With cotton squaring, growers should have someone scouting their fields weekly for tarnished plant bugs. With the dry conditions, most of the adults are in silking corn. As corn pollinates and the silks dry, I expect many of these adults to move into cotton, especially if dry weeds continue to be a poor host.

It pays more to protect cotton from tarnished plant bugs early (during squaring and early bloom) than later. By protecting the earliest squares, we can set fruit earlier and potentially make an earlier-maturing and higher-yielding crop.

This is a pest with a spatially spotty distribution. The only way to effectively manage tarnished plant bug is to treat each field individually. Even within a field there will be hot and cold spots for tarnished plant bug. Check both high vigor (preferred area) and non-high vigor (non-preferred area) areas of the field.

More tips on how to scout, when to treat, and what to treat with can be found here. Note that we recommend growers use the same tarnished plant bug threshold on ThryvOn varieties, as non-ThryvOn varieties. Here is complete coverage of how to manage plant bugs in ThryvOn varieties.