Talkin' Cotton Podcast
Welcome to the UGA Cotton Team's Talkin' Cotton Podcast. This is a podcast for cotton growers, county agents, industry partners and anyone else interested in learning about science-backed cotton production and pest management. Our goal is to educate you with the most up-to-date data and information all season long. Talkin' Cotton will feature guests, such as, extension specialists, research faculty, graduate students, extension agents, industry allies and many others! Let's get into the why's of puttin' on, throwin' off and cuttin' out.
Talkin' Cotton Podcast
Georgia Cotton Update On Rainfall, Irrigation, And Stand Quality
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Rain shows up, planters roll, and somehow we’re still talking about drought. That’s the tension driving cotton decisions across Georgia right now, so we sit down as the UGA Cotton Team to sort out what’s actually happening in fields and in the weather data. We look at planting progress, why some areas are still playing catch-up, and how a “wetter week” can coexist with negative water balance when evapotranspiration keeps draining the tank. If you’re trying to decide whether to push planting, pause, or line up irrigation, this conversation gives you a clearer framework.
We also get practical about what we can control. We talk planter speed, seed depth, downforce, and row closers because stand quality is where a lot of seasons get won or lost. Then we pivot to irrigation management and pivot maintenance: uniformity issues like flipped drops and sideways sprays can quietly build drought stress patterns that show up later when July heat hits. We add a serious reminder on pivot safety, grounding, and why lightning damage can turn a routine check into a dangerous situation.
On the pest and scouting front, we highlight upcoming scout schools and explain why scouting every acre matters as cotton approaches squaring. We cover early season insects including thrips, grasshoppers, and false chinch bugs, then talk about plant bugs and square retention. Finally, we address the big question we keep hearing: what’s the latest on jassids, where we expect first detections, and how growers and gardeners can help by watching hosts like okra and sharing suspect photos through county Extension.
If this helped you make a cleaner call on planting, irrigation, or pest management, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, share it with a neighbor, and leave a review so more growers can find it.
Planting Progress And Key Events
SPEAKER_04Bringing you all things cotton production and pest management. This is the Talkin' Cotton Podcast with the University of Georgia Cotton Team. Let's get into the whys of putting on, throwing off, and cutting out. All right. Today is May the 27th, 2026. Looking at the crop progress report as of uh this past week, they're they got us at 58% planted. So we're we've covered a lot of ground uh really in the last week. I think it jumped 20% in a week. So we uh we're really getting after it last week. And over the weekend, a lot of folks got rain, and so that's kind of keeping us out of the field right now uh in some places, but you know, we're we're getting close to wrapping up in southwest Georgia, and I know they're getting after it in in southeast Georgia, but we got a we got us a good crowd today. We got us a good crowd. Dr. Robert, you doing good? Damn man, good. Dr. Porter's here, yeah, and then Dr. Lazaro's with us again. Good morning. Second time. I wasn't here for the first time, but hey, I was laid up in the bed with a fever. My boy's been passing all kinds of stuff around. So but hey, we're back, we're on the up and up at my house. So we're doing better. But thank you for keeping it at home. Yeah, no kidding. So so, real quick, Wes, I'm all I'm gonna kind of hand it off to you about what you've been hearing and what people have been calling about because you you got a master irrigator something to do today, don't you?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, today's uh an ag technology demo day at Vidalia, but I'm hauling stuff over to Vidalia also for our irrigation expo. If y'all hadn't heard about it, we do have on June the 10th at the Vidalia Onion Research Station starting at about nine o'clock in the morning. We've got uh an irrigation expo. That's a joint uh joint partnership between University of Georgia and University of Florida. We'll do every other year. So next year it'll be back in Florida. This year here, we've uh looks like looking like a big event so far. We've got a lot of vendors already signed up. We had so last week we had like a hundred people already registered, you know, we're still two, three weeks out. So uh we're doing everything at it. It's not just row crop, it's gonna be a cool event, I think. So either way, that's the pitch for it. Um, if you if you don't have anything going on June 10th, can pull away for a little while and you're from that region, head over. Your agents can get you the registration link. It's free to register. The first 200 register, get a free hat. Oh, yeah. Doing something unique at it too. I can't remember how we're structured. We've got food trucks there for lunch. So you kind of have a couple options for lunch. It's gonna be a little cool rotational style event, all field demos, no boring in the classroom talks, right? So, yeah, either way, um come on, did it if you want. So let's jump into cotton. What I'm seeing a couple things right now to camp's point. We planted a lot of cotton last week. We were too dry to plant, we had a week to plant, and then we got too wet to plant. Yep. So we don't want to. I've heard a few complaints about the wetness, and even myself made a comment I shouldn't have made. Don't want to hear it. I know, right? That's what I was about to say.
SPEAKER_04You know, we were way too dry, and we asked for rain, and we got what we asked for, so not no complaining.
