I’m extremely excited to introduce the presenter for our third segment of the 2021 Cotton Focus Video Series- Dr. Bob Kemerait, Professor and Extension Specialist for the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Georgia. Dr. Kemerait’s program covers corn, cotton, peanuts and soybeans for the state of Georgia. As many of you know, Georgia cotton growers are faced with big challenges every year, including boll rot, Bacterial blight, Cotton leafroll dwarf virus, Fusarium wilt, nematodes, Target spot, Areolate mildew and seedling diseases. Dr. Kemerait’s program guides his growers through each of these challenges. While we face our own unique challenges, I always find it beneficial to learn about challenges faced by other regions and I believe understanding these issues from other perspectives makes us better at producing within our own environment.
On behalf of Dr. Heather Kelly and myself, special thanks to Dr. Kemerait for taking the time out of his extremely busy schedule to deliver this presentation. I should also add, Dr. Kemerait is on Twitter. I thoroughly enjoy following his profile- his posts are very informative and often entertaining; who else do you know that has video of a turtle eating a cotton plant? You can find his profile here.
Dr. Kemerait’s presentation is linked below:
Again, thank you Dr. Kemerait!
Our second series of presentations for the 2021 Cotton Focus Video Series are from Dr. Larry Steckel’s program. Dr. Steckel and his PhD student, Clay Perkins, will be presenting two topics for us- the first is ‘Grass Management in Xtend and Enlist Cotton’ and the second is ‘Characterization and Management of Glyphosate-Resistant Junglerice’. We are extremely blessed to have Dr. Steckel in Tennessee and I’m excited to have these two very important topics covered, especially after the challenges we’ve faced with grasses in recent years.
To kick off the 2021 Cotton Focus Video Series, we are extremely grateful to have two videos from Dr. Scott Stewart- one discussing updates on thrips and one discussing updates bollworms. As many of you know, Dr. Scott Stewart has recently accepted a new role as the Director of the West Tennessee Research and Education Center. While we all hate to see him leave his current position, we are definitely excited to have him remaining on the team and I am very thankful he was willing to take time out of his busy schedule to still develop and deliver this content! Dr. Stewart has also recorded a presentation on plant bugs; we will be posting that a little later in this series.
After much deliberation, the decision was made earlier this year to move Cotton Focus to a VIRTUAL event. Instead of making all presentations within a single day, we will be posting a few presentations each week on this blog (
There are two VIRTUAL county meetings coming up next week that many of you may be interested in attending.
Preliminary data from the 2020 TN Cotton CST Data is now available. We are releasing an average table for the XtendFlex trials and the Enlist trials today. We only tested the XtendFlex and Enlist varieties together in a handful of locations. I will release the average tables from those locations later, along with results from each individual location. Also, stay tuned for the OVT small plot trial data average table which includes 44 commercial and pre-commercial varieties. The last of the OVT samples should gin during the first of next week.