Tools to protect crops from stress

FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — To paraphrase Forrest Gump with a tweak, farming is like box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.

Insects and diseases are like the weather: One has to plan for it while having no clue of what will happen.

Ruhiyyih Dyrdahl-Young, BASF soybean fungicide and insecticide portfolio manager, discussed preparing for the unknown in a recent interview.

What should farmers be looking for in terms of insect thresholds and what’s happening in their fields?

Dyrdahl-Young: Insect control is one of those things that you have to have a plan for going into the season. We don’t know exactly what’s going to show up pest-wise in a given season, but with the kind of supply chain disruptions that we’re dealing with across the whole industry, this is one of those seasons where people really need to be thinking ahead and assume they’re going to run into some kind of insect pressure this summer.

Scouting is an absolute essential part of anything we do to manage pests, but if we don’t have that plan at the beginning of the season before the insects show up, by the time we’re scouting and seeing something like aphids, Japanese beetles or bean leaf beetles show up we’re already kind of behind the eight ball.

Insects and diseases are kind of like the weather. You have to plan for it, but you have no clue what you’re going to get.

Dyrdahl-Young: I would agree wholeheartedly with that, but one thing we always know is going to show up during the season is stress on the plant. Whether it’s drought or in Illinois we’ve had a lot of rainstorms across the season, there was hail that hit parts of it, as well.

One of the things that BASF offers is a plant health effect with our fungicides. We notice that when you’re applying your BASF fungicide, whether that’s Revytek or Veltyma, it has this F500 molecule in it that helps the plant cope with stress, as well. So, you reduce the plant ethylene and you stop the plant from experiencing physiological stress and allow it to just focus on yield.

We might have disease show up, we might not, but guaranteed we’ll have environmental stress on the crop. Especially for a crop like soybeans, when we get to R3, just plan on making a fungicide and insecticide pass across the field and get the benefit of mitigating environmental stress, as well as whatever pests or disease might show up.

Should using sticky traps to monitor insect populations be a regular practice for farmers?

Dyrdahl-Young: Absolutely, insects are one of those things that can be pretty sneaky and unless we are doing a really, really good job of scouting, it’s easy to just miss the whole part where you’re at the threshold and at the point where you’re having actual yield damage.

One of the products I support is Renestra insecticide. It’s a dual mode of action insecticide. You get the fast-acting knockdown of a pyrethroid and it’s paired with a brand new mode of action in Sefina which is an aphid technology. It’s an amazing aphicide.

It’s the best of both worlds. You get broad spectrum control with aphid control, as well, even those populations that might be resistant to pyrethroid because it’s a new mode of action.

What are your insecticide application recommendations?

Dyrdahl-Young: Make that planned application of a fungicide and insecticide at R3. You sort of have that window between when your seed treatment might be running out of steam and that R3 period. So, at that point the scouting is going to be really essential. For me, I’ve seen some of the best results just pairing the fungicide and insecticide at the R3 timing.

With a tank mix Revytek fungicide and Renestra insecticide we see a really nice yield bump of 4 bushels under some insect pressure pretty consistently across the country. It’s a really nice complement to one another with good tank mix-ability and kind of makes the decision really easy to get there with a Revytek fungicide and Renestra insecticide at R3 on your soybean crop.

As has been the case with the development of herbicide-resistant weeds over time, that same concern is also entering the realm of insects developing resistance to insecticides.

Dyrdahl-Young: The further north you move, the more likely you are to run into pyrethroid resistance in the aphid population. Aphids are one of those that we don’t necessarily see them show up every season, but when they do, you have a real problem.

The thresholds are pretty low with soybean aphid and when you start to see that in your field, you really need to start to take some action pretty aggressively.

The dual mode of action in Renestra gives you the pyrethroid plus Sefina and Sefina is the novel mode of action that really knocks out both the susceptible and resistant populations of aphids.

Any chemistry that we have that we introduce into the market, it’s absolutely essential that we’re pairing multiple modes of action. Renestra is a really good fit for the soybean acre because you’re getting that dual mode of action and you are managing whatever resistance might be in your field population and then also protecting against what might come.