SPEAKER_03So, no, we need it. Um the the good and the bad of it. Let's talk about that for a minute. So I did just read before I came over here, I I read, I don't know if any of y'all signed up for it, Eric Snodgrass at Nutrient. He's like the famous, famous weather manager. He's really good. He sends out a weekly report and he sends it, I think, on Saturdays or Sundays. I'm not on his list. I just watched some of his videos. Yeah, so I read his weekly report. Where he's at right now, guys predicted over this upcoming week for the sub this is generalized generalization, the southern region of Georgia, where we're expected to get one to two plus inches of rainfall. If you notice, we've got at least a 45 to 60 percent chance every day in the foreseeable future. Um, that'll make it a little tough depending on where you're at. But I uh same time, like if I look at Tifton, we got a lot of rain, I think, on Friday. So right, yeah, Friday. But then after that, it's been kind of like a third and a half
Rain Forecasts, Drought, Water Balance
SPEAKER_03inch events interspersed. So you could potentially get back into some of your uh your fields, sandier fields, and some of your fields that are you know not whole and water if need be. I would I would evaluate that. But he's saying that moving through June, we're expected to be wetter than average. But you know what? What his and what his July forecast showed me was we're supposed to be drier than average, and we all knew this was coming, right?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03So, you know, again, we're wet right now, but we are, as you just said, almost 60% planted. So we're still we are at the end of May, but that's all right. If we can uh you can plant cotton pretty fast. Water requirements on it, we'll talk about that since we've been getting it. We're sitting okay. What I don't, what none of us want to happen is what happened, what, two years ago, where it got it got so wet that we basically sat in water, yeah, couldn't grow. I I don't that may happen. I don't see that happening. What I see this year, and we're working on a blog post thanks to Ross Green. He wanted to write one up and he made a bunch of good points that we've all talked about. But what's really weird right now that we don't normally experience is if you go back, this is a cool thing to look at. I think um I've talked to Lisa Baxter about it, she shared some stuff. I don't know if Ross has, but we're going to include it in the newsletter and a few other people. But our uh weather stations have what's called a water balance calculator. And it's not just drought, but it's like, all right, how much rainfall did we get? But how much did we lose to evapotranspiration per month per time period? And we're negative on our water balances moving all the way through. We're negative five inches in the month of April.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03I didn't run the month of May yet. We're working on it right. We're almost at the end. If you go look at the drought monitor, um they will release the new map tomorrow, but last week's release map, we're still in like 75% D3 to D4.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I was thinking D4's exceptional.
SPEAKER_03Exceptional. We're we're probably less than sorry, 30% in D4. That's the southern region. But across the state, we're 74, 75 percent in the D3 category. We're still in pretty insignificant drought in the southern region, especially the southeast, has hit really hard. Um, up until Sunday, maybe I'd have to look at my timeline. Sunday, Monday, maybe Saturday evening, even like if you go look up at Midville, they've been missing all those rains. Yeah. And he finally caught, which I hate to see it come this way, but it caught like a three-inch rain one day at that particular station because I've got a field of soybeans up there and we're monitoring daily rainfall. Yeah. And so we were catching up, but my point is with talking about that water bounce, we were so far behind. If you look from January, February, March, April, we're on average like three to four inches behind each month. And what that means is even though there were not a crop in the ground growing, we evaporated the moisture out higher than we received. So we basically depleted moisture without even a crop using it. So now we've got to work on refilling. And so I've heard, and I made a comment on the one of the podcasts about three or four weeks ago, and then I got some calls from farmers on it, and then have read some other stuff that at that time, and I'm hopefully we're overcoming that now, but that rainfalls were doing funny things in fields that have been dry so long, right? It's like they were water was moving funny, it wasn't truly re-infiltrating, so that was causing major problems. I'm hoping this rainfall's helped us overcome that, getting us back to where we need to be. So back to those water requirements, we are pretty low, camp. I'm uh got my newsletter loaded. I'm gonna start working on it tomorrow, and when I get back in the office tomorrow and Friday, because it's due to you on Monday. But that's what I'm gonna talk about. We're low on water use, but at the same time, it doesn't take but about a week in the scenario we're in right now of us to miss these rainfalls, and we're gonna need to really stay on top of it and make sure we don't uh short that crop early season. And then the the last 40% of y'all planting, I hope you've got everything ironed out on your planters. I'm still getting some phone calls uh about planters. I got one about peanuts last week that we talked in depth about on the peanut podcast. Uh it's been a few, it's been about two weeks since I've got one on cotton. But um you we can push a little faster on cotton. You know, you can push probably five and a half, six miles an hour. I still strongly encourage with a standard. With a standard planner. Yep. If you've got a high speed setup, you can push a little bit faster than that, right? You can those small seeds, we can handle it. We can move them. I will say all the data I have showed that
Planter Settings, Speed, Depth, Closing
SPEAKER_03over like eight to nine miles an hour, we start degrading uh seed singulation, seed spacing, even with advanced deliveries. Just keep that in mind when you get in a hurry. Um, depth is still critical. Dr. Roberts would tell you he's figured out down force is pretty critical. He's told me a couple times.
SPEAKER_04Did he tell you, did he tell you that all that first cotton come up though? Good. After we went back and repiped. No, not all.
