09 Aug Scouting Your Sorghum Fields For Late Season Insects
Late July and early August bring a lot of important events like county fairs, last minute vacations before school starts, and late season insects in sorghum. Recently the two that seem to be showing up the most are sugarcane aphids and headworms. As a quick note, sugarcane aphids have been renamed “sorghum aphids”.
Sorghum aphids were first reported in Kansas this past week in Sedgwick, Ellsworth, and Pottawatomie counties. We have not had a substantial sorghum aphid outbreak in the Plains in several years. The concern is that most of the sorghum acres have a long ways to go before physiological maturity. Keeping an eye out for SA is a good idea while you are out admiring your clean Double Team fields. K-State’s Agronomy eUpdates on August 4th have all the information on the SA map and scouting techniques. See link below.
Sorghum headworms are a very common insect that will feed on about anything and has many names such as the tobacco bud worm, corn earworm, and cotton bollworm. So basically take the economically important part of a plant and add “worm” to the end you are probably not far off. I suppose if they liked aluminum we would have beer canworms. Either way, they are very easy to scout for and there are lots of options for controlling sorghum headworms. Once again, the recent K-State Agronomy eupdate highlighted some of the new control options. See link below.