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Higher and more diverse insect pressure

Farmers might be seeing more diverse and higher insect pressure following a mild winter and early spring across much of the Midwest.

Justine Terwillegar is an agronomic service representative for Syngenta Crop Protection and says temperatures warmed up fairly quickly in March and April.

“And this lead to stuff taking off pretty fast, so our winter annual weed pressure was higher. Cover crops took off, we had manure applications going out. All of those things brought together create an environment that unfortunately insects love.”

She tells Brownfield even in areas where seed treatments were used, insect feeding is occurring.

“That’s showing populations are higher than what we normally deal with, so I would expect for the rest of the season it’s probably going to be a similar trend where we’re going to observe higher populations just because they were able to overwinter a little bit better.”

Terwillegar says bean leaf beetles in soybeans, black cutworms in corn, and army worms in wheat are among the pests causing problems right now.