Cotton: where's an Agdia kit when you really need it?

Tucker Miller, a Drew, Miss., crop consultant, said this week that he tested worm eggs recently with an Agdia Hel-ID kit.

Two facts are worth mentioning.

First, the eggs tested positive for neither bollworms nor budworms. Several of our contacts over the last couple of weeks have been perplexed about finding what look like Heliothis eggs, but they haven’t seen either kind of moth and aren’t finding hatched worms later. When this happened several years ago and eggs turned up negative for both species, it was first thought that the kits were defective. Agdia’s rep, Willie Bryant, flew into the Delta and worked closely with USDA and Mississippi State to determine what, esactly, was going on.

It finally was concluded that the eggs were probably laid by the granulate (or granulated) cutworm moth. That appears to be the case again this year in some places, although plenty of bollworms or budworms are already being found on cotton.

Second, Tucker Miller actually had a kit for testing the eggs. Agdia hasn’t manufactured the kits in at least two years. There were rural legends (the country equivalent of urban legends) that a few kits were still in circulation. Until Miller mentioned testing eggs this season, we assumed that the kits were, in fact, all gone.

So, where did he get them?

Miller would only say that he had come across “a source” for the kits. He uses them sparingly and only processes portions of a kit each time. That allows him to stretch three or four rounds of testing from a single kit. Miller said he had “five or six” of the kits left.

At the last Beltwide, the folks at Agdia’s booth said there were no plans to resume production.

The kits were a great concept. Why did they fail as a commercial product?

• Demand for the kits faded as more Bt cotton was planted, plus they were costly. Gus Lorenz, Arkansas IPM Coordinator, believes the kits ran about $45 each when first introduced, then the company jumped the price to about $90 two years later. “We kept telling the company that if it would bring the price down, more people would buy them,” Lorenz recalls. “But the company said there was no way it could sell them for less than that and make anything.”
• Processing also was time consuming, and consultants complained about coming in from a long day in the field and facing two hours of running kits through the various chemicals. At various stages the chemicals had to be in specific temperature ranges, too. It always sounded as complicated as processing color film.
  
• Agdia probably never sold as many as it originally projected. Chemical companies partly knocked the market out from under them by gathering eggs from consultants, running the tests and then issuing area reports about the results.

So, for any number of reasons, Hel-ID kits are gone now, save for a few here and there. Lorenz, like Miller, said this week that he has “a few stuck away for when I need them.”

Angus Catchot, Mississippi Extension Entomologist, said he had a handful of kits left, as well.

As it happens, this is turning into a year when the kits would come in quite handy. Figuring out that the mystery eggs are probably for granulate cutworms – or at least not those of budworms or bollworms – would likely save some spraying. Plus, we’re hearing about more egg laying, in general, on both Bt and non-Bt cotton, and there will be cases when it would be helpful to know which ones are being deposited.

“There’s probably more non-Bt cotton out there, too, since many growers seem to be going with a 20% refuge this season,” Catchot said. “It’s going to be tough deciding what worms are developing and how to treat them. Do you have a high enough percentage of bollworms to trust a pyrethroid? Or, are these budworms, and you’ve got to go with other chemistry?”

For his part, Miller was glad to have a Hel-ID kit to use when he started finding the eggs. And until now hadn’t been aware that the kits were no longer available.

“A couple of friends have asked lately if they could ‘borrow’ a kit from me,” Miller chuckled.

The joke, of course, is that when you borrow something you replace it later with the same thing. You borrow sugar. But Hel-ID kits can’t be replaced.

(See this week’s Mississippi Crop Situation Report for more on mystery eggs and granulate cutworms.)