The Volunteer Cotton Herbicide Trial Field Day will be held May 29 in Weslaco to help farmers learn the latest on ridding their corn and grain sorghum fields of volunteer cotton, according to Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service personnel.
t will be held from 9-10 a.m. at Texas A&M’s Hiler Annex Farm, located one-half mile east of the intersection of Farm-to-Market Road 1015 and Mile 10 East, north of Weslaco. One Texas Department of Agriculture continuing education unit will be available for certified pesticide applicators.
Danielle Sekula-Ortiz, an AgriLife Extension cotton integrated pest management agent at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Weslaco, said the field day is designed to allow growers to see for themselves which herbicides work best.
“When growers plant corn or grain sorghum in a field that previously had been planted in cotton, unwanted volunteer cotton plants tend to pop up,” she said. “It’s important that they rid their fields of these cotton plants, usually early in the season, to help keep populations of boll weevils down.”
To help growers decide which products work best in either cotton or grain sorghum, Sekula-Ortiz planted a small demonstration plot to show the effectiveness of 10 different herbicides on corn and another seven on grain sorghum.
“Hopefully, growers can treat these plants effectively so that the plants can’t produce pinhead squares where boll weevils feed and reproduce,” she said.
After growers have observed the herbicide trials, they can move on to another nearby demonstration plot to see the results of a cotton variety trial, according to Brad Cowan, an AgriLife Extension agent for Hidalgo County.
“We’ll have two trials growers can observe — one is what we call a monster trial and the other is a smaller RACE trial, or replicated agronomic cotton evaluation trial,” he said.
Young volunteer cotton plants sprayed with a herbicide are shown here next to corn stalks. The cotton is showing phytotoxicity in the form of leaf burn.
The monster trial consists of some 30 cotton varieties planted in small plots in order to show a greater number of varieties, he said.
“The RACE trial has only ten varieties, but these are planted in larger plots to allow growers to see how they would grow in a commercial size field. All these varieties have also been planted in trials throughout Hidalgo and Cameron counties.”
Another entrance to the annex farm is located one-quarter mile north of the intersection of Mile 2 West and Mile 10 North, Cowan said.
Source:agrilife.org