Todd Gleason: From the land grant university in Urbana Champaign Illinois, this is a special edition of the closing market report presentations from the twenty twenty five farm assets conference crop sciences for the 2026 growing season. Season. I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason. Coming up next, we'll dive into the outlook for the 2026 growing season with a focus on crop sciences. Join Stephanie Porter from the Illinois Soybean Association and University of Illinois Extension Entomologist Nick Sider as they discuss the latest research on pest management, weed resistance, and innovative on farm trials aimed at helping farmers navigate the challenges of the coming year.

Todd Gleason: Stephanie Porter is here. She's from the Illinois Soybean Association and Nick Sider is with us as well. Nick, is an entomologist, field crops on campus at the University of Illinois. And Stephanie, I quite frankly don't recall what your title is at the Illinois Soaping Association. Can you tell me about, what that is and what you do there?

Stephanie Porter: Sure. I do a little bit of everything.

Todd Gleason: I was aware of that.

Stephanie Porter: I'm the outreach agronomist. I work with a team of now 10. So soybean production department out known as the agronomy team. I head up originally, I've been here for ISA about four years almost. And I headed out the outreach portion.

So that would be the field advisor portion, fieldadvisor.org. So everything that comes with that apparently, we need an agronomist to look that over, but we also have some great communications teams that do field Pfizer as well. And then I've also just recently as we've started our on farm trial network, been the boots on the ground. I'm the scout along with Darby Dansel in the back doing that as well.

Todd Gleason: Okay. And then let's talk a little bit about entomology, Nick. Sometimes there are years when bugs are a huge problem. Problem. Insects are just an enormous problem.

I think it's been a while now. So it's been calm for you. But you do a lot of interesting work. What are the things that you have been working on on campus? I think some cover crops, maybe some other things as it's related to insects that you're finding of most interest and that farmers tend to want to hear about.

Nick Seiter: Yeah, sure. So over the last few years, we've been doing a handful of projects. I would say the one the one insect pest that like continuously drives some yield loss, at least in parts of the state, not so much around here, is rootworm. So we work on rootworm quite a bit, evaluating controls, that kind of thing. We've looked at the impacts of cover crops on insect management.

Most of the time, pretty subtle, so that's been good. I would say the risk if you've got like a grass ahead of corn, there's a risk of some stand reducing issues there. Generally speaking, that grass ahead of soybean has been not zero risk, but relatively low risk when it comes to insect pests at least. We've been doing some work actually with ISA looking at the return on investment of insecticides in soybean. And I think as most of you know, like most of the insecticides we use in in soybean, we're not often necessarily responding to, like, insect densities in the field for a variety of reasons.

Often we're responding to we're going across the field, or we bought seed that had a seed treatment in it or something like that. So we're looking at some of those approaches, kind of tying the insect data into it. That's what I do is count bugs, right? So I count bugs in these trials. And what we found in that work over the last couple of years is that when we don't have an insect population, and we've done this trial 15 times now, I think 13 times where we've had usable yield data, we haven't exceeded an economic threshold for insects in any of those trials.

We haven't lost yield from insects in any of those trials. So it's been, you know, kind of what we were expecting to see, but it's good to line that up. We're hoping to see what happens when we actually exceed some of those thresholds. Beyond that, answering questions about Cornleaf Bay Foods when they came up a couple years ago, answering questions about

Stephanie Porter: Grape Collapses.

Nick Seiter: Grape Collaspis. Yeah. This last year, we had a little bit of Grape Collaspis action going on, down by, like, Mount Auburn, Springfield area in particular. Little bit everything that way.

Todd Gleason: You mentioned

Stephanie Porter: I wanted to add too that I think a good point is that you're doing some small trialing as well as you're doing some on farm trials.

Nick Seiter: Oh yeah. Too. Yeah, absolutely. So we're doing small plots where we can control everything. So we can have multiple treatments, we can have an o insecticide control that's going to reliably be an o insecticide control.