SPEAKER_01Not all of it, but enough of it. A couple rows. Enough of it. We're thinning. Uh-huh. Yeah. Y'all are thinning. Yeah. I mean, there was enough. It's just a few rows. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it'll eventually you got the right thing. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Got it figured out. I mean, it was it was an interesting situation out there. But I I would say just make sure you're getting that seed at an adequate seed depth. If we're not, and there's there's opinions on row closing systems, uh, opinions on a lot of different things, depending on what type of row closers you're using. If you're trying to plant shallow, I can promise the double V pinches are not going to do you any justice. Especially when it's dry. When it's that's yes, when it's dry, we just can't form a seed trench at half or three-quarters. You can't do it, all right? It's as simple as that. You can have a little bit of moisture. Yep. So make sure you're setting at adequate depth and doing that seed justice. Anytime you can visibly see seed on not even on the soil surface, but uncovered, that seed's gonna struggle. So you're just not setting it up for full success. So just make sure you're doing a good job with that. I think besides that, you know, if there's y'all got questions or anything going on, you know, make sure you reach out. I've got to get on the road here in a few minutes, like Camp said, to head to East Georgia. But yeah, you know, it's um sometimes we feel like we don't have a ton to talk about, but at the same time, we got a lot of we still got 40% of uh what I'm hoping is a million acres to plant. Yeah, we're probably gonna be close. You know, that would be good. So if we look at that, we still got 400,000 acres to plant. And so just do it right. You know, we're when we're getting down to two or three weeks left to do it, let's do it right so that we don't have any so we don't have to revisit some of those situations. That's right. And uh you know, I we have a good opportunity, I think, for a really good cotton production season this year. We are supposed to move back dry into July, a lot we talked about. My understanding is dry through the fall, which could make really good cotton crops because we can harvest and get out of there. Get a couple of rains in July, one or two in August.
SPEAKER_04I mean, you can make good cotton. You can make good cotton out of it, you're exactly right. So um you know, it's funny you talk about how how much rain we've gotten and and in Tifton in particular, we caught like three quarters of an inch on Sunday, right? And I came in on Monday to try to get ahead of a couple things, and I mean I I was shocked. So I I would had been watching the rain, of course, but then looking at the vapotranspiration stuff, I mean, we were still losing, you know, tenth and a half, two tenths a day, whatever, even whenever it was raining like that. And I came in and and I mean I was able to spray like on hard metals and stuff, even a day after, not even 12 hours after we got three-quarters of an inch. So, I mean, it's amazing what you can still do. But some people are, you know, putting birds in the air, Dr. Roberts. I mean, it's just it's it's happening because it is wet in spots. And I mean, I talked to Lee Hitson in Atapogus yesterday. Yeah, he said he got five inches over the weekend and he watered half inch on Friday. So he he was telling me that he was, I said, You ain't drowning down there, are you?
SPEAKER_03He said, I'm about to. Yeah, I was down there Thursday, and I think he planted my cotton trial either Thursday afternoon or Friday, and then it rained.
SPEAKER_04Probably I think it was a he planted ours on, or they planted on Tuesday, and he said it was coming up on Saturday, so it fared a little bit better, probably. Probably better than mine. Yeah, probably so. So it uh it's gonna turn out okay down there, I think.
SPEAKER_03One other thing I would state, y'all mentioned it before we started the podcast, and uh I talk about it. Lauren says I've been talking about the same thing since she got here, and that's fair. I'm gonna keep talking about the same thing until y'all attribute.
SPEAKER_04Hey, it's all cyclical.
SPEAKER_03It's all cyclical. It just all comes back up. So we've all seen we've needed a lot of irrigation. To Ross's point, when we get this blog post together, one thing that we're seeing right now, even though we're getting rainfall, when I I probably got off track of what I should have continued to say, even though we've been getting rainfall, we're still so far behind on the year that our deep soil, uh deep soil moisture is not there. And then, Camp, to your point, when we get these hot days and um lower humidity, you're losing the stuff on the surface. That's it. Faster and faster than we can replace it with irrigation. So we're we're walking into a situation that if we and I've been saying it since we started this year, that if we don't have a good game plan together, we're gonna struggle in the season. And that's the points he pointed out. Like it's like, all right, look, and especially depending on where you're at, if you're in southwest Georgia, you've got better moisture, better access to water, higher flow rates, I mean, most of the time. But as we move east, that changes a little bit. Yeah. We'll struggle to keep up. Well, another thing that's gonna cause you problems, and I've I've seen too much of it. Everybody in this room's seen it and mentioned something to me. Your uniformity on your pivots, and it's not even going and doing an MIL, but like I drove by one the other day, and I'm not even gonna say where it's at um on the air. We counted on the way down by the time we started noticing 18 drops
Pivot Maintenance, Uniformity, Lightning Safety
SPEAKER_03that were up somewhere sideways on the pivot, somewhere around. And I took a picture of one that was one that was wrapped around the tower, and it was in an active cornfield. And I can tell you, when we drove by one day, it was facing one way. We came back, it was facing the other way. So it means it ran and it irrigated that way. I bet if you flew a drone over that particular field, you're gonna see drought stress in that corn at every one of those spots because we're just not uniformly putting it out. And I even have people asking the question with fixed sprays and some of these just spinners and stuff down in the corn canopy so far. And I know we're we're not talking about um corn here, but it it relates down in the canopy that we're not getting uniform coverage. Where if I take and throw them up on the guides or I wrap them around the tower, we know. And so I say that, but cotton, we're about to be in it, and if you leave them up like that, it's gonna do the exact same thing. When I see one laying on the guide and spraying down sideways in the field, you're not gonna get a good uniform pattern across that cotton. We need that. I you know, we we're gonna need that moving into July if it gets dry. So go fix them right now. Get a wooden stick with a hook on the end if you have to just walk by and flip them over. You know, get one of your uh hired guys to do it or a kid or whomever, you know, everybody loves riding side by sides right now. Get out there side by side and ride down the pivot with a hook stick and flip them back over and be ready to go. That's a good safe way.
