California adds Gly to "known to cause cancer" list

For every pest specie of insect, there's about 1400 beneficial or predatory species. Nature worked out the solution to many of these pest problems eons ago. Usually an infestation of one or another types of problematic bugs are a result of an imbalance in the system. I think if we were just better at keeping the "system" balanced and healthy most of those problems would disappear. Most of the time we're treating symptoms rather than the actual cause.

I used to have a horrible time every year with web worms on my beans, I changed over to no-till and increased the diversity in my crop rotations and cover crops and that problem just went away on it's own. I've not used an insecticide or any fungicide now for two years except on the pumpkins and that's a different issue. I've not been able to change them over to no till due to other parties involved. Pumpkins this year were overwhelmed by bugs and powdery mildew. I plan on attacking that issue head on next year.

 

We had soybean plots with 20+ bushel an acre loss from aphids this year.

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That sucks! They're a real b*tch on cucurbits too. There's a lot of predatory insects that feast on aphids. I've never had a problem yet with them on soybeans. My wheat this year had a time period when they got fairly bad but within threshold and then lacewings and lady bugs moved in and cleaned them up in a week. It was amazing. Of course the wheat still sucked from all the rain we had a severe vomitoxin problem here. Even with that, my wheat tested 5ppm and everyone elses around me ranged from 8-18, heard one account of a 23ppm test. The elevators here actually told several people they'd (the producer) have to pay them (the elevator) to take the wheat. I didn't use any fungicide on mine at all and several local guys sprayed four times.

 

I guess that would explain the outrageous number of ladybugs we had in our beans this year.