 Hello, everyone. My name is Ainava Majumdar. A lot of the farmers just call me Dr. A. And I'm extension professor with Alabama Cooperative Extension System Auburn University. And today I'm going to talk about a dreaded insect pest called yellow margin leaf beetle, which is now a major pest of brassica crops in Alabama and across the southeast. Yellow margin leaf beetle really belongs to the chrysanthemum family of beetles. And the way you can identify yellow margin leaf beetle adult is by looking at its wings, the four wings, which are the hardened elytra. And they have the orange or brown color on the edges of that wing. And that's why it's called the yellow margin leaf beetle. The eggs are laid often in ground near the plant and soil. And there's often clusters of eggs close to the ground. And those hatch into larvae. And the larvae and their adults are really what causes the most damage. They feed together in large masses and cause a lot of very quick crop damage. And then they pupate with a light cocoon. Those larvae, yellow margin leaf beetle larvae almost look like lady beetle larvae, except that they don't have the stout spines as in the lady beetles. Also the lady beetle eggs, egg clusters are more upright. The yellow margin leaf beetle egg masses are more laying on the ground. There's almost two generations of this insect per year. And the pest pressure is incredibly high in spring, especially with warm winters. So that could be another reason why we are seeing rise in pest pressures is the incredible buildup of this insect in the field and the shifting in weather patterns. Here's another picture of the sequential feeding damage that occurs in the field. So on turnips, which is a preferred host, it will start feeding on the leaves. When the leaves are done, it will feed on the stems, almost like a stem borer. And then it feeds on the roots, the turnip roots, and that can totally destroy your produce. We have seen up to 90% destruction of turnip roots. They're not worth harvesting on commercial scale. So the damage can be severe. The buildup of the pest can be pretty rapid over the years if nothing is done. Here's a short video to show the overwintering capability of yellow margin leaf beetle. As you can see, there's numerous larvae. If you take the turnip roots out, you can see these larvae just come out of the ground and start crawling on the soil surface. So the buildup is incredible and they can overwinter very nicely and rapidly become adults in spring and buildup can be fast. Because they love turnips almost to death, we use turnips as a trap crop for research and demonstration. So here you're looking at a research and demonstration plot in Central Alabama, which is a pretty high pest pressure area for yellow margin leaf beetles, where we're using turnips as a trap crop. Several rows of turnips as a trap crop planted both sides of cabbage, which is the main crop. So there's the trap crop, which is often planted two weeks ahead. And then cabbages are on the right of the screen. And the turnips are used as perimeter trap crop. And this is another picture 2017 where we had a pretty high infestation of yellow margin leaf beetle and all those missing turnips. That's because of the yellow margin leaf beetle adult and beetles feeding together in spring. And this population can be very damaging. An overview of some of the results. This is from 2019. 2020 we tried our best, but we had too much rainfall. We were not able to spray as often. And of course the virus COVID-19 hit soon after we were trying to do the research. And we had to stop all work because of the mandates. But anyway, so we are looking at some 2019 data and then I'll show you an aggregate data. So this is turnip defoliation from yellow margin leaf beetles. You're looking at the damage ratings, which is from one to six scale. One is very light defoliation and six is complete defoliation. We did two treatments and these observations are four days after the second treatment. And we included bifenthrin as a conventional treatment that is often used by producers. And then we have PFR 97, which is a microbial insecticide botanic card max, which is a pre-mix insecticide organic pre-mix with Biberia bassiana and pyrethrin in it. Monterey spinosid is the home garden version of the expensive end trust, which was also in the test. And they both have spinosins as active ingredients. And then we had two coded products in the trial. As you can see, yellow margin leaf beetles are fairly easy to control with conventional products. But a lot of the organic products really struggle, especially if you are late in application. Applications must start at detection. And that's very important to stop the pest. Here's again the larval counts. And it's very similar and related to the leaf damage that we had in the previous slide. And again, they're fairly easy to kill with conventional products. And I think one of the better products were the spinosids. The spinosids were more effective than some of the other products. So spinosin and pyganic based products seem to do well. And these are the adults. Now the point of the slide is adults can be very hard to kill. They're very mobile insects. They will often fall down to the ground when you scout or spray. So they will try to evade some of the spraying and they are difficult to kill overall. So it's much easier to kill the larvae. This just shows some of the overall results that we have seen over the years. And we started out with small plots to where we are now doing these large scale demonstrations and then turning those demonstrations for the trap cropping into research and replicated trials. So again, we have tried a number of organic products. And one thing that we have understood is if you get caterpillar pressures along with yellow margin leaf beetles, you can start with something like VT based product like Zantari. But if you get a high infestation of yellow margin leaf beetles, then you should start with something like Entrust or Pyganic that do much better job of controlling yellow margin leaf beetle. And if you're spraying them weekly intervals, you would get a fairly good caterpillar control as well, unless you have resistant populations. But overall, if you are a farmer and have caterpillars first has high pressure, go with VT based products and then switch to either the spinoset or the pyrithrin products. These are from our demonstration trials. Again, you're looking at the damage ratings. And as it is evident, if we do nothing, damage can be absolutely high 5.7 out of 6. So that can really whack the turnips and cause major production losses. And Pyganic and Entrust or spinoset based products really do well. We also have seen some good results with PFR 97, but it's been a little inconsistent at this point. And again, we continue to look at this insect weather permitting and getting more confidence in our data. This final slide of overview has some of the chemicals that are able to control yellow margin leaf beetle. And this insect does not have resistance to products. So they're fairly easy to control with a lot of the low cost synthetic pyrethroids. Overall, we have to remember that weather affects yellow margin leaf beetle populations. So make sure you adapt your IPM plants to the weather conditions. Trap cropping is a very good strategy for small to medium farms, especially with the perimeter trap crops. And you can use the trap crop as a trap and kill strategy. The threshold for action is very low. One adult per plant. So it's basically you have to jump into action when you see the adults. University of Florida has done a lot of research on natural enemies. And there are several natural enemies of the yellow margin leaf beetles that need to be protected. For example, spine soldier birds, lace wings and lady beetles, assassin birds. So we have to be judicious with our use of insecticides. And Pygonic and spinoset based insecticides seem to be the best options at this point. And as we stated before, use BT based products if caterpillars are ahead of the yellow margin leaf beetles. So scouting is the only way you can know what's out there in the crop. Just a quick overview of some of the digital resources where we have published our research information on yellow margin leaf beetle. We have a free online course for farmers. It's called farming basics. We also have a phone app with the same name farming basics, which is free to download on any mobile device. Where we have information about yellow margin leaf beetles. We have several YouTube videos on our building farm project playlist that are available. And I strongly encourage farmers and researchers to subscribe to the Alabama IPM communicator newsletter. You can Google Alabama IPM communicator and you should be able to subscribe to it by just entering an email. And in response to COVID-19 spread, we have started some new activities to reach out to our farmers. We are doing virtual farm tools on the weeks. We also have the monthly webinar series that we do for farmers to spread the information. And we have a weekly Q&A Friday show that we do with regional extension agents, extension specialists and county coordinators working together. And all these are transmitted through the Facebook page, Alabama Extension Commercial Horticulture. And that's a great way to reach out producers looking for information. And once again, my name is Anava Majumdar and my phone number and email are on the screen. So please feel free to contact me. And our website for beginning farmers is AlabamaBeginningFarmer.com. Please look it up, subscribe to our newsletter. Thank you very much.