We can do whatever we want on those, right? And it's just research farm plots that we're janking up if we do get something that comes in there. We're also duplicating this on farm, using insecticide treatments essentially of the farmer's choice. So so looking at what they're actually doing on their farms. Larger plots, you know, bigger yield samples, that kind of thing.

And and we've we've seen really the same thing in in both cases which has been good. You know there's a lot of reasons to to duplicate this kind of work on on mortgage plots. So it's we've been encouraged that we've seen the same thing.

Todd Gleason: I want to take you back through some history. Relatively speaking, you mentioned the Western Corn Rootworm was the insect that you get most of your questions about. I want to lay some history and then come back to today with that. BT products for corn came into existence in 1995 if I remember correctly, it was '5 or six, I think it was '5. '96.

Six. It was for European corn borer. Those were high dose BT products. We never hear about the European corn borer ever as a problem and haven't since then. However, the BT products for Western Corn Rootworm came into existence in 2003, and we do hear about issues with it.

Some of you will remember that there were set asides sort of blocks that you had to plant, then it went to refuge in a bag at some point point. But what's the difference between the high dose that has controlled the European corn borer and the quote golden child unquote has not been found that's resistant to this product to the best of my knowledge yet. And the western corn rootworm which is a low dose product.

Nick Seiter: Yeah. So I'll tell you in a couple of different terms. What we're trying to achieve with that high dose is we're trying to kill what we call heterozygotes. So they've got the resistant allele on one hand, the susceptible on the other. In terms of practical, it means with European corn borer on day one of those BT traits being introduced, about one in ten thousand, something like that survived on it.

One in ten thousand of those European corn borers. When it was introduced for corn rootworms, so like on day one, no preselection, no exposure, nothing before, we killed about ninety three percent of the corn worms. If you take that out of ten thousand, that's seven hundred, is that right? Am I doing that math right? It's a lot more than one.

You have a lot more available on day one to start passing those alleles on. So that's, in a nutshell, what we mean by dose. The reason that dose is so important, when a trait is rare in the populations, like when there's not much of it out there, it's almost always a heterozygote. Know, almost always it's paired with the much more common susceptible trait. If you kill those heterozygotes, you maintain really low frequencies of that trait.

The other thing that happens, and this I think is kinda interesting, so with European corn borer, they mate randomly and they disperse a lot when they mate. They shuffle really, really good. They shuffle their populations. With corn rootworm, that little female beetle climbs up the cornstalk, and she begins releasing a sex pheromone before she leaves that plant. And about nine times out of 10, she's mated before she ever leaves that plant.

They don't shuffle very well. They don't mix. You get these kinda isolated pockets of corn rootworm naturally. The really kind like the the interesting part of the story, we have seen resistance in European corn borers since about 2018. Where we have seen it, it's not so much in The US.

We we've seen one little bit in The US over in Connecticut. Okay? It's been in Canada, and it's been in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Manitoba, in areas where they grow just a little little bit of corn, and it's surrounded by, like, millions of acres of not corn, whether it's forest or, you know, prairie or whatever it might be. So you get this isolation effect even though those disperse very well because that corn is so isolated. Rootworm almost does that on its own with its mating behavior.

So like, your field is different from my trial field in Urbana is different from your fields as far as the rootworm population because they don't shuffle around as much. They they they they're more kinda insulated, and that contributes to the problem as well. The third element here, some things, some insects are really good at developing resistance. European corn borer is one of them. As far as I'm aware, there's no insecticide resistant European corn borer populations anywhere.

I've never heard of such a thing. With corn rootworm, they've developed resistance to multiple insecticide modes of action. They developed resistance to crop rotation. So, like, their their host plant relationship, they've developed resistance to that. They're quite good at overcoming these things in a way that European corn worm is is.

So that that's part of the equation as well.

