so my name is c brown i'm the extension field crop entomologist uh for the university of tennessee and i'm in the department of entomology and plant pathology and today i'm going to give you a little bit of information on the new thrive on cotton technology that you may have seen in popular press and it's been come out uh in the media a few times and so it's it's the newest technology that we have coming online for cotton uh in the bt world and i think it's a very valuable tool that our growers and ag professionals would definitely value and be able to use moving forward so something i want to start also talk about is that we have a a new ut institute of agricultural remind system that we set up here at the west tennessee research and extension center in jackson although you don't have to be in jackson to sign up for it what it is it's basically it's a it's a text based messaging system that allows us specialists myself uh dr larry steckel dr tyson raper any of us to basically get information to y'all that quickly and comes in the form of a text message and so um what this does is allows us ways to send you if something's coming up especially when the entomology world when i see something like moth flights or any kind of other situation that may be coming up whether we have control of plant bugs or thrips resistance what i can do is i'll send it to the ut ut cotton remind text message thread and so really it's free um if you have children you're probably familiar with this already uh so all you have to do is send the text to 81010 and in the text message just put at ut cotton or at ut soybean tea weed or corn what it does it signs you up for crop specific just news alerts and things that you know like i'll send out scout school information for my at ut soybeans for the ut cotton when i sent out cotton scout school when it was you know where location time so it's really a good way for us to get information to y'all a specialist and it's something that comes in the form of a text message so you can go back and find it it's searchable you can see it in a text thread and it's a really good way for us to be able to get information to y'all in the form of a text so we're not going to send you a book or send you a whole lot of it for more information than we need um this is something that really has been has had a lot of great feedback here in tennessee and um so hopefully if this is something interesting please sign up and uh you know we'll be happy to happy to chat with you on it and move forward all right so getting in the presentation so uh this year in 2022 has been a very difficult year for cotton growers with direct control and so uh where this product shines is going to be on thrips and so um it's kind of a little background on thrive on thrive on is a new bt gene that bear has developed and put into cotton and so we found thrips control on really by accident it's originally designed for tarnished plant bugs but you know after the going through our evaluations here at the academic level we started seeing that thrive on was taking no thrips damage it was extremely you know thrips resistant it seemed to be where we didn't we didn't get a whole lot of thrust injury on this cotton and so what come to find out that actually the bt gene that is in the throttle on cotton actually has some activity on drips and i as an entomologist i don't use this term very often but it is a silver bullet on drips i mean it is something that we i rarely wouldn't think i'd say this in my career but as of what we've seen right now it is a silver bullet on on thrifts that we see in the mid-south and we've looked at this technology for several years i've i've looked at it for five years some of my colleagues have looked at it for longer than that and we see the same results over and over again where we we see just very very good uh performance against thrips damage and thrive and so you can see here on the right hand side you know this is this is going to be cotton with a normal seed treatment has not been sprayed for thrips this is thrive on on the left-hand side with a seed treatment that has has nothing else done to it no foliar applications no nothing and this is taken in the same field and so just a little bit about this this field you know when we do our thrift scouts in it we were finding roughly over 300 drips for per five plants and so of those 250 of them were in the church so the adults have come in they've made it they've laid eggs and this cotton is absolutely just getting completely uh destroyed by these thrips and the damage is very evident here as you can see on these plants and so uh whereas you you know you look at the towards the left-hand side the thrive on cotton looks good that those leaves almost are blemish free and we see a lot of just yield preservation and good yield potential as well as relative maturity preservation with the thrive on so looking at the thrips distribution and so a lot of the data that i'm going to be presenting was generated by dr scott graham and dr scott stewart at the university of tennessee and so uh i borrowed um i borrowed a lot of their data and so i would be presenting that today uh hopefully you know i said i'm new to tennessee and i haven't generated my own uh thrive on data as of yet but these two are you know have done a lot of the groundbreaking work when it came to uh thrive on control and uh or thrive on you know the benefits and they've done a very good job presenting this data and so they're gracious enough to let me you know borrow their data and present it so i can give y'all basically the background and how what you can expect out of thrive on in the future and so you know what we see here is the breakdown of the thrifts uh species and thrive on versus non-dragon overwhelmingly and that's what we see in cotton is tobacco thrips where you have the bt genes here on the right the where it says bt that's going to be thrive on where it says none that's that's non thrive on and so this is over four tests at two locations this is going to be at milan and jackson and so you know overwhelmingly 76 percent in both this were tobacco threats and that's normally to be expected in the mid-south i mean that's what we see in tennessee uh primarily the thrips that infest our cotton are gonna be tobacco uh you see soybean thrips occasionally uh but they're very very very small a small minority of what infests our cotton and so realistically i mean these are going to be the biggest ones that we see our tobacco thrips and that really doesn't change on thrive but what does change is the amount of thrips and the number of trips that we see on and so you've got two leaf stage cotton here on the left and 3.5 leaf