"The whole thing is that it just didn't do what it was supposed to do when it came to controlling the range of insects they said it would," says Paul Pilsner, one of the first consultants to alert Monsanto of the bollworm damage to Bt cotton this year and one of the several South Texas consultants dealing with angry and upset growers over bollworm damage to Bt cotton. "The main people at Monsanto told me that it was going to work on the bollworm enough to where we wouldn't have to be doing any spraying; that it had enough suppression of the bollworm where it wouldn't be an economic problem."
Other growers across the Belt, however, were more pleased with the product.
"We grew a little over 5000 acres of Bt cotton in the whole operation -- it's here to stay," says Tehula, MS, grower Sonny Diggs.
And, Randy Deaton, a product development manager at Monsanto who has worked with Bt cotton for almost a decade, claims the product did just what it was supposed to do -- give 90% to 95% control against bollworms, and that it was extraordinarily high numbers of bollworms, not product failure or product misrepresentation, that led growers in many states to spray.
"With any new product in any given year you're going to find someone who is unhappy with it," Deaton says. "We'll certainly be honest with people -- under certain circumstances it may need supplemental treatments."
HEAVY BOLLWORM INFESTATIONS?
Monsanto has stated on its internet website that "the amount of bollworm pressure was reported to be 20-50 times the levels needed to trigger traditional chemical control. Given these extreme infestation conditions, the need for supplemental insecticide treatments on a portion of the Bollgard cotton acreage is not surprising."
But some consultants say they were surprised at having to spray and that the reasons for that surprise were that their bollworm pressure was not that high and that Monsanto had promised 95% control of the bollworm under all but extraordinary cases.
"Monsanto representatives got up at the meetings and virtually said, 'Your days of spraying budworm and bollworm are over with if you plant this Bt cotton.' A lot of my growers, especially the ones who had to spray, felt like Monsanto really dropped the ball on that, " says Danny Bennett, a consultant in Central Georgia. "Because bollworm pressure has been light the past few years, that might be why Monsanto thought the pressure this season was unprecedentedly high. But if you look at bollworm pressure here over a 10-year period, you'd see that the pressure this season was only light to moderate."
Louisiana entomologist Ralph Bagwell called local populations "just slightly above normal." And he added, "As far as everything I've heard, it's been more widespread in Louisiana than any other state. We have approximately 200,000 acres, 75% was sprayed at least one time or more for bollworm. I have seen or heard of instances of upward of 80% boll damage from bollworm."
In Alabama, state entomologist Ron Smith said bollworm numbers were much higher this year, probably because of the high increase in corn acreage.
"Last year we couldn't find a bollworm in the acreage. This year we were finding 200 to 400 eggs per 100 plants in that peak period in July where they broke through on the Gulf Coast," Smith says, adding that he and most others in his state are extremely happy with the Bollgard control of bollworms, despite having to make one to two chemical applications on about 8% of the Bt cotton acreage.
Smith continues, "Looking back, our growers and advisors should have reacted quicker. In which case, all damage would have been eliminated. This does not mean that we need to use egg thresholds. I'm not saying we wouldn't have needed to spray but there would have been no damage. The pyrethroids work beautifully on bollworm. The problem where damage occurred is we didn't react to do anything when we were finding worms a quarter of an inch long, too large for Bollgard to kill."
Despite the disagreements over exactly how large the bollworm populations were in any given area, the bottom line that most are looking at is cost versus product benefit.
COST VERSUS BENEFIT
Many consultants are reporting that their growers were unhappy about having to spray, due mostly to the $32 an acre technology fee charged by Monsanto.
South Louisiana consultant Harold Lambert, who reported that in most cases he only received 60% bollworm control from his Bt cotton, said, "If there is a bottom line statement in this, it really is to me and my clients not so much of an issue that we had to spray the (bollworms) in the cotton; it is just that we have paid a fee for something that we didn't get and that was bollworm control anywhere close to satisfactory level."
Will Monsanto consider lowering the technology fee for next year? Deaton says right now it is too early to tell.
"We are still assessing what the value is that people received from the technology and it will still be a couple of months before we have all of the information," Deaton says. "You have to wait until yields are back and everyone gets to see the return on their investment in Bollgard."
Mississippi entomologist Blake Layton also warns growers when comparing their Bt and conventional cotton to not just look at insecticide costs for this year but at last year's costs as well.
"One thing we don't want to forget is the threat that tobacco budworm can present and that we don't have any chemistry to effectively deal with it. That difference is not apparent this year because we had unusually high bollworm numbers and they are easily controlled with pyrethroids," Layton says. "If you treat bollworms, you can kill them with $6 of pyrethroids alone. If you are dealing with budworms, you almost double the cost of the application and can almost guarantee you've got to make two applications to get the same level of control. So it costs tree to four times as much to control X population of budworms as it does X populations of bollworms and then you still may not get thorough control."
SCOUTING AND OTHER CHANGES
Growers who do plant Bt cotton next year will go into it with new knowledge gained from this 1996 season. "We learned a lot about Bt cotton," says Louisiana consultant Grady Coburn. "We are going to have to bone up on our sampling techniques, monitoring frequencies, and the amount of time we spend in the fields to better assess the damage potential of the cotton bollworm in Bt cotton."
Some of these scouting changes will include whole plant evaluation rather than terminals only; and checking fields more frequently -- two, possibly three times per week.
"We're going to know a lot more after this year," Deaton says. "Certainly one of the things we will be able to tell people is a little bit better how to scout and we're a little more sensitive to the adjustments that people need to make in order to properly manage the crop and get the most value out of it."
This increase in field scouting time could, for many growers across the Belt, mean an increase in consulting fees for Bt cotton.
"They need to scout more because I can assure you it takes longer in the field to find some of the problems we are talking about right now, much longer," says Smith. "For example, on the fall armyworm, I took two of my summer helpers and we surveyed 3 1/2 hours each -- that's 10 1/2 hours total -- all we had done were 110 plants. Now that's if we were quantifying them right down to a tee to do research work, but still they are very difficult to find and scouting is much slower."
In addition to scouting techniques, Monsanto and other researchers across the Belt are looking at the following:
"We are still very bullish on the technology and think it has a lot to offer growers. We hope everyone is patient," Deaton says. "It's difficult to learn how to use something new, but something as new as Bollgard makes it even more difficult. I hope everyone appreciates how unique this product is. It will take a lot of adjustment and learning by everyone."
8/19/97