Reducing Control Costs for Tarnished Plant Bug in Mid-South Cotton: Practical Opportunities Using Management Zones

Grid sampling and zone management for fertilizer applications have become common practices on many Midsouth farms; however, use of site-specific approaches for insect control are lacking.To compete globally, U.S. producers must improve overall system efficiency and work to exploit their comparative advantage in engineering technology, equipment capacity, and use of precision agriculture tools. This includes expanding site-specific management tactics for improving insect pest management. Applications of insecticides protect yield potential within the constraints of carrying capacity, and costly insecticides applied to non-susceptible or non-threatened portions of a variable field are simply wasted dollars for the farming operation. A zone management plan for crop protection ideally will allow managers to protect susceptible plants but will not waste costly control inputs where a) plants are not susceptible, b) pest numbers are low and pose no economic risk, or c) all of the above. In this presentation, I will discuss planning and executing zone management for tarnished plant bug with emphasis on early season scouting and control.