⋅ BY CASSIDY NEMEC ⋅
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Paul and Linda Freund Farms hosted Bayer’s 2023 Needville, Texas, field day June 13. Tour stops and discussions included Dekalb corn and sorghum products and testing information, a new technology update on VT4Pro and Smart Stax Pro for corn. Deltapine also discussed their latest cotton varieties and New Product Evaluator candidates, as well as their ThryvOn technology.
Cotton Traits, Varieties Galore
Scott Stanislav, technical agronomist for Bayer, explained the benefit of the ThryvOn technology throughout the cotton belt with the Bt trait for thrips and lygus bugs.
“We’re really looking more on the agronomic side of things. If you get thrips, you’re delaying your maturity and delaying your fruit set. Your overall plant health may be less there than with the ThryvOn technology where you have that protection.”
He suggested there may be further benefit past the typical thrips and lygus coverage as well.
“It’s key to look at the agronomic piece of it from potentially earlier fruiting to some anecdotal evidence that we may have increased root growth in the ThryvOn compared to the non-ThryvOn in the presence of thrips.”
Stanislav emphasized the role these added benefits play in Texas as well. “Especially along the Texas coast, where a lot of the time you’re racing the weather and the potential for storms, earliness can be a very key factor to whether you get the crop out of the field due to rains and potentially tropical weather.”
In addition to all of this, he noted the introduction of new varieties coming along containing the Bollgard 3 ThryvOn with the XtendFlex technology in them.
According to Stanislav, DP 2012 B3XF and DP 2020 B3XF continue to be popular varieties across the Cotton Belt. DP 2239 was originally tested on the East Coast and is now becoming a heavy contender in the Texas Gulf Coast.