stage cotton on the right and so really if you look at the bottom it says trait so this is going to be thrive on with a c treatment this is going from left to right this is thrive on with no seed treatment no thrive on with the seed treatment so just a regular cotton and then no thrive on enough seed treatment and so where we see you know even at the two leaf stage and the three stage the insecticide seed treatment or the ist is performing very well i mean it's keeping thrips numbers down you know we're only running roughly 20 trips per five plants uh so that's still that's a that's a low number of fruits but where we don't have trades and where we don't have seed treatments we have significantly higher numbers of thrips which is to be expected i mean so we're going to see a lot of trips but what is what's really the kind of the telling case here is where we have the trait only in both at the two leaf and three they've staged you know we even without an ist we still see a significant reduction in thrift and so uh you know when we added insecticide seed treatment to thrive on it does pick up performance some but at the same time i mean we don't have to have the insecticide seed treatment to get good performance out of thriving so much so that we as entomologists across the mid-south are know we don't really even recommend a seed treatment on thrive on cotton because we don't need it i mean the thrifts that are there don't do enough damage to really warrant even an over treatment and so the insecticide seed treatment on thrive on is not necessary um and so and that's something that we're really starting to see and find out about thrive on is these thrifts really aren't it's more of a repellency it's not a direct mortality but it more of a they feed they don't like what they taste and they fly on and what that does is when they don't like where they are they're not gonna mate and lay eggs and you're not going to see the huge amounts of damage that you saw on that earth that previous picture and so where the thrips don't colonize the cotton we don't see the damage all right so this is moving on to injury rating so kind of the same scales and uh same treatments where we have trade only i mean you know we're this is typically when we rate threats on a one to five scale one zero to one uh is almost a perfect plant and so there's no damage five is dead where you need to make a folder application is a three and so where we have trade only i mean it's less than one so that plant is almost i mean blemish free kind of like what i showed you pretty much perfect where you add an ist to it it just gets a little bit better in reality cotton plants that are below one are absolutely i mean there's no reason to make a foliar over treatment and they're not going to see in the yield loss i mean it's really or relative maturity loss so the thrive on is protecting our yield in that and when it comes to damage as well okay so looking at really kind of where where the rubber meets the road with yield and so this is what uh what dr graham and stuart had saw is that you know where they use thrive on and this is pounds of seed cotton so where they use thrive on with an insecticide seed treatment versus where they use thrive on with no seed treatment we didn't see a significant difference where they used a seed treatment for non-thrive on this non-bt ist you know we didn't really see a big difference in you know between these three treatments where we did see a difference in yield was the non-bt no ist so essentially where we didn't use the seed treatment and where we didn't have thrive on we lost about 100 pounds of lint per acre and you're looking at you know potentially dollar fifty cotton i mean that that's a lot of that's a lot of yield that's left on the table that's a lot of money that's growers are leaving behind just from thrips and so um you know this is something that really will pay off in growers pocket books and it's something i think truly as the thrips component of this this product is very impressive and is a is a great tool for integrated pest management and cotton so your take home so if your thrive on is going to reduce thrips numbers um it's going to be repellency not direct mortality repellency is the key here and that comes to resistance questions i get being that it's repellent and more of a non-preference non-feeding i guess would be almost a better way to say it we don't really see resistance because it's not outright killing it and so i think this is going to be hopefully this trade will be here for the long haul and it works very well another good thing about it is it's only being put in cotton it's not being put in soybeans it's not putting corn any of these other crops that use transgenic compounds it's not it's not going to be put in that it's only going to be utilized in cotton which is good so we're only we're not exposing all of the thrip spot the tobacco through its populations to essentially this compound in unnecessary applications in like corn and soybeans um oversprays are not needed with this product with with this new technology i mean this is something that we can say my colleagues and i have looked at this for several years across the mid-south the southeast the west and texas uh and we don't see the need out of all of those trials none of us have ever needed to make an overspray on thrival and the ones that have tried looking at making overspray it did not benefit in you whatsoever and so oversprays are not going to be needed with this technology uh insecticide seed treatments are a question mark i mean we are not recommending seed treatments as a mid-south entomology group which is i'm a part of however uh baer said that they due to epa stewardship protocols are not they have to put some kind of seed treatment on the seed so it will probably be come with a seed treatment although just know later on down the road potentially you do not need a seed treatment on this cotton for thrips it performs well without it all right switching gears to plant bugs so this is a picture of this is thrive on on the right-hand side and non-drive on the left-hand side and that shows the yield preservation that we get from plant books and so this is where plant bug this is what the rival was originally designed to do was to help control plant folks and so you can see i mean there's there's the maturity difference is pretty striking this cotton is fruit on it it's it's senescing the bowls are opening where this cotton is still green and you know is really not able to shut down and try to in anticipation for articles um so this is some data this is target's point of entrance squares and blues and this the non-vt is going to be kind of a lighter