Sugarcane Aphid Control in Sorghum

Did you ever feel like staying in the truck and doing a little bit of drive-by scouting instead? Me too. But that's not going to tell us if the sugarcane aphids in our sorghum need control. This pest can really cut into our yield, but if we control unnecessarily, that's going to cut into our profit. So step one is get out of the truck. Step two, we want to walk 25 feet into the interior of the field. Step three, take a look at about 50 feet of row. If you can see that there's glistening from honeydew on the upper surface of the leaves, then turn them over and take a look. What we're looking for is these aphid colonies. By aphid colonies, we mean these clusters of aphids that are multiplying really rapidly as the season goes on. You can always tell sugarcane aphids from other aphids because they're completely pale yellow or green all over their bodies except for four areas. Those four areas that are black are their feet, their eyes, their antennae, and their tailpipes. Step four, completely ignore the fact that you wish you never got out of the truck and keep counting. We need to take a look at different sections of the field and make sure we've examined 60 to 80 plants. Step five is comparing your numbers to the threshold. So pre-boot to boot is 20% of plants infested. Once we move on later into the season, flowering and beyond is typically 30% of plants infested. We do have chemical control options like Savanto Prime and also a Transform WG. Next year, we can plant resistant varieties and we can also plant earlier to try to avoid the pests.