Reading Time: 4 minutes What do shelterbelts, pivot corners and field margins have in common? No, they’re not unprofitable or “wasted” areas. As natural habitats for beneficial insects, including pollinators and predators of crop pests, those non-cropped areas may be worth their square footage in gold. Alejandro Costamagna, an assistant professor in the University of Manitoba’s department of entomology, […] Read more
Give your insect friends a home
Leaving some non-crop areas with a diverse range of perennial vegetation can save you money on insecticide
Preparing for western bean cutworm in 2017
#PestPatrol with Tracey Baute, OMAFRA
Reading Time: 3 minutes Western bean cutworm (WBC) has earned the designation of primary pest of corn in Ontario, and it is starting to become important for dry bean growers too. Quality concerns outweigh yield loss with this pest, and when conditions are conducive to mycotoxins, as in 2016, WBC’s impact is very evident. The flurry of tweets under […] Read more
The swede midge threat
Swede midge continues to confound Near North canola growers, and it could migrate farther south
Reading Time: 5 minutes By 2015, Terry Phillips, then chair of the Ontario Canola Growers Association, was advising growers in Ontario’s Near North to stop planting canola on farms that had been hit by the recent arrival of the swede midge. By then, yields were already getting cut by as much as 50 per cent by the pest, with […] Read more
Integrated Pest Management gaining credibility
More and more growers are beginning to embrace the IPM approach to insect control, and the system is beginning to bear fruit
Reading Time: 7 minutes A few years back Owen Olfert and other entomologists approached a group of growers with what might have seemed like an outrageous request — don’t spray for wheat midge. They were in the process of introducing a new parasite to knock back midge populations, but there was a problem — the critter in question was […] Read more
Crop pest scouts may gain from ‘app’lied knowledge
Insect ID is a challenge — but Prairie entomologists say there will soon be an app for that, and a whole lot more
Reading Time: 7 minutes One of the most challenging aspects of crop protection will always be the flying, crawling and chomping critters that show up every season, hoping to take a bite out of your profits. There are a lot of them, they can be hard to tell apart, and wind and weather can determine if insects arrive in […] Read more
Pest Patrol: Are there any new insect pests that we should be alert for?
#PestPatrol with Mike Cowbrough, OMAFRA
Reading Time: 2 minutes The following information was provided by Tracey Baute, field crop entomologist, OMAFRA. Cereal leaf beetles feed on wheat, oat, corn, forages and grassy weeds. Spring plantings are most attractive, particularly late plantings, though some winter wheat can be infested in the spring. Both adults and larvae cause damage by chewing long strips of tissue between […] Read more
Watch out for bollworms
Old World bollworm may be a severe threat to agriculture in North America
Reading Time: 4 minutes Asian soybean rust, aflatoxin in corn and Palmer amaranth are but three examples of disease and weed species that have made huge news in the U.S. but haven’t yet crossed the border into Canada in a big way. It makes it difficult to issue a credible alert about a new pest threat called Helicoverpa armigera […] Read more
Help the insects eat each other
Insecticides don’t just kill the bad bugs — they also kill their enemies
Reading Time: 4 minutes Terry Young has never sprayed for insects. “I’ve had the odd bertha and lygus in my canola and wheat midge in my wheat, but they haven’t been an issue for as long as I’ve been farming, which is 30-plus years now,” he says. Young farms at Lacombe, which is one of the most productive agricultural […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
