Dr. Don Shurley

Dr. Don Shurley

Shurley: USDA Crop Adjustments Could Be Encouraging for Cotton

Dr. O.A. Cleveland

Dr. O.A. Cleveland

Cleveland Bids Farewell in Final Cotton Marketing Weekly Column

Beck BarnesJim Steadman

Beck Barnes | Jim Steadman

McNair Family Produces a Century of Cotton in the Coastal Bend

Jim SteadmanBeck Barnes

Jim Steadman | Beck Barnes

Celebrating Our 200th Episode...and Jay Mahaffey, Too!

Keeping Your Options Open

Avatar for Jim.Robinson By Henry Gantz|February 26, 2009

One of the most trite but right clichés is “variety is the spice of life.”

For Bronwood, GA, grower Larron Copeland, Delta & Pine Land’s DP 555 BR is the predominant variety on his farm. Not surprising, since DP 555 is planted on more acres than any other variety for well-established reasons. But he does add a little zing and zip with other varieties – PhytoGen 480 WR being the main one.

Copeland began planting PhytoGen varieties three years ago. The first was PSC 355. “That was my favorite dryland conventional variety,” he says. “We had some 1,300-1,400 pound yields with it.”

The transgenic 480 WR has PSC 355 in its lineage. He will also use another 355 progeny – PhytoGen 425 RF – as a refuge.

PhytoGen 480 WR is a variety stacked with Dow’s WideStrike and Monsanto’s Roundup Ready genes. WideStrike, like Bollgard II, has two stacked Bt genes. WideStrike expresses the Cry1F and Cry1Ac proteins of Bacillus thuringiensis. Bollgard II also expresses the Cry1Ac protein, but the second is Cry2Ab. Without getting too bogged down in genetic manipulation nomenclature, what you are getting from the differences is another transgenic option to fit different situations.

Top Articles
Inside the Great American Cotton Plan: Why Demand Is Taking Center Stage

“WideStrike is very, very competitive,” says PhytoGen cotton development specialist Hub Miller. “There will be situations where you have to spray Bollgard II, and there are going to be situations where you have to spray WideStrike.”

“That’s what we did last year,” adds Copeland.

Miller believes PhytoGen varieties offer growers a legitimate choice from a yield standpoint and a technology standpoint. “They have not had that until now,” he explains. “And that’s why people like Larron are going to plant it.”

The 480 wasn’t Copeland’s highest yielder in 2006 –555 was – but he says dollars-per-acre wise, there were equal due to 480’s grades. So if they are equal, why not plant just one? The answer from Copeland: “We start off with 480 simply because we think it has better emergence. I’m not going to say you can plant it in the middle of the winter” – and obviously he would not – “but you can plant it earlier than some of the other varieties.”

Stinking it Up

According to 2005 National Cotton Council information, stink bugs were the third most damaging pest across the Cotton Belt, following Heliothines and lygus. That year, Georgia lost 1.74% of its yield to the green and brown stink bugs.
“Stink bugs have been an important pest for us for several years,” says Dr. Phillip Roberts, Extension entomologist, University of Georgia Cooperative Extension Service, Tifton, “and that is due to two factors: We became boll-weevil free 15 years ago; that eliminated sprays for boll weevils. And then when Bt cotton became available in 1996, we eliminated a lot of worm sprays. Those sprays that targeted budworms, bollworms and boll weevils would, coincidentally, control stink bugs.”
Because of those two factors, targeted sprays for stink bugs have become a common practice. Stink bugs are piercing insects that attack cotton bolls as they begin to develop.
“They feed on the developing seed inside the boll and on the tissue surrounding it,” Roberts continues. “During the feeding process, you can have physical damage to the seed, which would impact lint production. Perhaps more importantly, when they feed they can introduce pathogens that lead to boll rot. There is also a wound site on the boll and pathogens can enter that way, too. We get a lot of ‘tight locking.’”
Stink bugs are a post-bloom pest and damage begins as boll-setting starts. Explains Roberts: “Stink bugs should be on the grower’s mind from the time cotton begins to bloom until the last harvestable boll is 25 days old. It varies from year to year – we bloom a lot longer here than some other parts of the country – but stink bugs are probably a problem for us eight weeks.”
There are two basic insecticide recommendations for stink bugs in Georgia:
• Pyrethroid
• Organophosphate: Bidrin, methyl parathion
“The selection of what to use depends on which stink bugs are present,” says Roberts. “We have the Southern green and the brown. On the brown stink bug, pyrethroids will only provide fair control, so we would recommend an organophosphate. Pyrethroids as well as organophosphates will control the Southern green stink bug.”

In 2006, the 480 was planted on April 4, and was picked in November. “It was the first cotton we planted and the last cotton we picked,” Copeland says. “It was on dryland and we just left it, and left it, and left it there. It finally ended up making good cotton. The yield was over 1,000 pounds (per acre).”

Corn Up, Peanuts Down

Copeland planted more corn this year – who didn’t? Although it’s not for the reasons you might suspect. “The price of corn had something to do with it,” he says. “But the price of peanuts had more to do with it. The price is so low we replaced a lot of peanuts with corn.”

This year he has 600 acres of corn – up from 200 in 2006 – 700 acres of soybeans and 2,500 acres of cotton.

Two concerns Copeland has, as the crop-year hits full stride, are the price of cotton and weed resistance, which seems to be more advanced in the Southeast. “We have ALS-resistant pigweed now – we have it bad – and we are starting to see some Roundup resistance,” he says. “We thought we had some Roundup resistance last year, so we sprayed again just to make sure we didn’t just miss some of them. Roundup didn’t do anything to those weeds.”

Once weed-resistant weeds are found, it’s ex post facto, so Copeland wants to be proactive, rather than reactive. “Definitely,” he says.

So in anticipation of resistance problems, he uses Roundup and 2,4-D as a burndown, and BASF’s Prowl and Syngenta’s Reflex at planting. Prowl is effective on grasses; Reflex takes out broadleafs.

The phenoxy herbicide 2,4-D has been around since World War II (British agronomists developed 2,4-D as a way to increase crop yields during a time of severe food shortages) and is very economical to use. It is the most widely used herbicide in the world and the third most widely used in North America.

“We can clean up resistant marestail with 2,4-D in the burndown,” Copeland says. “If there is something out there that Roundup won’t take care of, it just doesn’t make sense not to use 2,4-D. Roundup is going to get what it gets, but if you see something out there – marestail, cutleaf evening primrose, henbit – you will wish had put some 2,4-D in there.”

A broadcast rate of 8-12 oz. per acre — the ester formulation if it is cool; amine formulation if it is warm — will do the trick.

0

Gantz is the editor of Cotton Grower magazine. Over the years, he has won many National Agricultural Marketing Association awards, including two national NAMAs – one in advertising and one in public relations. Gantz brings hands-on experience, having worked as Sales Manager for an agricultural supply distributor in the Mississippi Delta. See all author stories here.