Monthly Archives: May 2024

Cotton in Bloom and IPM

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Many of the cotton fields in South Texas are in bloom. Once cotton is blooming, we need to change our scouting methods. Plant water use is increasing rapidly and the insects that cause yield loss are changing. Now is the time to start counting Nodes Above White Flower (NAWF). This will help you know how the crop is progressing and when insects stop being an economic pest. Count NAWF by finding the first position white flower and counting the number of nodes (branches) above the branch with the… Read More →

Leafhoppers in Corn: Update

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Short story: Spraying to control leafhoppers in dent stage corn is not likely to benefit the crop. Corn Maturity: As of May 29, 2024, most of the corn in the mid-coast of Texas is at dent. The time required from early dent to maturity is 20-35 days. Insect populations: Every corn field I have visited has leafhoppers at some level. Leafhopper numbers range from less than 1 per plant to 15-20 per leaf. Plant symptoms: A minority of the corn fields show symptoms of leaf yellowing to reddening or death and <2%… Read More →

Corn Leafhoppers

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As a continuation of this year’s strange insect problems, we now have Corn Leafhoppers in some corn fields of the Mid-Coast. This insect is not uncommon but showed up in corn fields in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) a few weeks ago and is now appearing in some local corn fields in numbers great enough to cause concern. Today, May 24, I visited a Victoria County corn field and found corn leafhoppers in numbers ranging from 1 to 30 leafhoppers per leaf. Most of these insects are below… Read More →

Persistent Cotton Fleahoppers

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For the past few weeks many fields have been inundated with cotton fleahoppers.  We began an insecticide control trial on May 10. The field averaged 5.3 cotton fleahoppers in 20 plants, well above the economic threshold of 2 fleas per 20 plants. The graph below is data from the trial I have been conducting. The blue arrows indicate treatment timings. The red line is insect counts from untreated plots.  During this trial, no differences were found between treatments due to variability within treatments. Throughout the trial, 86% of… Read More →

False Chinch Bugs in Grain Sorghum

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Early last week, I received reports of false chinch bugs in sorghum fields around Corpus Christi. Several fields there were treated to prevent yield losses. Today, we found a field south of Victoria with alarming numbers of false chinch bugs in some of the sorghum heads. When you shake a sorghum head into the bucket and find 200+ bugs, it can be a bit concerning. After scouting around the field, I determined the field was averaging somewhere between  20 and 50 false chinch bugs per head.  It is… Read More →