Winter has started early across Northern New York. Cornell Beef Extension Specialist Dr. Mike Baker shares some Do’s and Don’ts for Barn Snow Removal from Curt Gooch and Sam Steinberg of Cornell’s Biological and Environmental Engineering Department.

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Please see two recent media stories on the NNYADP-funded alfalfa snout beetle control project that developed the use of native NY nematodes to help manage the highly-destructive alfalfa pest, the alfalfa snout beetle.

Lowville Journal Republican article by Whitney Randolph

Malone Telegram article by Olivia Pepe

A biocontrol treatment developed to help Northern New York alfalfa growers is now showing early promise of proving useful to New York apple growers.

Early field trials in four NY orchard plantings have shown a reduction of 70 to 97 percent, compared with untreated plantings, in the populations of plum curculio, a key pest of eastern U.S. apple crops.

With long-term funding from the farmer-driven Northern New York Agricultural Development Program, Cornell University entomologist Elson Shields developed a biocontrol protocol for using a combination of native New York nematodes to reduce alfalfa snout beetle populations in NNY alfalfa crops.

Shields and Cornell colleague Art Agnello are now applying nematodes to control plum curculio in organic-production apple plantings.

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Note: The NNYADP has three new on-farm demonstration projects on dairy farms in Northern New York showing the value of using the nematodes to reduce alfalfa snout beetle/ASB populations. Those farms are in the North Bangor/Malone area in Franklin County, at Brier Hill in St. Lawrence County, and in Turin/Lewis County.

The NNYADP is also funding the selective breeding of alfalfa snout beetle-resistant varieties of alfalfa to give farmers a one-two punch for managing ASB.

CCE Jefferson-Lewis Field Crops Specialist Mike Hunter asks the question: Do you have Alfalfa Snout Beetles on your farm? in the October 2014 issue of the CCE newsletters for Jefferson and Lewis counties.

He notes “Every year we discover new infestations of alfalfa snout beetles on farms.”

The NNYADP funded long-term research that is helping farmers use a cost-effective combination of biocontrol nematodes and ASB-resistant alfalfa varieties to control the highly destructive pest.

Click here to learn more about identifying and managing ASB on your farm.

Canker on stem, and inter-veinal discoloration of leaves above the canker caused by northern stem canker. Photo: Jaime Cummings/Cornell University.

Click here to see the WWNY TV 7 report by Asa Stackel on this story

As part of the Northern New York Agricultural Development Program-funded Creating a NNY Corn and Soybean Disease Diagnosis and Assessment Database project, Cornell Cooperative Extension Field Crops Specialists Mike Hunter and Kitty O’Neil scouted soybean fields in the region. The following article, which appears in the current What’s Cropping Up? newsletter from Cornell University, shares details on the discovery of this crop disease in New York state.

 

Northern Stem Canker: A New Challenge for New York Soybean Producers
by Jaime A. Cummings and Gary C. Bergstrom
Cornell University School of Integrative Plant Science, Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology Section

As part of 2014 research projects supported by the New York Soybean Check-off Program and the Northern New York Agricultural Development Program, participating Cornell Cooperative Extension/CCE Educators have been scouting soybean production fields, recording observations on diseases, and sending plant samples to the Field Crop Pathology Laboratory at Cornell University for positive diagnosis of disease problems. A serious disease called ‘northern stem canker’ was confirmed for the first time in New York soybean fields. It showed up in samples from soybean fields in Jefferson, Livingston, Niagara, Ontario, Orleans, Seneca, and Wayne Counties collected by CCE Educators Mike Hunter, Mike Stanyard and Bill Verbeten.

The disease was diagnosed at Cornell based on characteristic symptoms and the laboratory isolation of the causal fungus and confirmation of a portion of its DNA sequence.

Soybeans are also being scouted in other areas of New York in 2014, but so far this disease has not been detected outside of the seven counties mentioned above.

Northern stem canker (NSC) is caused by the fungus Diaporthe phaseolorum var. caulivora and differs from a related fungus, Diaporthe phaseolorum var. meridionalis, that causes southern stem canker throughout the southern U.S. NSC occurs in most Midwestern states and in Ontario, but this is, to our knowledge, the first confirmation in New York or the northeastern U.S. Reported yield losses in the Midwest have ranged from minor to in excess of 50%, so the presence of the pathogen is considered a significant factor for soybean production.

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Click here for NNYADP press release