SPEAKER_04I've wondered how, like, because I pulled a tractor up to and like flipped it back over while I was in the field doing something. But that's a good safe way. Hey, pivot safety, man.
SPEAKER_03Hey, yeah, be careful. Well, I would also say with our, if we want to talk about that for 30 seconds, with storms moving through, we had some lightning storms, stuff like that. That's a quick way to ground out a pivot if your ground wire's not uh connected and you go out to that system and you hadn't messed with it yet. I don't know if we talked about on any of the podcasts, but uh we wrote I wrote a blog post about it. Pivot safety is not a joke. That's 480 volts on that thing, and they will ground out to the tower. If you don't have a ground wire on them, or even if you do, and they're sitting there live because it's been hit by lightning, guess what's gonna become the ground? You. Yep. So we all know back of hand, we know be careful. I've heard a lot of stories of people tinkering on the tops of them and getting blown off. A lot of stories of people falling off because uh getting up there and finding a wasp nest, yeah, you know, and panicking and having nowhere to go. So there's a lot of things. I was talking about wasps before we got started. Yeah, so yeah, it's it'll happen. So those don't fun either. No, they're not. So a lot of things like that to consider when we get out there. I know we get get busy, but hey, you're if you are wet and can't get in the field, go ride some of your pivots real quick and fix the fix the drops off when you're ready. That's it. Downtime activity. Get your planter, make sure your planter is set where you want it, make sure your sprayer. I'm sure Dr. Lazaro is gonna talk about that when I leave. Make sure your sprayer's ready to go. Yeah. And make sure your pivot's ready to go.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Oh, yeah. Good stuff, man. Good stuff. I've been getting some calls about getting back in fields and planting and stuff like that and replanting and whatever. So, I mean, if you got to make that kind of decision, we just want to make sure that we're doing the doing the right thing, right? And making sure that we're not putting out more seed than we need to and all that fun stuff. But Dr. Lazaro, what's on your mind? What are you giving phone calls about?
SPEAKER_00Oh, well, absolutely nothing.
SPEAKER_04Okay, cool. But yeah, we need to start forking ones. All right. So uh if you're listening to this and you just people send I get phone calls sometimes because people are bored. So if you're bored, call Dr. Lazaro. She would love to chat with you.
SPEAKER_00So board calls can say to camp.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They sometimes they just call and chat. But hey, I get some good ideas that way. Just talking. Because one of them yesterday, he was like, Are y'all doing podcasts this week? Say, Yeah, what should we talk about? And he gave me a bunch of stuff we should talk about. So like what? Like replanting and seedling disease and hides too wet and all this. So hey, we've we've hit a couple of them at least. So hey, feel like we're doing pretty good.
SPEAKER_00Full full agenda there.
SPEAKER_04That's right. That's right. So what's on your mind?
SPEAKER_00I'm still getting my feet wet, nobody intended. Trying to figure out what's going on and and meeting folks and putting out my very few trials that I'm doing this year.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah. Good deal. Good deal. Everything going good with some of that, some of that good stuff y'all are doing at the gram farm. Everything looking good with that?
SPEAKER_00So far, so good. We're we've got some neat technologies coming in, some drone works, um other scouting tools, as well as a couple different uh surprise technologies, um, um autonomous, um, that are you know contractor based. So we've got a lot a lot going on. It's all it's open to everybody. Welcome. We planted cotton last week. So give us a few more weeks and then come out and see what we're doing.
SPEAKER_04Oh, yeah. That sounds good. Daughter Robert, what uh what do you think, man? Well, she mentioned scouting. Hey, it's so important. Yep. One of the best investments you can make. Oh yeah. It's a good scout. Our scout.
SPEAKER_02Our good scout. Speaking of scouting, uh June 1st, that's Monday in Tifton. That's coming up Monday. Yep. We'll start at 9 o'clock at the conference center with our cotton peanut and soybean scout school.
