Cotton Consutlants, Mother Nature And The Danger Of Sweeping Generalizations

Cotton consulting has not gotten easier with the advent of Bt and Roundup Ready varieties.

Quite the contrary. It's become more of a challenge.

Dealer reps and Extension scouts who regularly work in cotton say the same thing. For every solution, there is a problem.

Here's how that's worked with cotton insects:

• The shift to Bt cotton caused a corresponding shift in the insect complex.
  
  
• Pests once considered minor became significant problems.
  
  
• And in many cases, the newer pests are harder to scout or they complicate treatment decisions due to move away from broad-spectrum materials and/or insecticide resistance issues.

Through the years, we've conducted several consultant surveys, asking about business practices and in-field scouting methods. As early as 2004, we asked if cotton scouting was easier, harder or about the same in Bt cotton compared to conventional varieties. The response was heavily weighted toward harder. Also, consultants overwhelmingly indicated that it took more time to scout transgenic fields.

All of that was before most people recognized the coming of Roundup-resistant weeds, notably Palmer pigweed and marestail. Plenty of consultants who started their careers as insects scouts are now dealing with weed management issues. And for whatever reason, more leaf spot diseases are hitting cotton in parts of the South, adding one more hot spot of concern to the consultant's check list.

Some people predicted that Bt cotton would, in fact, make cotton consultants an endangered species. I heard that more in the Southeast than the Delta, perhaps. And demand for consultants fell off for several years. Between Bt varieties and declining cotton acres, many practitioners either left the business or learned to scout other crops, particularly grains.

One veteran Extension worker told me halfway through the last decade that in a few years there really would be no need for cotton consultants due to the near-universal acceptance of Bt cotton. With more research, he reasoned that pests like plant bugs and aphids could be managed with treatments timed according to degree-day accumulations.

He was dead wrong. Nature is always trying to fill empty spaces, which means that somebody needs to be checking.

I've been around long enough to have heard those sames kinds of sweeping generalizations about other new technologies.

• In the 1980s, a few weed scientists said, half jokingly, that Johnsongrass might soon be on the verge of extinction with the introduction of that era's over-the-top grass herbicides. It didn't happen.

• The same goes for Roundup Ready. Monsanto positioned it as a super herbicide, only to find that nature positioned a super weed against it, meaning pigweed. The handful of Extension specialists promoting resistance management were faint voices in the wilderness.

All this came to mind today as I read Roger Carter's weekly e-letter.

Carter, whose consulting firm operates in east-central Louisiana, discusses how pest spectrums have changed and what that has meant to the way consultants must now scout cotton.

Here's a link to Roger's comments.

They're well worth reading if you are a consultant, you pay one to check your crops or you're considering it.

But they're particularly important for any farmer who doesn't intend to use a consultant, dealer fieldman or Extension scout to check his cotton in 2011. The natural order of things keeps changing. If higher cotton prices are luring you back to the crop after dropping it for several years, forget most of what you remember from the last time you picked a bale of cotton. Depending on where you are, the insects may have a new game plan.

Read Carter's comments and remember that nature is always sneaking up on you.


- Owen Taylor