Finally got to see a little more sunshine this week and it looks like the plants responded. Fred dropped some water on us but not as much as initially anticipated, so that’s good. Daycare shut down because of Covid this week so I had a little helper checking fields with me. Della wanted to help so her job was looking for bugs. She would pull a cotton plant back and say “no bugs in here daddy.” I did have to watch her closely because she kept wanting to pull all the pretty flowers off.
Cotton: Later planted cotton seems to be blooming well. I’ve seen some cotton starting to flush and load up in the top. That’s probably due to ground drying out and the plant is able to take up more of the fertilizer we’ve been putting out to keep it moving. Some boll are starting to crack down in the canopy and I talked to a guy in a neighboring county that should be defoliating in about 2 weeks. It’s slowly starting to get here.
Peanuts: We’ll have some 140-day old peanuts next week. From the looks of things, the majority of peanut crop is looking a about a week off right now. Heavy thrips pressure and herbicide injury early on really slowed them down. The cooler temperatures had an effect too. I do want to start looking once they hit 120 days just so we can stay on track with them. I’d rather start looking a little early than a few days too late. Mrs. Cathy emailed the maturity schedule this week and it has also been posted to the blog site. One thing we’re going to do differently this year is that I’m going to ask that you bring some on the vines. Peg strength is a big part of the decision and we haven’t really focused on it much in the past, but this year we are. Disease pressure is still pretty high. If you have 12Ys, your white mold material will protect against Rhizoctonia limb rot but we’ve found Azoxystrobin and Elatus work really against it.
EPA: The US EPA announced yesterday that it will revoke all tolerances for chlorpyrifos. This will take effect 6 months after the final rule is published in the Federal Register. I do not know how long that will take, but I expect a matter of weeks. This will be a big problem for people who have burrower bug issues. The link below will take you to an EPA website that provides additional information in addition to a link to the draft rule.
https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/chlorpyrifos