Todd Gleason: The crop rotation took about twenty five years if I remember correctly for the resistance to develop. And when you say they don't shuffle very well, they do move though pretty quickly, but they're wind borne, usually they go west or they go east on the westerlies pretty fast, but not back to the west very quickly when a new

Todd Gleason: line develops. Right?

Nick Seiter: Yeah. And and the other thing about that, like, there there's a portion of the population that gets up and goes. Most of the population sort of stays. So it's not all of them get up and go and move to the east. It's only a I forget what the actual share is.

I want to say it's like 30% or something like that.

Todd Gleason: They get up and go but they ride the winds just like many other things. If you've got questions, go

Todd Gleason: ahead and raise your hand on insects or agronomy of any sort. So Stephanie, tell me about the kinds of research that you do, what happens at Illinois Soaping Association, the research farm

Todd Gleason: that was recently acquired, those sorts of things, and how you might be working with the university and other organizations.

Stephanie Porter: Okay. That's a lot. Okay. Well, let's start here. I think what it all boils down to is we do this grower concern survey.

And anybody in this room can take this, and we've had not just farmers. We've had hundreds of people take this in the last two, three years. That since the agronomy teams formed. And it's really interesting the last several, I would say last year or so, we were just talking to Doctor. Hager about this, know, we we contribute more than a million dollars in agronomic research at this point.

So how do we decide? You know how are those check off dollars invested? And so that's a lot of money to go out. And so when we did the survey last year for example, the number one thing was people wanted to look at actual no till practices and cover crops and that type of thing. It was number one on our survey.

Next up is no surprise to me, me being previously in the industry. We paid big bucks for a marketing company to do this across The US. We get the same answer whenever ISA does it within Illinois, and that is weeds. So whether that be resistance that's also going to be how are some other tactics other tools that we can use to get rid of the weed issue. And we're also doing funding not only research with re resistance but also a lot of people like to plant early soybeans early in Illinois so how is that changing waterhemp?

It is. And so that's an example of what doctor Hager is working on most recently. And Doctor. Pat Traynall just did a webinar not too long ago which recorded and is on field advisor. Talking about why isn't Liberty working like it used to.

Is this resistance or is this environmental? And that's a big deal as well. Some of the hot topics currently. Some other things obviously insects and diseases, that's no surprise. People are worried about whether pesticides are becoming resistant.

They're also very concerned about new and emerging pests and diseases. Why does Stephanie keep talking about red crown rot? That's a hot topic. These are things that farmers are putting on their survey or they're calling me up and asking me about. And so they want researchers to work on soybean cyst nematode of course.

Double crop soybeans is a big deal in Illinois. And so we put forth research dollars towards that as well as diversifying crop systems within the state. But with anything, I have a IPM background. When we start diversifying we add more cover crop species, more wheat, that's great. But what happens with the pests too?

And so that's kinda goes back, it all goes hand in hand and works together. And then we're trying to start doing some on farm trialing. We when we first started out three years ago, people kept coming to us and talking about sulfur. They're putting sulfur on in front of their corn, but what about soybeans? My brother's doing the same thing.

Should we putting be putting on before soybeans? And so that is one of our first action trials that we carried out in '25 and then also in '26. But how can we work with other researchers and tie that all together? Well we have Doctor. Fred Belo also working on tissue testing.

When is the correct time? What leaf should we be taking? What are the right concentrations? We've just always done it the way the lab told us. Is that the correct way?

So would you say fortunately or unfortunately? Darby and I did a lot of tissue testing this year as well. Which she's very familiar with from Doctor. Belo's lab. So those are some, I guess just some little things that we're working on.

We're also doing some on farm trialing this year with and this is past but Darby's really into the cover crops as well as looking at barley, cereal rye, and then not within the farming like a 40 acre large plot on farm plot. We're also doing double crop looking at different populations of double crop. And then also, like I said, sulfur. So basically they want us to be scouting year round is what I figured out.