Scout Schools And Scouting Priorities
SPEAKER_02We'll also hold a scout school in Midville on June the 9th. That's a Tuesday. The second Tuesday in June. So we'll start at 9 o'clock in Midville. Yeah. So we'd encourage folks if they want to send some folks, come learn about insects. Myself and Dr. Mark Abney. Wade will be over there in East Georgia. Maybe they'll help us out. But uh we'll talk about scouting insects as we go into any year, but especially this year. Yeah. Uh we need to make sure we're scouting every single acre of cotton that we grow. Yeah. But uh Lauren, my phone has been kind of quiet. And uh I talk to people that are bored. But but I do like to hear from folks because you know, when we talk about insects and insect pest management, it's real dynamic and it varies across the state. And a good gauge that everything's going okay is not many phone calls. Yeah. But uh I do like to hear every now and then that, hey, everything's looking good. Yeah. You know, where we are to date, um thrips have been all over the place. We had some pretty early planted cotton, not just here that we planted, but uh across various areas of Georgia. Thrips were pretty tough. Yeah. And uh but really anything, once we got much into May, our thrips pressure has been really minimal. Uh you know, one of the things I've gotten questions on is you know, can we just leave off everything on thrips? And and the answer to that is no. Yeah. Even if thrips are low, we've got to have something at planting. Yeah. And a seed treatment, a midacloper seed treatment should hold us. It's just been real, real sporadic with thrips. I was receiving quite a few crawls on grasshoppers. Yeah. And up until this past week, false chinch bugs. But uh the grasshopper thing settled down. Um I haven't heard of any major issues over some acre spray, but the false chinch bugs.
SPEAKER_04For a false chinch bug? For a grasshopper.
SPEAKER_02Okay, yeah. Yeah, there has been a little bit of spraying on false chinch bugs, but false chinch bugs really like uh hot and dry conditions. And I don't know what happens, but when we catch some rains, it just kind of goes away. You think it's because the cotton starts growing? It could be the cotton's growing, but uh you know, I think a lot of these insects, like false chinch
Early Insects Thrips Plant Bugs
SPEAKER_02bugs and grasshoppers, these sporadic type insects, I mean, you gotta have the condition to have them. And that's primarily a reduced tillage field. Yeah. But I think those insects are looking for moisture. And when it's just bone dry, I mean, they're looking for anything green. And if you think of a hey, I learned something.
SPEAKER_04Our agronomist made a great observation. You know, you can learn a lot about insect behavior if you just watch them. And and I was just watching them a couple weeks ago. It was actually weeks ago. I was no, I was on a tractor. On the tractor. I was just doing alleys in a field, and I was out in one of our in one of the farms here on the station, and we had grasshoppers pretty bad when we were planting. I took a really nice video of Dr. Roberts on the planter, and there was a lot of grasshoppers. There was a lot of grasshoppers, and we never sprayed them because I was told by my scout, hey, let's just wait and see what happens. So I waited and saw what happened. They never ate too much, and so we never sprayed them. But they they moved, which I which was interesting. They moved from where the rye was to the grass roads in between the fields. And so my observation was that grasshoppers really prefer green living plant material. That's a pretty good observation. Yeah. You're gonna be an entomologist yet. Maybe just documenting insect behavior, man. But they do. They prefer, you know, that green stuff. So I mean, it'sn't they're gonna go somewhere, whether it's the grass around your field or Or whatever, but I mean there's a lot of times there's there's cotton right there, and if they're hungry, they're gonna eat it. Probably do want to mention plant bugs a little bit.
SPEAKER_02Um we're already there, and before we do another podcast in two weeks, we'll have quite a bit of cotton squaring. Yeah. We've got cotton we planted the first week of April with squaring.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And uh, you know, so there's quite a bit of folks jumped out there early. You know, once we start squaring, it's time to get the sweep net out, you know, and do some square retention counts. Again, we can go over all that at our scout school. But one of the things we've seen over time is, you know, this adult infestations when they're moving to cotton, our earliest planted cotton tends to be at a little higher risk. And uh once cotton's squaring, it just becomes an attractive host. So we need to make sure we're out there running sweep nets and just making sure we're keeping at least 80 percent of that fruit camp. I mean, we don't need a hundred percent retention. Absolutely not. 80 percent, we still can maximize yield. Yeah, that's right. But uh on the insect front, that's it. I probably have gotten more calls about jazz. Just from people, just people that are curious, really. People are curious, and you know, we still have not detected jazz in the state of Georgia. Yeah. Anywhere. Yeah. Um the last jazzed we saw was the last week of January on a sticky card. Yeah. You know, we've got people looking at it. But Mason's still looking. He's still looking, you know. And everybody else. We got a team. We got a team. Yeah, I I mean a small army. But it's important for us to know when we do detect them. So I want to encourage anyone out there, you know. Well, I I believe we're gonna find them in an okra patch, somebody's garden. Yeah. And and that's how it was in 2025. Yeah. And and maybe I'm wrong, but you know, we had four pretty good cold events over the winter. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of ways to look at winter temperatures. Yeah. It wasn't necessarily a cold winter, but there were it was cold when it was cold. Yeah, I'm aware. But it was cold. So one of the things uh you know, we were also fairly dry.
