Rice Delphacid Presents New Threat To MS Crop

Jan 29, 2026

By Bonnie Coblentz

Rice delphacid is a plant hopper that has been damaging Texas rice since 2015, and this invasive threat to Southern rice production made its appearance in Mississippi last year.

Rice delphacid is native to Central and South America and has been slowly moving north. In addition to Mississippi, it was found in Louisiana and Arkansas in 2025.

Don Cook and Tyler Towles, entomologists with the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station, found this pest in mid-September in Mississippi State University rice fields at the Delta Research and Extension Center in Stoneville.

After its discovery in Washington County, it was also observed in Bolivar, Humphreys, Leflore and Sunflower counties, which are some of the state’s primary rice-producing areas.

“Rice delphacids feed on various grasses, with rice being its primary and most economically significant host,” Cook said. “They show up in very high numbers, and in addition to the leaf damage that causes yield loss, they excrete excess sugar as honeydew, and this leads to sooty mold in the rice.

Source : msstate.edu

Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.