform at the higher rate Look at the yield in this trial You've got to keep in mind now sometimes there's other pests involved But I'm going to make the presumption most of this is due to the sugarcane aphid based on the results here untreated check what 50 bushel 140 with admire pro that's a lot of yield loss right there Admire looked good indigo looked good transform looked good pretty much everything that controlled aphids the best did best on yield Another example uh, david button university of georgia and again I'm just really trying to hammer home the point that some things work and some things don't in this case transform Did very well centric did pretty well lorsban did pretty well not as good as the others But pretty well and this is one thing we've seen in some of our data And keep in mind a lot of data is coming out in a hurry is depending on The aphid growth phase the stage of the sorghum Some treatments look good some of the time and then they may look miserable the next time the ones that have been most consistent Transforms been good Centrics been good admire pros been good Unfortunately, none of those are currently labeled on sorghum Dimethoids not been good lords bands not been good pyrethroids are less than good as you can see here I don't know what happened to all my my cell ranges, but that's just showing you statistics again But I just make a point. We're looking at several insecticide some newer products. I'll talk about savante later transform Again, this is kind of a relative aphid number These things look good I mean dimethuate and this test wasn't terrible lorsban wasn't terrible But that's not enough aphid control the way these things reproduce if you leave half the aphids in the field You're not going to make much headway Another example from miss sipping. I think I'll just it's the same story It does make the point here carbine a good aphid product for a lot of aphids is not particularly good on the sugarcane aphid Lorsban and in this trial here was not very good at all I'm going to show you several more yield slides Just again to my pound home some points that this thing is is the real deal This is an example from miss sippy where they got a 67 percent yield loss When they didn't spray sorghum with two applications of transform This was when the sorghum was infested At the panicle emerged. So right when the head emerged 67 percent yield loss This is at the soft dough stage. This is data. Jeff Gore got in the stoneville area Even at the soft dough stage when they infested at that stage they got up to a 21 percent yield loss at that time from sugarcane aphid So what is labeled for aphid control and sorghum? Not much. I've mentioned Dimethiway, I don't think anybody's going to recommend it by itself anyhow It's just not been consistent at all regardless of the rate Problem you have with dimethiway and chlorpyrifos is they have long pre-harvest intervals Which really gives you a problem if you got that that issue at harvest with aphids on the leaves and heads That's 28 day pre-harvest interval. Dimethiway. It's pretty tough on beneficial So a lot of times what we see with products tough on beneficials is even if they knock them back The pest comes back pretty quickly. That's what we're seeing with the pyrethroids for sure we're chlorpyrifos, lorizban, newfos, whatever boar hawk, whichever one you're using sometimes looks good It's tempting. It's tempting at times particularly at the higher rates But i'm not confident enough to really go Recommend it very often if I am going to recommend it It's going to be probably the two pint rate Which means you have a 30 day ph or excuse me a 60 day pre-harvest interval So those products really cause some issues with the pre-harvest interval I'll talk about transform next because it's on the next slide, but It's a little easier to use closer to harvest because it only has a 14 day pre-harvest interval The reasons it's shaded out here is because it's not labeled it's it's labeled now by section 18 Actually, it was labeled then by section 18 2015 I think you can expect that we will also get a Section 18 for transform really anywhere in the south and southeast where this pest occurs The epa was good about approving them last year Several states it looks like we'll submit a section 18 for centric A little bit of debate about whether we should go for centric or admire pro because they appear pretty similar But we're looking for another mode of action We're expecting a full label for savanto savanto is a new mode of action action from bear Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of experience with it The price appears to be very high and it may be out of the market We really don't know how we low we can go on the rate to help compensate for that that high price I really think At the end of the day probably the way we're going to solve the sugar cane aphid problem is with resistance hybrid resistance or Perhaps genetic resistance genetically modified resistance. This is just an example of rating that david currents took from some of their early germplasm sorghum lines at the lsu egg center. I'm not sure what station this was at, but you can see there are differences There's been some differences reported even among the commercial varieties and I could have showed you a data slide there So we know there's some hybrid Resistance out there We just don't know enough about it, but this is probably going to be more sustainable Because one of the things and I didn't have pound this a home that much But what they found in the more southern environments like mississippi louisiana in many cases they need three insecticide applications If you're making three applications of transform at ten bucks a shot With an aerial application you're talking about a forty dollar investment minimum That doesn't make sorghum very sustainable. There's a lot of interest in sorghum this coming year But that that is hurting some of the interest right there So we need to do better than making three insecticide applications and that is excluding midge applications and excluding applications for head worms So what would I suggest in 2015? First of all, I would suggest particularly in the more southern geographies that you use an insecticide seed treatment The the people that seem to have the most experience tell me you can expect 40 45 days suppression of sugarcane beetle infestations That's really important because those pre boot infestations are the most damaging Those are the ones that will just flat sometimes kill the plant and the heads won't emerge If aphids are