orange and the bt is dark orange you know where we see dirty squares dirty blooms the bt or the thrive on significantly reduces the number of injured squares and blooms as well as just total plant folks and it's going to be something similar to what we saw with rips it's more of a deterrent they it's not outright mortality especially on large immature plant bugs or adults we may see some direct mortality on small nymphs it's like first second instar potentially but what we what happens is plant bugs fly in they start feeding they don't like what they taste and then they fly off they don't it slows colonization down uh by plant bugs which produces overall populations and causes our reduction in uh reduction in the number of plant bugs you see which causes a yield preservation because we don't have as many plant bugs and that also means that we typically don't spray as much um and so looking at insecticide performance this is a this is some data that i generated out of louisiana i haven't had a chance to generate it here in tennessee yet but if you look anything with a t on it is thrive on so we have orthine at three quarters of a pound on non thrive on cotton versus thrive on this black line is the threshold that we have which is three plant bugs per drop and you can see you know really where it shines is if you look at bifenthrin you know this 6.4 ounces with a t on it we don't see this huge significant difference between the two thrive on and on thrive on but we do see a reduction in plant books and that's what the rival is going to bring to the table and so if you go over here really what tells the story is it's non-treating and so most of these insecticides perform relatively the same whether they're on thrive on cotton or non-thrivaling cotton but something we do see in our non-treated the non-treated thrive on is significantly lower than the non-treating conventional and so you're looking at you know less than four plant bugs per drop and then the thrive line versus upwards of eight so i mean we had roughly it was cut more than half and so that's where we see a lot of the benefits of this technology is just the reduction in plant numbers and with insecticides i mean it's i've had guys ask me you know can does it make some of our subpar insecticides look better uh there's some potential with that but at the same time it's gonna make your good insecticides just absolutely shine like your transforms are going to absolutely just look spectacular on thrive on the diamond is another one that's going to look really good on thrive as well and so it's it's not going to be something where you can dust off some of these older let's say a pyrethroid by itself like this bifenthrin it's still not working even on thrive on you're still above threshold pyrethroids by themselves are just are not good on plant bugs because of resistance and that's in there still even on thrive on i'm not going to recommend just using a pyrethroid by itself for plant bone control okay so looking at uh moving from squares and blooms to bowls uh we have some outer stains and so some warts and then lint damage and so you know where we have the bt or the thrive on we see all these significant doctors uh scram graham and stewart saw significant reductions and outer stains warts and limb damage and so you know this kind of just shows kind of more completes that picture that even in bowls it's going to help stop and slow the damage of plant bugs so much so to the point where it's significantly lower and thrive on versus non-time and so where you reduce your outer stains your bone warts and your wet damage you increase your yield and so you've got less plant bugs which feed less which cause less damage which require less insecticides and so as a general rule how what i've told people is that you know typically if you sprayed six times for plant bugs in the past on non thrive on you may spray four times on thrive if you've sprayed twice you may get away with spraying once or if you're lucky potentially knowing and so there is value and benefit here it's just it is definitely not it is not the silver bullet on plant bugs that it is and this is something uh that you know we see is that plant bugs especially adults will feed on thrive um they will you'll get if you you will have very large adult migrations uh moving out of corn out of non-crop folks into thrive and they can absolutely strip all the squares off of it we saw it happen in louisiana it happened in mississippi and so if you have very large plant bug populations in the environment they still need to be controlled thrive on is not going to be the answer to large migrating adult populations so you still have to scout and that's where this thresholds are the same bullet point comes in as of right now we are not lowering the threshold or increasing the threshold on thrive on versus non-threatening cotton you see that we think that it's just going to make thresholds more important you're just going to have a little bit of wiggle room potentially on spray applications with thresholds you can if you can't get to a field within you know the time frame you need to make an application it doesn't have to be you don't have to be quite as johnny on the spot with thrive on as you do because non-drive on cotton it gives you a little bit of lag time that's built into it however because you know because of the technology and the non-feeding and the less numbers you still need to make applications um however they are slower to build especially if you have a normal plant bug migration here they typically are going to be slower to build and thrive on cotton however they can and will build the thresholds and there is some potential nymph mortality that we do see however it's going to be on the very small move so your first and your second in stars not going to be on your real big fourth fifth you know especially adults the bigger the larger the nymphs get the less mortality you're going to see with them and so they're still going to be there potentially feeding probing doing some damage so that's why it's still very important to scout thrive on and it's not something you can just set it and kind of forget it that's what i've got so i'm based out of the west tennessee research and education center in jackson this is my cell phone number so if you please feel free to call me if you have any questions or concerns uh with cotton or field crops anything moving forward this is my email address feel free to email me if you uh if you have any concerns or if you have any questions about anything i've presented or just field crops in general in tennessee or the mid-south and i will be happy to help you in any way i can thank you
2022-08-01