Todd Gleason: Something you mentioned early in your comments, Nick, was insecticides being just applied relatively speaking, I'll say arbitrarily. For instance, with fungicides. What good do they do in the field exactly?

Nick Seiter: So with with an insecticide, what we're trying to do is kill an insect. Right? Like, that's that's our goal. Our our goal is to kill an insect pest. One one thing that we we find, they get tossed in because they're cheap, obviously.

Right? They're, in many cases, quite cheap. Like a generic warrior is like a dollar 50 an acre, something like that.

Todd Gleason: So it

Nick Seiter: doesn't cost very much. They're going across the field. That's the the idea. The the issue with an insecticide so like if you think about weeds, for instance. Aaron Aaron's not here.

We we know in any given field, any year, if you do nothing for weed control, you will fail. Right? They'll get you. If you do nothing to control wheel weeds, they'll get you. We also know that we have to do something for weeds early before the the canopy closes, beginning of the season.

Right? This is I I know you all know this. I'm just making the the comparison. Insects aren't like that. We don't see yield reduction from insects in every field in Illinois.

It never exceeds 10% of the acres where we do. 10% is probably a dramatic overestimate, particularly for for soybean. But the other thing, the really critical thing about insects, it's not always the same time. Right? There's this whole different suite of insect pests that are active at different times of year that are doing different things.

When we apply an insecticide, it's typically going to last seven to ten days. That's about how often the insecticides that we're using most frequently are going to give you some kind of adequate viable level of control for an insect. So to put these out as a preventative, it better be going something that's there in the next seven to ten days. Right? Like for it to have the effect.

One of the great things about the work we're doing here, we're we're we're doing r three, which is the fungicide timing, typically. Right? Two things. One, we pretty much never see anything of any sort of consequence at all with insects at R three. We just don't.

Like if if soybean aphid is not in the system, which is not for us, we don't see a whole heck of a lot happening at R 3. In those plots where we have sprayed at R 3, very often we get, say, bean leaf beetle in late at least like here in East Central Illinois, we see bean leaf beetle all the time late. Wanna know how much impact that r three insecticide has on bean leaf beetle? Zero. So, like, timing is everything when it comes to insecticides.

The reality is what we see in a lot of cases, we had an insecticide, we didn't see a insect infestation. Great. We must have done something. The reality is most of our fields do not have an insect infestation. Not an economic one.

That's why guys like me make their living telling people not to spread it. Right? Like, we we just it's not like weeds. It's not even like diseases necessarily. And so when we do that as a prophylactic, it's fine.

It it might prevent something, but only if it's gonna happen in

Todd Gleason: the next several days.

Nick Seiter: And for us at r three in Illinois, usually it doesn't. Just most of the time that doesn't happen.

Todd Gleason: This is why we have damage thresholds for rescue treatments as opposed to just flying Yeah. Flying it on. Right?

Nick Seiter: Yeah. And I mean, scouting soybeans is hard. Right? Scouting any of these crops is is hard. It's difficult to do.

But when we do the automatic, we're sort of throwing a dart at a board. Most of the time on Illinois, that board is empty. Like, most of the time, we're not throwing it in with insects. Disease, it's obviously it's different. Typically, I'm no pathologist, but you can usually predict that based on weather conditions.

Can't do that with insects very effectively most of the time. Weeds, you can predict it based on the fact that it's a bare field that you planted a seed into. Right? It's gonna happen every time. It's a different situation.

We need to approach it differently.

Stephanie Porter: I think that, my background's in integrated pest management. Most people don't know what that is. Until recently, they're asking me, should I be using that insecticide where, you know, it's fairly cheap? They've always just thrown it in with their fungicide. They've always used a fungicide.

And last year, they're asking questions like, should I use a fungicide? And That was a big deal this year, especially with corn. To think about the year we had with rust, we talked a lot about corn rust this year, southern rust in particular. I found it interesting to go along with that with high input prices. Yesterday we had Doctor.

