By MICHELE F. MIHALJEVICH
Indiana Correspondent

WOOSTER, Ohio — While Ron Hammond is pretty confident soybean aphids won’t be a serious problem this year, he’s still not betting everything on that statement.

“I’m not willing to write them off completely,” said Hammond, extension field crop entomologist with the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center of The Ohio State University in Wooster. “I’m willing to raise the pot to say they won’t be a problem. Not the house, and not the farm, though.”

Numbers of soybean aphids have been low this year, not only in states such as Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, but also to the north, where aphids traditionally begin their journey south, Hammond said.

“Most of the Midwest has seen very low or very moderate numbers of aphids,” he said. “But I’m also concerned about Michigan, Ontario and Quebec. Things are looking up for farmers to not have problems with them this year.”

The spring’s extreme moisture accounts for a lot of the decrease in aphid numbers, said John Obermeyer, extension entomologist at Purdue University. In a normal year, soybean aphid numbers would boom to the north of Indiana and then those insects would be sent south by winds and storm fronts, he said.

“This year, aphid numbers have been plunging everywhere, including Indiana,” he said. “It’s tough for the poor aphids this year.”
Aphids compete with the soybean plant for moisture and nutrients, which leads to decreased yields, Obermeyer said. While farmers benefit from lower aphid numbers, researchers do not, he added.
“This year, we were hoping to work on establishing a parasite for aphids – a small, stingless wasp,” he said. “But when you don’t have aphids, that’s hard to do.”

Hammond said he’s concerned about recent reports that some farmers are putting additional applications of insecticides on fields.
“They’re putting on fungicides as a preventative to help with plant health, and they decide to go ahead and put on more insecticide as well,” he said. “They end up destroying a lot of beneficial insects.
“You end up killing a lot of predators (to aphids) and if we’d happen to get aphids coming in right after that, who knows what could happen?”

Farmers should still pay attention to their fields and check for aphid infestation for the next two or three weeks, he said.

“If we’re going to see any kind of large migration, it would be in the next week or week and a half,” he said.