How To Control Sugarcane Aphids?
Temple has bugs on his grain sorghum. Luckily he has an expert on hand to tell him what to do about it.
00:01 Obviously we have some kind of insect, so we peeled this crop apart and we've got some type of insects up here. I was forewarned of sugar cane aphids, you know, 00:11 to make sure that I stayed in front of that. Mm-Hmm. But you, you just brought something up. 00:16 So tell me about these sugar cane aphids and how to control this. Well, luckily for you, uh, these aren't sugar cane aphids, 00:22 so they're just aphids. They're just APHIS and the insecticides you put out did a very good job on 'em. I mean, I've, I've walked here, I touched a bunch of leaves. 00:30 I don't find the really sticky honeydew that the residue that's left behind from sugar cane aphids. Um, 00:37 one of the reasons why down south grain sorghum production has kind of fallen to the wayside is because we have a lot of sugar cane API pressure 00:47 in, in the south, right? And the insecticides aren't very good against them. You don't get a lot of control and they can actually just ruin your entire crop. 00:58 What we found Not only ruin a crop, what I was told is they'll ruin the inside your combine when you come in here, they make everything sticky. It's like glue going through your combine. 01:06 So we talked about we use this product to make grain sorghum molasses, right? That's what you're getting. 01:11 You're basically getting just sugar exudate scattered all through the combine and it gets nasty. 01:16 That's a little sticky, Right? What the guys have gone to doing, and we took our cue from sugarcane actually, 01:24 is there is a natural fungus that floats around in the air. And if you have sugarcane aphids and they're, 01:32 they're establishing a colony, just making sure that you apply sweet success in every pass you make going across this field can do tremendous wonders for the crop because you 01:45 raise the bricks level up. Now sugar cane AFI can feed on a lot higher sugar content product, right? You know, 01:54 so you don't have to worry about feed refusal like you do with a lot of other insects, right? When the bricks level gets so high, they can't digest it, right? 02:02 Sugarcane, aphid, because in the name it says sugarcane right is used to a lot of sugar. He wants it 02:08 Right? So you're not gonna get him to back off because it's too sweet. But what you will do is the honey dew that they deposit on the leaves will 02:17 actually allow that fungus to colonize and it will only do it if the sugar content or the bricks level of that honey dew is elevated, 02:27 that fungus is nature's way of maintaining balance. So within 48 hours of that fungus colonizing that honeydew, you can see almost an entire colony collapse of 02:40 those aphids. It's toxic to 'em, Really. And not only have I seen that work in actual sugarcane, but the guys down south that do grow grain sorghum have experienced the 02:53 exact same thing. And their sugar cane aphids, they still have them, but the outbreak is manageable and they don't have the negative impact, 03:02 not only on yield, but also equipment that guys that don't use sweet success. I love the fact of, you know, that meat. I'm not saying that it's, 03:12 it's not a cure all and it's, it's carbon insecticide, don't get me wrong. But anytime that we can cut back on some chemistry and we can add something 03:20 that's natural that I'm all good with, I'm in. So, you heard it here, there's one more little trick to the trade. We'll be back to you soon.
Growers In This Video
See All GrowersTemple Rhodes
Centreville, MD