SPEAKER_04It was dry. Which could help. It could have, yes.
SPEAKER_02Killing them hosts. But you know, we want to know where these things are detected. So we can have some idea of what the winter we experience did, if it truly did freeze them out. Yeah. You know, how far did it freeze them out? How quick are they gonna get here? Yeah. We've got a postdoc working, Dr. Haley Kennedy. Yeah. And she's gonna get with Audrey at the Cotton Commission, and we're gonna push something out to like master gardeners. Yeah. Let them help us maybe detect jasid. So we didn't mochra plant. I mean, we got an opportunity to look at migration and movement, how fast this happens, you know. If we go back to 25, we found them on July 9th, and geez, within like three or four weeks, it was like, holy moly. The map lit up. The map lit up. So we're gonna like, you know, we're gonna do a map again this year, and um we're doing that across the southeast.
SPEAKER_00But uh what's special about okra?
SPEAKER_02It's just a preferred host. Yeah. You know, we don't know, but yeah, I believe if you had okra and cotton side by side, they're gonna go to okra.
SPEAKER_04I was thinking about that yesterday. And it might be something like if they show up, when they show up, we plant cotton, okra, sunflowers, and what plant or whatever next to each other.
SPEAKER_02I like okra. You do. I don't put okra in my little garden. It's a bad use of space. Bad use of space and nematodes. Nematodes. Those up nematodes. We don't want them. We don't want those nematodes. But people will plant an okra patch really early. Why?
SPEAKER_04Not re well, not super early now. Well we were in Emmanuel County this week. Well, that was a little meetings, and it was it was in February. It was like the last week of February. Whenever it got it was one of them times it got really, really cold. Yeah, and them them guys in Emmanuel County, they were really listening to what Dr. Roberts had to say because they they fought these jokers this year bad. And so up there talking, and we were telling them where to be looking and all that good stuff. And uh he goes, Hey, has anybody planted an okra patch? And it was like the end of February, and somebody, somebody in the crowd goes, It's supposed to get 20 degrees tonight. Well, so they don't plant it in February, but they might plant it in April.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah. Yeah. But the point is, okra will be living and up probably as early. I mean, you should I would you should plant okra when you plant cotton. Same family.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Um sunflowers are the same way too. Yeah. And they're pretty aggressive.
SPEAKER_02But we're looking everywhere. We've seen a lot of uh what my crew refers to as fakes. Fakes. Yeah. But the only way we can truly identify Jasset is you have to have the adult. And you're looking for the two spots on the wings. Yeah. Two spotted cotton leaf.
SPEAKER_04Well, and that's what I was gonna say is that you know, even yesterday I sent you a picture of something on a sunflower I had in my own.
SPEAKER_02Highly suspect.
SPEAKER_04But yeah, it's but it was amateur, right? So I mean, be checking ochre patches and and bird fields and stuff like that. But you know, really need to know if you see an adult. Yes.
SPEAKER_02If you see if you s suspect anything, just try to take a picture and send it to your county agent. And uh we'd appreciate it. But so far, so good on that.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And it's just people are curious. They just want to know.
SPEAKER_04Well, people just want to make sure they're ready.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's right. And uh and it's like I told an agent yesterday, and she says, Have I missed anything? And she was just wanting to make sure nothing's changed. I says, No, you haven't missed anything. When something does appear and stuff starts happening, our county agent's gonna be the one with the most current information. Yeah, same as last year.
SPEAKER_04Same as last year. That's about it. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Dr. Dr. Kimwright joined us, and Dr. Kimwright, it's been uh a hell of a couple weeks, like in your in your uh, as you would say, wheelhouse, right?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, we had uh we had to have a little come to Jesus with my study workers today, so I apologize being late. But uh they love those kind of meetings. I'm sure they do. And they eventually, you know, especially with you. They uh it's it's like if you ever seen a movie Cool Hand Luke, um I f I start off with always with what we have here is a failure to communicate. And by the end of the session, everybody sees it. Everybody's
Jassid Monitoring And Host Plants
SPEAKER_05on the same page. That's it. So anyway, it has been, you know, we can talk about jazz. I'm I I'm not envious. Dr. Cameron I loves Jassets. Yeah, Jasset envy. But but fortunately, not fortunately, but what's interesting is this past uh past couple weeks, you know, and we're we're largely, usually almost always behind, beyond seedling disease in our crop. And uh a surprise to me with the with the weather we had, where all of a sudden it got cool and all of a sudden the rain that hadn't fallen did fall, then it it was just a perfect scenario for seedling disease. And and Dr. Han, this is where I really think that the uh the county delivery system, UGA extension, the strength of it shows because uh growers unexpectedly have a stand problem, they have plants dying, uh they call their county agents out, uh I can help them diagnose it if they need me to. Uh it's absolutely uh the rhizoctonia seedling disease, absorption, it's all tied to that. But but but the real strength is you can't do anything about that disease anymore. It's weather-driven, you've made your decisions, we caused the furrow, man. If we if we could go back, normally that seed treatment was enough, but with the weather conditions, we would have put isoxystrobin in furrow. But the most important thing is, is is my phone call to you or message to you the next day is you know, I need your help. What do we do for my plants? So the good news is that if you have a rhizonia problem, it's not a disease that like a rust disease or a foliar disease, just keeps spreading. It's it's contained, and then you can go back and replant. It's yeah, you're not at any higher risk because you had it before than you have it now. Yeah. Um, as temperatures warm up, uh the problem gets less and less. Um the real question is not what can we do now as far as my wheelhouse, it's your wheelhouse. What can we do? And how do you make a decision, Camp? How do you help growers make a decision on whether they should plant or not? Because the last thing I'll say and I'll shut up is Rizoc tends to all soil-borne problems, uh, nemathodes, uh, soil-borne disease seedling, they tend to be patchy. You know, it's not like you take one out of every three plants across the entire field. You don't. You take six out of ten in a bad spot, and then elsewhere might be out of one or two. How do you manage that?
