Pest&Crop Survey 2021
John Obermeyer
Pest&Crop Survey 2021
While traveling a local county road this week, I was amazed at the number of woolly bear caterpillars I came across. At one particular location, they were crossing en masse from one weedy, unharvested soybean field to a grass pasture.
Astute observers have recently reported mysterious egg masses on the outside of their homes, including siding, gutters, soffits, facia, and porch ceiling fan blades!
Soybean fields throughout the state are rapidly undergoing their annual color changes, deep green to golden yellow.
The sugarcane aphid (Melanaphis sacchari), a relatively new pest of grain sorghum, forage sorghums, sudangrass, sorghum-sudangrass hybrids and Johnson grass, first detected in Indiana in 2016, is making its presence known primarily in southcentral and southwestern counties.
Reports of denuded forage crops, especially alfalfa, from large numbers of fall armyworm have been shared from throughout Kentucky and southern counties of Indiana and Illinois.
In recent weeks, fall armyworm infestations have been decimating some soybean and forage crops in Kentucky.
Although some other states in the corn belt, and to the north in Ontario, Canada are seeing high moth flights (and we thought Indiana would follow suit), as it turns out, Indiana is a “have-not” state for WBC this year.
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