Mueller talk to us at the CCA conference. And he brought something to my attention. Know, there is the disease triangle but what if we know that southern rust blows up from the South. It has to come up from the South. Why were there more more spores?

Well it's because the economic situations also could be hitting them down there as well. They're not using fungicides. They had more inoculum that blew up here. And we're trying to decide if we're gonna be using a fungicide or not. And then I also have this where I'm gonna go and my gosh, she's from the Illinois Soybean Association.

She's talking about corn. I love corn too. It's a system. We grow it too. But you got to think, a lot of guys as long as also my brother as well.

He loves when I shout that out. But you're thinking about fungicides for next year. Where can you cut costs there? Well, this one was really good for me this year. Well, what maybe did what disease we had about every disease disease on our farm this year except for maybe tar spot.

There was some heavy tar spot. But think about tar spot as well. Don't forget about tar spot. There's some fungicides out there that worked really really well on rust this year. You got a really good yield bump.

But also think about those fungicides that tar spot could come back. But I've been in fields obviously to the north that had I can see the inoculum right now of tar spot. I know you had tar spot but there's some areas that didn't. But just think about all those different diseases when you start cutting out different fungicides. And I think there's a lot of guys that are thinking about maybe not spraying fungicides in the following year as well.

FAC Attendee 1: Other questions? My question is for Nick. Does the high stress situation in corn crop hinder the production of the material to kill root worms and corn borers? And then my second question is what happened to what happened to cutworms? I haven't heard of them in a few years.

Nick Seiter: Good questions. The the first one, it probably reduces it a little bit, but not enough that we detect a difference in the in the field. Like it's they're proteins, right? The BT proteins, they're proteins like any other. Anything that could impact protein production in that plant could theoretically impact it.

They've at sort of things that really influence protein production in a big way, right, like nitrogen rate, for instance, like going very low nitrogen rates, very high nitrogen rates. They haven't been able to take something like that and make it impact trait performance in a way we can measure in the field. Presumably other stresses are going to have less of an impact on it than that. So it's not none, but the odds of seeing like a practical impact from that in the field are apparently fairly Now cutworm, that's an interesting one. And there's a few things going on with I think mainly black cutworm, right, is is what we're mostly talking One, they really thrive on fields that have a high winter annual weed population.

You know, a black cutler moth doesn't want to lay her eggs in a clean cornfield. It's not a very attractive egg laying site for her. Generally speaking, think we do a pretty good job of controlling winter annual weeds. So that that's part of it. It's those years where we don't, where things go wrong that we can get into problems with that.

We have a lot of seed treatments now. We have a lot of traits now. And very few of those are spectacular controls for black cutworm. Like the Vip trait for instance is really, really good for black cutworm. I think some of the diamide seed treatments that we don't use as much of, pretty good on black cutworm.

But we have a lot of things out there that kind of are just kind of a drag on that population. They're not necessarily gonna be economic control in any one field, but I do think probably when you have them across 11,000,000 acres in Illinois and and, you know, more acres to the south of us and that kind of thing, it probably has an impact on that population. But I I know one thing we've seen in recent years that's been kinda interesting. Even some years where we had some pretty strong moth flights, that hasn't really translated for us into cutworm injury. I think I think our weed management is a lot of it, honestly.

I think we do a pretty good job, especially in this part of the state, of keeping pretty clean fields. And with with black cutworm in particular, it's like winter annual broadleams like, you know, hand bit, chickweed, shepherd's fur, stuff like that. That's what really gets them to lay their eggs.

Stephanie Porter: Well, know we caught a lot of moths. That it wasn't a lack and and there was some and it wasn't just no till fields either. And it I know we caught the moths. They're dying. Or they're not they're not causing major injury.

They're not causing injury yet.