SPEAKER_04Well, and I think the the question that I have comes back to are the seedlings that have it are they gonna survive and will they grow out of it? Or are they is it all dependent? So the ones that are dead die.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, right. The ones that are dead. You know, that's uh Yogi Berra would appreciate that. The ones that are dead, the ones that are dead die. Uh but the it but the ones that hang on, they will continue to hang on, but I I truly believe that they'll they'll never they'll never fully recover. So if you have sublethal infection, plants that kind of struggle and they will grow, but yeah, they're not what you're doing.
SPEAKER_04They're not gonna be. Yeah, it's like a girdle, like you girdle the stem, all the stuff can't move like it's supposed to, and all that good stuff. But I mean, I don't like I don't like replanting cotton. I mean, it's just that's another trip across the field, right? But at the end of the day, you gotta do what you got to do. And some of these guys uh, you know, are going in and supplementing, whether it's the whole field or or dropping in in spots, and and a lot of times you, you know, it kind of depends to me on what's been sprayed in the field already, because it sometimes, you know, these guys have already made a herbicide application, whether it's at plant or over the top or whatever. And that tends to complicate things if you got a residual herbicide out there, depending on a residual herbicide. If you got a group 15 out there, whether it's worn or dual or outlook or whatever, that certainly complicates things. But, you know, my replant recommendation has changed in the last year or so. And there's a lot of people who do replant work and spend a lot of time on that. Guy Collins is one of them. We did a podcast on the on the cotton specialist corner a few weeks back, and he talked about how they did all this research, and it was like 30% of the field had to be three-foot skips and all this stuff to dictate a replant. And really, my recommendation is if the field needed to be replanted, you'd have done it already. If you're calling me, you're on the fence. And so, but you know, in those situations where we're talking about seedling disease taking over pretty bad in spots of a field. I mean, guys know what needs to be done. And if you got a group 15 out there, we need to freshen that strip up, whether it's with a strip till rig or something like that, just to bring some fresh dirt back to the surface before you replant. Of course, we can't do anything about it right now. I was on the phone with somebody yesterday about this very topic, and it's gonna be end of the week, really, before we can get back in the field. And so we can we got a few more days to kind of monitor that crop and then make a decision end of the week and kind of go from there.
SPEAKER_05But and it can be complicated too if like, for instance, uh if you've uh you put out a nematocide, yeah. And the chances are with the nematocyte going out without the rain, you know, it it you're if you do replant, it's not gonna be it's not gonna have the same oomph that the uh when the early plant did. The good news is is what what's the uh what's the rule of thumb for how many plants per foot do you need to maximize yield? Oh one. One stuff. Yeah, even spaced, yeah. You know, I my my buddy Chris Goodman here in Tifton and I I'm sure he'll hear that I mentioned his name, but you know, he'll look at he'll look at and he always sees a half-empty glass, right? Yeah, yeah. And uh it may not be, and I and granted, uh growers have invested a tremendous amount, they've invested their effort, their money. But sometimes if you put the science behind it, it's not as bad as it as it might have been. If you look at what stand you do have, it may not be as bad as you think it is, even though it's not what you wanted.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and you know, even thinking on down the line, right now, if you had one plant per foot, it looks like a really thin stand. But the problem becomes whenever you have a lot of those big skips, and it's not necessarily this time of year where the problem comes in, it's at the end of the year, whenever it comes to picking that. Uh, the picker really does not like those big skips, and it'll plug up on you and just won't won't pick well uh on some of those big skips, and so it can create problems down the line if there's enough of that to justify replanting. And so, but it, you know, just a bad situation to be in. Uh, another call that I've been getting, Dr. Roberts, is on when to switch over. Like people want to know, hey, should we switch from a full season to a short season and all this junk? Good question. Yeah, it's a good question. I want to hear your answer. Yeah, well, my answer I want to see if it matches much. My answer is right now, it don't matter. Just
Seedling Disease, Replant, Variety Timing
SPEAKER_04pick one. Plant a highest yielding variety, right? And because I mean it just is what it is. But what I mean, up until last year, we planted some cotton June 11th. And we had a full season right next to a short season, and they did the same. So, I mean, at the end of the day, even up to I'd say June 15th, you're fine. Plant the highest yielding variety. Now, it uh on paper, we all plant June 15th. You get what I'm saying? In the real world, that may not always be the case. And so if we start getting much later than that, that that's whenever I'd start thinking about ways to shorten our season.
