The growing season in the Midwest is going on with a new set of challenges than we faced last year. Well, maybe a new set of challenges isn’t the way we should think about it, but a new combination of familiar challenges. Instead of catastrophic drought, we are seeing historic levels of flooding. We are also looking at more outbreaks of different diseases that the drought had been keeping at bay. But we are also dealing with an influx of some old foes, pests like the corn rootworm.
The billion-dollar bug is so named because of the value it costs corn producers almost every year. Farmers are encouraged to do all they can to work with USDA offices and their state extension offices to help collect more data to learn about this bug and see where pockets of resistance to BT traits have developed.
Universities across the Midwest are working together to find options and methods to deal with these annoying bugs. Nick Seiter out of the University of Illinois talks about what they are seeing and how they are working with other organizations and universities to combat the rootworm.
Seiter is urging farmers across the Midwest to investigate partnering with their extension offices to see what they can do to help further the data collection about rootworms and to look at the data already gathered by visiting RootwormIPM.org.
To get involved in testing in your fields, talk to your county Iowa State University Extension office. You can find contact info here: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/countyservices/
