Dr. Gus Lorenz - Entomology Specialist

[Title Slide - Current Pest Problems in Arkansas Soybean, Dr. Gus Lorenz, Entomology Specialist, Number 10 - August 10, 2009, Your Arkansas Soybean Podcast, University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, Arkansas Soybean Promotion Board]

[Gus Lorenz standing in a soybean field] I’m gonna spend just a little bit of time telling you what’s going on right now, because this is a very busy insect year in soybeans. Right now we’re in the middle of a boll worm flight through most of this state. We’re seeing even in this area right here, there are fields right now that are being stripped by boll worm feeding on blooms and pods. We’re seeing numbers way in excess of threshold. We’re seeing as high as thirty boll worms on twenty-five sweeps and if you get those kind of levels they’re gonna severely impact yield and you need to keep that in mind and you need to be scouting on a regular basis you need to get that sweep net out and start scouting your beans every five to seven days minimum or you’re gonna get in trouble with this boll worm population. We’ve had the highest boll worm flight numbers that we’ve seen since the mid-nineties and it’s time for everybody to start looking for boll worms.

The stink bug situation, this field right here, we’ve treated about ten days two weeks ago I guess for stink bugs. We were at treatment level and the beans hadn’t even started podding yet. So that gives you a good indication of where we are headed because our soybean crop is so late, much later than normal, particularly in this area because of all the rainfall you’ve had. We’ve got a really late crop and so we’re setup for a lot of the soybean pest type problems that are associated with a late maturing crop and that means stink bugs number one. So you need to be out scouting for stink bugs right now there’s not a field in the state that doesn’t have a stinkbug in it that I’ve found. We’re seeing stinkbugs from south Arkansas all the way up through north Arkansas, up the River Valley, everywhere you go. We’re seeing treatment level stinkbugs in soybeans so you need to be out scouting.

We’ve had about ten soybean scout schools this year. I’ve given over two hundred sweep nets away with the help of Bayer. They bought a hundred sweep nets, I bought a hundred. We’ve gave them away to everybody that wanted one. So there’s no excuse not to get out there and sample your beans right now because this insect situation is not gonna go away it’s just gonna intensify with the year.

So I encourage you to get out and check and if you don’t have the time or the where with all to get out and check your beans I encourage you to find somebody to do it for you and it was too late yesterday. So get out there right now because I’m getting these stories right now, about two a day, people are calling me saying “I went out to my field to look at making that fungicide application and I don’t have any flowers, I don’t have any pods, they’re gone and the boll worms are still there.” So keep that in mind.

This is the most devastating insect pest that we have in soybeans and this is the year of the boll worm. So you need to get out and get checking right now. Does anybody got any questions?

You know what to treat with, the pyrethroids you probably wanna look at a cheaper pyrethroid. Find you a good one, a cheap one, one that’s labeled for soybeans and use that lower end rate right now. I will tell you that our resistance numbers on our vile SA’s is showing some increased resistance to pyrethroids but I won’t let that deter me until I start hearing some feedback from people saying the pyrethroids aren’t working.

So let’s stick with them regardless of what you’re hearing right now. Let’s stick with what’s worked for us, and what’s cheapest, and what’s gonna give us the best residual. So that’s what you wanna keep in mind as you go into this season but there’s no reason to not get out a start checking right now.