 Okay, my name is Kathy Flanders and I want to talk a little bit about managing our stored grain insects and corn because corn harvest will be coming up soon and there are various considerations to be thinking about in terms of making sure that we can maintain the quality of our stored grain and our stored corn. I gave a webinar earlier this year if you go to AlabamaCrops.com and look under the webinar series. You can look at the archive we talked a little bit about storing wheat. The principles are pretty much the same so I'm going to keep this talk fairly short. I just want to add that if you're storing soybeans, the main thing and the most important thing with soybeans is going to be getting that moisture content done properly. Keep it putting them into a clean bin and getting your moisture content down to where you need it to be for safe storage. But I'm going to mainly focus on corn for this webinar. The main principles for managing stored grain insects in any of these crops are as we want to keep the grain clean and dry. We want to keep it cool and we want to check it often. And these sort of three simple the C's here of clean and dry cool and checking it often encompass a lot of different steps that we all put together. No one step in and of itself is sufficient for safe storage but put it all together and you'll have a pretty good chance of getting through the year getting through the storage cycle without having problems from insects. The longer you store your insects the more likely you're eventually going to have problems and down here in the southeast as you'll sort of see the sort of things that make insects happy is sort of what our southern storage environment can be if we don't take some special steps to discourage the insects. So our goal is we want to minimize the number of insects that we're starting with and we also want to make the growing conditions unfavorable in the green bins for these any of these remaining insects to grow. Because most of the insects that we're working with are growing up right there in the storage facilities with the exception of the maize weevil which we can bring in. The problem is is why we have to be so careful is because once you get a bunch of insects in throughout your big gug your big grain bin the problem is going to be that you're then going to have to fumigate that bin to get rid of the insects. There's nowhere the way there's nothing you can just spray on top or to sort of clean that grain up. Our basic remedy is going to be to have to fumigate which can be costly and dangerous. So let's talk about the three C's we had keeping keeping it clean and dry so why are we wanting to worry about keeping it clean? Well some of those stored grain insects that we have can live for years as adults and they can just sort of hang out in the grain bins and if you have a bit of soil a bit of grain left in the bin from the time you took out the previous crop and put in the next one that's positively heaven for them because they can just be sitting there multiplying in that grain. So keeping that clean getting that getting that everything swept out and cleaned up as soon as the previous crop is removed from storage is very important. Why are we worried about keeping it dry? Well the reproduction of all of these different insects is higher when there's a higher moisture content within the grain and you can just sort of see the difference between different percent development if you look at your percentage moisture on the bottom there of 14% moisture and you leave your pairs of weevils there for five months you end up with a lot more weevils if you had 14% wheat as opposed to 9% wheat and it's the same for all of the different seeds that we would be putting in these in in storage is that the drier it is the better it is. You don't want to get it too dry because you're running into the shrinkage issues that Dennis was talking about but you want to store it as dry as you can and the longer you plan to keep your corn in storage the drier it needs to be. As I mentioned it's important to get your grain bins cleaned out it's easier said than done if you look at the corrugated floors and the holes in them and the things that they have to have for aeration purposes it's not the easiest thing to clean that bin out but every bit cleaning you do is going to pay off later on so the most important thing you can do is just get all of that old grain out of there and not let insects be building up throughout the time that that bin is empty. Clean it right out as soon as the grain is bringing the previous amount of that your grain is sent out get it cleaned up. Keep your grain equipment cleaning handy because if you just sort of get in the habit of cleaning up any spills or any places where insects can develop the cleaner the whole facility is the less problems you're going to have with insects because there's going to be less places to harbor the insects. In terms of keeping it clean as soon as that bin is cleaned out and that all the old grain is taken out swept out putting on an insecticide treatment to kill any insects that are there and it's going to be an important concept. Tempo SC Altra is generally the go-to product for people but there are a few other products that can be used to sort of spray around on the floor of the bin and up on the walls as high as you can reach and then outside spraying around the outside of the grain bin. So empty bin treatments are very important in part of keeping that grain clean and then also to try to keep it clean is if you're going to be storing it for any length of time so corn more than a few months it's important to put a grain protectant on that corn as it's loaded into the bin this is an insecticide that is a sort of admixt into the into the crop as it's loaded into the bin. So at the moment this the choices that we have for corn and this is the type of up here grain protectants for corn it should say and those grain protectants are that we have several that are available actellic, sense that there's a tank mix of two different ones Sentinel and Diacon two another one Diacon IGR plus so we have some choices on what we use to sort of protect those grains. Some data from Michael Taze at the University of Georgia shows that the best treatments are going to be your actellic or your your sense that if you look at those these are the ones that that first off if you start look at this summary from putting it in in October and taking