Dicamba, a weed killer notorious in some states for spreading well beyond where it’s sprayed, harming other plants along the way, is affecting growers in Ohio.
pest management
When a mosquito can’t go, it’s a problem. But only for the mosquito
You may someday hear less of that buzzing sound. A team led by scientists from CFAES and Vanderbilt University has taken the next step toward developing an improved, sustainable mosquito insecticide — one that won’t cause the biting, sometimes-disease-carrying pests to become resistant to it. Read the story. (Photo: Aedes aegypti by James Gathany, CDC.)
2 good reads on growing hops
Want to keep learning about hops? For starters, try CFAES’s Hops in Ohio: Beneficial Arthropods fact sheet (sustainable ways to manage pests) and Michigan State University Extension’s Sustainable Hop Production in the Great Lakes Region (PDF). (Also see our previous post.)
Today at 3:30 p.m.: Climate change and insect pestilence
Dartmouth College’s Matt Ayres presents “Climate Change and Insect Pestilence” from 3:30-4:30 p.m. today in 121 Fisher Auditorium at CFAES’s research arm, OARDC, 1680 Madison Ave., in Wooster. You can also watch by video link in 244 Kottman Hall, 2021 Coffey Road, on Ohio State’s Columbus campus. Ayres is a professor of biological sciences and is associate director of Dartmouth’s Institute of Arctic Studies. His talk is part of the autumn semester seminar series by CFAES’s Department of Entomology. Details: piermarini.1@osu.edu.
Wednesday: Can we genetically engineer crop pests not to be crop pests?
Fred Gould, the William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Entomology at North Carolina State and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, asks “Can Genetic Pest Management Protect Crops, Human Health and Biodiversity?” at 3:30 p.m. today in 121 Fisher Auditorium on the Wooster campus of CFAES’s research arm, OARDC, and by video link to 244 Kottman Hall, 2021 Coffey Road, on Ohio State’s Columbus campus. Details: piermarini.1@osu.edu. Watch a 2012 talk that Gould gave on the topic here (52:09).
They’re booming (and that’s bad)
Stink bugs are casting a pall this fall in more foul ways than one. (Photo: Red-shouldered stink bug by Herb Pilcher, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Bugwood.org.)
‘The intelligent sprayer can reduce spray volume by 47 to 73 percent’
CFAES scientist Erdal Ozkan has developed a prototype for an “intelligent” pesticide sprayer for orchards and plant nurseries. The air-, laser-, and computer-assisted device is said to be the first of its kind in the U.S. The new tech, according to a report by the SEEDS competitive grants program (pdf; p. 32) of CFAES’s research arm, OARDC, “will help growers prevent excessive pesticide use and thus reduce production costs, worker exposure to pesticide risks, and adverse environmental contamination.” More testing awaits.
You guys are guests in my corn. And there’s nothing in it for me
In northern Ohio, what used to be only a minor pest in lawns is now threatening to become a major problem in corn. And it, too, is an invasive species (pdf).