SPEAKER_02You know, there are a lot of things you can do to do that, and we'll talk about that.
SPEAKER_04Let's hope we get this crop in in a timely manner, and we don't have to worry about yeah, we got three, four weeks of good, solid, you know, planting weather to get this thing in. And then it kind of looks like the conditions may change a little bit next week, and so we can really start getting back after it. We can still make great cotton, plant it in June. I mean, we we can make really, really good cotton, plant it in June. And so there's certainly still opportunity there to get the crop in, make really good. And, you know, like we said, if we get too late, then we're gonna we're gonna talk about ways to maximize, you know, that crop and and minimize or shorten the season enough to where we can be confident that we're still gonna make it and miss that first frost and in November, you know. But that's a long way off, right? And so at the end of the day, right now, up until June 15th, I'd say, man, just plant the highest yielding variety, plant the one you want to plant, right? I mean, most people have a variety they like, and so uh that's kind of like a lot of people. I mean, just throw that in there. Whatever. Think about nematodes. Whatever. So nematodes, yeah, think about them, I guess, while you're planting your your variety that you like. So, but yeah, if you got a nematode problem, you gotta address it. In my garden, I have a nematode problem. I pulled up my squash and zucchini yesterday, and they just Son, them nematodes like that stuff. Or at least it looks like they like it. They they react really well to squash and zucchini.
SPEAKER_02So and homegrown tomatoes. I hadn't pulled, I hadn't pulled up my squash because I still have neighbors who are thankful to get it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04But I'm about squash, I'm squashed out. I have a wife at my house and I asked her, I said, I said, you think we're done with the squash? She said, Yep. Okay. So I pulled them up. But um Yeah, hey, plant your nematode-resistant tomato variety.
SPEAKER_02I do that. Speaking of nematodes, Bob, uh, have you looked for marbles in the field on the station recently? You know where I'm talking about? I I do know what you're talking about. You need you need to go look for marbles there. There is a spot in the field that's suspect. There's two spots that you really need to look for marbles. I mean, we just got a bunch of dead plants. And I'll go with the colour. We had rolled a nematode sample, but I I would like you just to lay eyes on it. You know, for those of the It's a nematode resistant variety, but it's a nematode resistant variety, but it still could be like sting or something like that.
SPEAKER_05You know, for the for those listening, you don't have to entice me to come to the field with arrowheads or marbles, but it doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_04I was gonna say, but if you send a picture of marbles or arrowheads, you're gonna get a phone call a lot quicker than if you didn't send that picture.
SPEAKER_00That's just tossing a couple out.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, well, that's that's my fear. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05That's my fear. When he said you like marbles, I said, mm-hmm. So anyway.
SPEAKER_02But you're not gonna be able to do that. Well, really, there we we planted a nematode resistant variety because we've been cotton for for a pretty good while. And uh there's some spots that are suspect, and we just hadn't pulled a nematode variety.
SPEAKER_05I'll take a but what's also interesting about that, Philip, is that sometimes there's some well, in the past, in fact, we've had some of our initial root nod nemathode resistant varieties were very resistant to get root knot nemathodes, but it did not translate into fusarium wilt resistance. Now that could be And that's what I'm thinking because basically all those nemathodes have to do is knock a hole in the wall and the fusarium climbs in. What happens with the nemathode resistant variety is you don't develop the giant cell, the female can't lay eggs, yada yada yada. But if you do damage it a little bit and create a wound, you may not have the nemathode damage, but it may be enough for the fusarium to get in. So yeah, I'll I check it out. I didn't even slice any of the plants. There ain't much to slice out.
SPEAKER_02Because they they died early.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, well, I'll go out there and check it out, especially after a hard rain like we've had. It's a perfect time to look for cotton. I mean the marble, I mean the marbles.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, well, anyway, nematodes. Yeah, there's a suspect. There's something going on in that field. We just haven't quite figured it out yet. But anyhow, all right. Well, hey, Dr. Roberts already gave the the shout out for the scout schools, June 1st in Tifton, June 9th in Midville. That's the next big events that we got going. 9 a.m. 9 a.m. start scones? We're gonna have scones in Tifton. Peyton's in charge of snacks in Midville. If you want scones in Midville, call Peyton Sapp. Maybe, maybe he'll make them. All right. So um, a lot of stuff, a lot of good stuff going on, a lot of stuff left to do in the field. So I hope it goes smooth for everybody. And if you have any questions, just reach out to your county agent. Thank you for listening to this episode of Talkin' Cotton with the UGA Cotton Team. If you have any questions about anything we talked about today, or if there's anything you'd like for us to talk about in the future, please contact your local UGA County Extension agent. And as always, you can find us on all major podcast platforms. Be sure to like, share with your friends, and subscribe so you can stay up to date.
.jpg)