Welasco, Texas
September 10, 2008
Hurricane Dolly is but a memory in the weather history books,
yet she continues to threaten the Rio Grande Valley’s cotton
industry in the form of scattered cottonseeds,
Texas AgriLife
Extension Service experts say.
Those seeds are now sprouting in the most unlikely of places,
providing food and shelter for the dreaded boll weevil, whose
populations could severely damage next year’s crop, said LeeRoy
Rock, an AgriLife Extension cotton entomologist in Weslaco.
“These volunteer cotton crops are now popping up everywhere,”
Rock said. “We’ve seen them along roadsides, in irrigation
ditches, even in residential lawns and flowerbeds. It’s
important that everybody pitch in to get rid of them.”
Dolly’s strong winds and heavy rains in late July destroyed most
of what was left of the 2008 cotton crop, already battered by
drought then by heavy rains. But in the process, Rock said, she
also scattered lint and seeds far and wide.
“We’re still calculating damage estimates for the 2008 cotton
crop,” he said, “but we’re also concerned about what boll
weevils could do to the 2009 crop now that they have plenty of
volunteer crops in which to feed and reproduce.”
State law mandates that cotton growers destroy any remnants of
cotton stalks by Sept. 1 so as to remove over-wintering sites
for boll weevils.
Several agencies, including AgriLife Extension, Texas Department
of Agriculture and the Boll Weevil Eradication Foundation are
working with growers to implement an integrated pest management
approach to prevent a boll weevil population explosion in 2009,
Rock said.
But with so many volunteer plants now sprouting outside
commercial cotton fields, control will be difficult at best.
“Eradicating post-season cotton stalks is routine work for
growers,” he said, “But now we’re asking for the public’s help
in getting rid of any cotton plants they may encounter in their
landscaping by simply pulling them up by hand.”
City and state road maintenance personnel are also being asked
to help by mowing and spraying herbicide on roadsides.
Irrigation districts can help by removing cotton plants from
irrigation and drainage ditches, he said.
“If we can get residents to pull cotton plants out of their
flowerbeds and landscaping in the urban areas of the Valley,
that will go a long way toward reducing the amount of
insecticides growers will have to spray to control boll weevils
this fall and in the spring and summer of 2009,” Rock said.
“This kind of IPM approach is cost effective and helps preserve
our natural resources by decreasing the amount of chemical
introduced into the environment,” he said. |
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