it out in the last sample and in August that you the most insects are in your entry to bin but your actellic down here and your sense that which is what we call execute at the time this test was done have the fewer number of insects overall these other ones the treatments the Sentinel alone or the Sentinel with the insect growth regulator product will give you sort of intermediate numbers and top dress is just not something that's very effective at all and is we really don't recommend those so one thing to be worried about and to think about for using sense that the active ingredients venosid is that on the label it says that the tolerances and residue limits for the sense that may not be established in all counties in all countries and so using use it only on commodities that are intended to for use in the United States or that's going to be exported to countries that will accept grain treated with sense that which is most of countries but that's just something to think about one more thing we were talking about grain drying and how important that is to put your grain in at the right moisture if you dry your grain it's going to be hot and so hot grain and grain protectants don't mix because if the grain protectant insecticide will break down if the grain is too hot so if there's no way of cooling that grain to say down below about 80 degrees or 85 degrees Fahrenheit then it's going to be better not to use that grain protected because it will just be broken down by the heat of the grain itself so we we kept it clean and dry and now our next problem is going to be to keep this grain cool so we want to keep our grain temperature below 60 degrees Fahrenheit whenever possible and we do that through the use of these aeration fans which blow the cool air and that cooling front through the grain it's easy to do this with corn because by the time corn harvest is getting it taking place we're starting to get a few cool nights and we can take advantage of that cooler air to cool that grain down the reason that this works is that most of these insects that we have to get into our stored grain just don't develop below 60 degrees and so this is just sort of showing putting a bunch of beetles in and holding them for a few months at different temperatures 55 70 and 85 at the end of that storage period the only insects that we had they were still alive with the original insects we put in but they hadn't done any reproducing and and you can kind of see that that 85 degrees was a really nice temperature for them to develop 70 degrees that they as few were developing than at 85 but get it below 60 degrees and that's one of the best pest management tools we have we have on our website and alvelocrops.com and clicking on stored grain a lot of information on how to store store grain and we have a actually a manual sort of gives some aeration guidelines for the southeast automated aeration controllers that can be installed retrofitted on some of the older bins can be used to make it easier to aerate you set them for the temperatures you want the fans to come on and off on and a lot of the new bins that are being put up actually have thermocouple cables inside of bins and they are connected to computers and so that you can access your what's happening the storage conditions within your bins and have the fans automatically turn themselves on and off so that's sort of one of the things that it that it's more a good idea if you're building bins to go ahead and put in your automated monitoring systems so we kept it clean and dry we've kept it cool and our last option is we want to make sure that we're checking our grain as frequently as possible one of the ways to do that is with the big brass grain probes that you have to sort of stick down into the grain bin the grain and pull out and see if there were insects present and other ways to use these little pitfall traps these little plastic things that you stick down put down vertically into the grain and leave them for a few days and come back and then the insects that had been in that bin would be wandering around and crawl through the little holes go clunk down through in the little pitfall and you can find out who's was crawling around in your bin this is just sort of an example to show that it's a matter of time as insects grow up because it takes about a month for a generation to occur and warm weather of these different stored grain insects this particular insect this particular grain bin was sampled once a month and we did okay for a while we started to build up our insects in July and by mid-September there was we were in big trouble so the longer you're going to be storing your grain the greater the chances there's going to be problems with your insects but monitoring them keeping track of what's out there as you can you can you can't keep track of what's on the bottom of the bin but you can at the top by using some of these traps or grain probes or something a caveat that a grain bin is a dangerous place to be we've got to worry about dust that can be building up we've got to worry about just working from heights and wearing safety harnesses making sure people know that you're in the bin when that when when you're going in the bin but it is important if at all possible to take samples of that grain and keep an eye on what's happening if all else fails we have the remedy of using an al and it's a chemical called the aluminum phosphide which breaks down into phosphine gas which can kill the insects when it builds up to high enough concentration it's important to be aware of the properties of aluminum phosphide that are going to affect safety and efficacy important to read the applicator's manual and to make a fumigation management plan and keep that on file when you're fumigating so it's important there's a lot of steps that are involved with fumigating it's important to get the bin sealed up properly the applicant the inactive form applied properly and then the bin kept sealed up for a long enough period of time so the fumigation occurs so well there's a lot of information about all these different topics if you go to alivamacross.com and click on stored grains and it will take you to a lot of information about storing grains and if anybody happens to be listening to this in the next week we are having a series of stored grain workshops next week and we'd encourage people that are more interested in learning how to store grain to attend one of those workshops