Todd Gleason: Other questions. And Stephanie, would you read that for me? That's so Aaron Aaron sent me an email with the important things. It won't take very long, but if you could read what his update might have been.

Stephanie Porter: Sure. This is a Illinois Soybean Association. This is a project that Doctor. Hager is doing with us. So this is some of your invested research dollars.

So his update on group fifteen resistance in waterhemp. So after screening 104 populations across the state with a discriminating dose of S. Medichlor, 44 populations, so this is around forty two percent, would be advanced to the detailed dose response experiments to calculate a resistant ratio. So what does that mean? This means the results suggest reduced sensitivity of waterhemp to group 15 herbicides.

And so the basically the this reduced sensitivity of waterhemp to these herbicides is more common in Illinois. More likely to be realized before fortunately. So he also has two announcements will be made next week at the annual meeting of the North Central Weed Science Society. So one, confirmation of resistance to glufosinate liberty. So that's a very hot topic in Illinois.

So they found it in four Illinois waterhemp populations. And number two, they're very close to confirming resistance of giant foxtail population to group 15 herbicides. So this will be the first such report in The United States. And then lastly, Asian copper leaf has been identified in a cornfield in Stevenson County. This is a weed that has not been identified in our state.

So this

Todd Gleason: is the

Stephanie Porter: first. So kind of a nasty weed coming in. So stay tuned for more updates on that. And we'll try to have those on Field Advisor.

Todd Gleason: Stephanie, any final word from you?

Stephanie Porter: Well, some of the things I've been asked about are some hot topics. One thing top of mind would be we had a really dry harvest. It could have been in a dry seed harvest. We had this last year as well. Pay attention to your germination rate and seed quality on your seed tag of your seed.

That was an issue this year. It can be another issue next year. If you think you have lower germination rates, you want to bump up your populations. And normally I'm not a big advocate of that. I know you can have lower populations than soybeans, but just something to pay attention to.

There's been a lot of seed treatment questions. So there's I don't promote one seed treatment over another. There is a new seed treatment, Victrado, coming from Syngenta I'm getting a lot of questions about in regards to Red Crown Rot. You can see me afterwards if you want to hear more about that. There's a lot of talk about that whether or not it's better than Saltro in regards to Red Crown Rot.

Those are things maybe Alevo. Those are things that you can think about in the spring when it's warmer. We've talked about a lot of the weed issues. One of the topics that I mentioned here was how to control obviously your weeds in early planting. Doctor.

Hager did some research on that. You can go to Field Advisor, go to the research page, read more about that. But when we keep talking about all this resistance, what it comes down to is in the fall, after harvest, when you're looking in the combine, you have waterhemp out there. It's going to see why is it still there. And so this is what it's come down to with all this resistance reports.

Why is that waterhemp still there? Was it environmental? Was it application error? Is it resistance out there? And that's what it comes down to.

Fertility is huge. I know there was a lot of talk about nitrogen today. You know are you variable rating? Are you even putting on, are you just putting on maintenance because of input costs? These are all hot topics that many have been talking about.

A lot of talk about finding areas with lower pH. And so that's come up as well. And I think that's about all my notes. I guess lastly, the biggest issue this year by far was weather. I don't know if we touched on that much this year but I was out in the field a lot all summer.

I'll tell you what, I've never seen a year like this. I have remembered '19 obviously, but this year across the whole entire state it's been especially devastating for those in the South. Many had yield bumps. I heard great yields, I heard a really high corn yield this year, but I've also been hearing very low yields. And so just think about those in Southern Illinois as well.

They're struggling a lot.

Todd Gleason: Stephanie Porter is an outreach agronomist at the Illinois Soybean Association and was joined on stage at the December 2025 Farm Assets Conference held in Bloomington, Illinois by University of Illinois Extension field crops entomologist Nick Sider. You may hear all of the presentations in our closing market report podcast. Search out CMRFAC which stands for closing market report farm assets conference. I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason.