 Good morning, everyone. My name is Caitlin Kessheimer. I am an extension entomologist. I cover a variety of systems and one of those is hemp. And so today I'm going to give a quick update on where we are with insect pest management in hemp, especially looking at the calendar and where we are in the growing season and what our major pests are likely to be. So we have many insects and mites in hemp and this is just a graphic summary of the ones we have. We have chewing insects that will eat the leaves and the stems and the flowers, piercing sucking insects, aphid stink bugs, and a variety of hemipterans that can suck nutrients out of the plant. We have mites, both indoor and outdoor, issues with some of our favorites, like two-spotted spider mites and also some specialist hemp russet mites. And then we have some more cryptic pests that we may not see on the surface. In our region, namely, fire ants are going to be a major issue. And obviously these are going to change if you are indoors or outdoors in different regions of both the state and Alabama and in the country. But on the very, very surface, we have, you know, circled here some indoor pests. So we have aphids and mites and fungus snacks. And then the ones circled here are our typical outdoor pests. And for today, I'm going to focus on caterpillar pests, namely corn earworm, which is arguably our biggest pest of outdoor hemp in the southeast and possibly even the United States. So you all have heard me talk about corn earworm before and just how damaging it can be. And here are some pictures of the caterpillar pests feeding on its favorite part of the plant. It feeds on the buds. And these are the markable portion of the plant, especially for floral hemp, where we are extracting the cannabinoids from this part. And so we certainly don't want any damage from caterpillar feeding. But the real problem is their feeding creates wounds that can allow pathogens to enter. And so we end up with a series of pathogens that we call collectively bud rot. And it could be a mixture. We have fusarium botrytis. But at the end of the day, this is not a marketable hemp plant, whether you want to sell it for a raw flower or extract it for its essential oils that are used for wellness products. And you certainly don't want caterpillars in there as well. And so we've worked on this the last couple of years. And so I'm going to give some quick updates as to where we are in managing this pest. Back in 2020, we worked with several other states in the southern U.S., Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware to monitor for caterpillars, both in the field and then the adult moths outside the field using pheromone traps similar to what we would do for sweet corn. We sampled both in the buds for larvae and then using pheromone traps for the adults. And then we came up with this damage rating scale from zero to three that we all used. Zero would be no damage. One would be about 25% or less of the bud is unmarketable. Two was up to 50%. And then three was more than 50% of the bud was going to be unharvestable and unmarketable. So we found that across all states, all locations, there was about seven give or take caterpillars per 30 buds. And this was the highest. And they were all in September at all locations, regardless of state. And what we did when we assessed damage at the end of the year, we found that there was one day at the end of August that was our only significant predictor of what the average damage rating might be. And at a minimum of two and a half caterpillars per 30 buds, that was our significant predictor of unacceptable crop damage. And so if you think about it, that is a very small number of caterpillars that can render your crop unmarketable, unharvestable or certainly less money when you are selling it as raw flour or even as extracted oils. And so what we next wanted to do was look at ways to control this pest using a series of insecticides. Since the last year, we across Alabama, North Carolina and Virginia, we evaluated a lot of our insecticides that are in fact labeled for hemp. They either have a federal label or are approved in Alabama. And then we also tested a lot of conventional standards that we know can control horn earworm in other crops. And so we tried to have the most consistent across states, but just because of supply chain issues, we weren't able to get the same treatments in every single state. And so that's what this column is here for. And this is just kind of a representation of some of the results that we had. We had several different locations, even within those states. And what you're looking at here is average caterpillar counts across the growing season and our different treatments. And then over here, we have our average damage ratings with those treatments. And what I want to point out with this graph here is that if we're looking at caterpillar counts, we certainly have some significant differences. Some products like our conventional standards really did a lot better and had significantly less worms than our untreated control. And then some of our biologicals, our BTs, and some others, we tried tank mixing our MPVs. But the interesting thing about this is even though we had differences in the number of caterpillars, we had no significant difference in the damage in each treatment. So these are all the same. There is some variation, but it's not significant. And so what this is telling me is that one, we're maybe not finding all the caterpillars that are there, or they've maybe already pupated and gone to the soil and we missed them. Or it just takes such a small number of caterpillars to cause extensive damage that caterpillar counts is not really an accurate way to assess what the end is going to be in terms of damage and harvestable. But so where we are right now, after doing that, we're replicating it again this year across the same locations. For the foreseeable future, the corn earworms are going to remain a damaging pest, primarily of outdoor hemp. The best options we have now are to scout pretty regularly and initiate control measures as soon as you start seeing larvae. We don't have economic thresholds, and part of that is we're still doing the research to see what the relationship between caterpillar numbers and damage is. But also we have such an unstable market with this crop that adding an economic value to the crop and seeing if the treatment is economical. We don't have that right now until the market stables out and we have a better price point. So what we've seen both in our trials and working with growers is that our MPV insecticides may offer the highest level of larval suppression, but these are biologicals that do take a while to kill the caterpillars. And so you may not get that great control in terms of damage, even if you are killing the caterpillars because they've done the feeding before we're able to kill them. And we're looking at other sustainable strategies. We're looking at both trap crops and conservation biocontrol and promoting natural enemies like spiders here to see if we can't help reduce the population of corn earworms. And so finally, in terms of other pests in hemp, being proactive is going to be your best strategy. While a lot of us like to resort to chemical control, we really need to have a multifaceted IPM approach using all the different tools, including scouting, keeping good field journals and controlling is going to be a major, major headache. And so if you are growing or plan on growing, be prepared to spend lots of time and energy and probably money on controlling pests. And especially if you're growing outdoors in Alabama with our high pest pressure and high moisture and humidity, we may end up with a lot of disease as well. And so be prepared for some yield or quality loss. With that, here is my contact information. So if you have any questions about corn earworm or other pests as we move further into the growing season, feel free to contact me. We also have a hemp Facebook page we're pretty active on and I tweet sometimes pictures about hemp. So happy to take any questions.