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Greg Smith
Buffalo Island Crop Services
Lake City, Arkansas
Both sides of my family always farmed cotton. It’s all I have ever known. Last year, the cotton crop got off to a good start although we did have a lot of thrips pressure. Because of the resistance we are seeing with organophosphate insecticides, research has shown that the best control you are going to get with those products is 40%.
When you get 40% control of a bunch of thrips, that is not enough, so we go directly to Intrepid Edge® insecticide. It’s as close to a home run with an insecticide as I have seen in a long time. I don’t know what we are going to run into this year, but with the economics the way they are, we can’t let an insect hold us back or cost us yield. We will be pretty aggressive on our threshold for thrips.
Tarnished Plant Bug Control
Our No. 1 insect pest is tarnished plant bug. We base our treatment thresholds on the number of plant bugs per sweep and do a percent small square set to monitor retention in each field. We want to keep the square set at 80% or above throughout the squaring period. Once the crop moves into flowering, we switch to a drop cloth or shake sheet and continue to do square sets until a square no longer has enough time to turn into a profitable boll.
For us, Transform® WG insecticide has been one of the most effective products we’ve seen on tarnished plant bugs. With each application you make, it provides some level of residual activity. During the flowering period, we make two applications of Transform back-to-back. This strategy has been the backbone of our plant bug program for several years, and it still works extremely well. Transform WG insecticide always gives us the best and longest-lasting control of anything we use. It’s been the centerpiece of what we do to control plant bugs. After the second application, we switch chemistries for good insect resistance management.
I believe yield potential is established in the first 40 days of the cotton crop’s life. Here in the northern tier of where cotton is grown in the Mid-South, earliness means profit for us. We want to get a healthy crop out of the ground and moving quickly before it’s time to shut it down. Then we want to defoliate and harvest the cotton before the November and December rains set in.
One of my most successful farmers once told me that to be successful in this business, you survive the bad years and take advantage of the good ones. We’ve been in a tough spot before, and we are still here. The good Lord willing, we will continue to be here.