present in the field because they seem to grow so quickly I've heard my colleague angus catch. I'd say we probably need to be scouting twice a week in those circumstances Not real popular and certainly not what we've been doing with sorghum in most cases If you don't have sorghum midge, don't spray for sorghum midge We can create a problem with these things really quickly by putting out a pyrethroid and unfortunately A lot of states including tennessee people are just in the habit of putting a pyrethroid out there for sorghum midge Which really isn't a very common pest in a lot of circumstances Uh Early planning. I think that's Real potential advantage for us in tennessee. I think as you go further and further south that gets a little less Consistent, but if we're right about the biology that this thing's going to freeze back To the coast areas and move up certainly early planning might help us avoid the pest And that's what we saw last year in tennessee, but again keeping in mind. It had never been in our geography geography before What about action thresholds? When should you treat this is where we really don't know as much as we'd like to Take your pick. I've heard people throw out a hundred aphids per on average per flag leaf I heard angus catch out say 30 infested plants. I'm not really sure how you determine that That's kind of a weird weird way to express a threshold on aphids to me I've heard a lot of people in fact angus was the one and I kind of like this threshold He said aphids on most plants of the field and then you've got several spots where you have obvious Clusters or colonies honey do accumulating in that field and that seems to work pretty well Also, what you don't want to do is let these things get very thick first of all You'll have already taken loss second of all even with a good product You don't knock them back far enough and they blow right back up on top of you I think I have five minutes remaining perfect. I know I went fast. I thought I was going to be long But I'll be happy to take any questions Maybe well, there's a couple of options come to mind and some of them haven't been very thoroughly tested Lord's band will kill midge. So if aphids is in the are in the field That that's an obvious choice. And if there's just a few aphids you might consider even, you know, a pint's plenty I mean to kill the aphids and the midge If there's a lot you might have to go to the higher rate You're not worried about your 60 day pre harvest interval that would probably be the time to me to try But I'd be real quick on the follow-up to make sure I got effective control Not of the midge so much, but of the of the aphid and they didn't blow up on me I Didn't have any midge this year in my trial. So I couldn't tell you what worked I saw some data from the mid-south where people were looking at I'm going blank warhawk the spinosid product getting a little bit of control out of it There was a pretty good Effort by some of my colleagues this year to try to find things that are relatively soft On on the aphids but hard on the midge. So there was a couple of things that were a little bit surprising to me I didn't think Would really give much with midge control and the spinosid product was one of them But I saw some discrepancy in the data If you have to go with the pyrethroid I just think you need to be very aware of that and before you put a pyrethroid out there I probably wouldn't use a pyrethroid if there was an aphid in the field. I probably wouldn't use it There was an aphid in the next county. I probably wouldn't use a pyrethroid So I think you need to be really careful with that one. Of course if you get into the headworm situation You got the same question. Which product do I use? You know pyrethroids haven't been as consistent. Anyhow, do I switch over to a belt? Do I switch over to a prevathime type product that's not going to flare up my aphids? There's quite a bit more money, but you're not increasing your risk of increasing that aphid population Kind of takes the besiege out of the picture for me because besiege is a mix of a pyrethroid Plus the same product that's in prevaton. So it may have those same negative consequences I don't know Ron. What do you think on midge control? What else comes to your mind? Yeah, it's a it's a tough one. So I mean and when you have midge you need to be spraying It's a very serious pest when you get it. I will say in Tennessee It's a very relatively uncommon pest unless you got sorghum late planted sorghum and near vicinity of early planted sorghum That's one thing I would avoid a cultural control right there Don't don't put late planted sorghum next to earlier planted sorghum. That's when you get it the worst Great question. I wish I had a little better answer any any other questions Ron how bad was it in Alabama last year? I got two minutes Yeah, same It's pretty impressive Not not north so much it worked its way up through west Tennessee Yeah, well, I will say in Tennessee I was kind of proud of we don't have any consultants looking at But I was proud of our retailers. They they kind of overreacted But when the word got out and I'll take some credit for that they really covered it pretty quickly which You know, fortunately, wasn't that many fields and really what we were worried about was the late planted sorghum Again another cultural control, but we had the worst fields we had were double crop sorghum behind wheat That may be something to try to avoid Yeah, well, you know, I there's circumstances where aerial application is just as good as ground but All things being considered you always want to try to go with the ground application I'm not a huge volume freak, but when it comes to airplane, I do like to see the volume go a little bit higher You know three is good five's better May consider increasing your rate because there's no question you can get some You can just lose some volatilization There's good data set in mississippi state for years and years guy named david. Oh my gosh I'm going to blank on his name, but he'd show you know heat of the summer you're losing 40 percent of your product A lot of times before it hits the canopy. So you need to consider increasing your rate There's a lot better applic aerial applicator people than I am We don't do much aerial application in Tennessee, but I'm going to go with the old standard recommendation Bump up your rate a little bit bump up your volume a little bit more water almost never hurts it doesn't Always help Any other questions? I got 10 seconds left. If not, I appreciate everybody's attention