Project Overview

Reports

Commodities

• Vegetables: sweet corn

Target Pests

• Target Pests: bacterial diseases, fungus, insects, weeds

Practices

• Pest Management: biological control, biorational pesticides, chemical control, cultural control, decision support system, economic threshold, forecasting, monitoring/scouting, pesticide application timing, pesticide resistance management, pesticides, prevention, sanitation, weed ecology

• Crop Production: cover crops, crop rotation, fertilizers

• Production Systems: agroecosystems

Sweet corn’s taste and versatility make it a favorite among consumers and an essential (ranks second for harvested acres) vegetable crop for US food systems. Insect, weed, and pathogen pests reduce marketable yield and increase management costs. Management efforts also may pose risks to human health and the environment, risks that can be mitigated through the adoption of Integrated Pest Management (IPM). This project will help sweet corn producers remain economically viable and encourage them to adopt IPM by improving interdisciplinary collaboration and coordination among professionals working in sweet corn. Specifically, we will leverage the expertise of working group members to revise and improve the sweet corn chapter in important regional production guides (printed manuals). In addition, we will build a sweet corn module for the newly developed MyIPM App for Vegetables, a tool that provides easy access to images that help with pest identification as well as management recommendations. It can be downloaded to a smartphone and used without internet access. Finally, a sweet corn working group helps Extension personnel identify emerging problems, efficiently deliver timely information, and connect with experts beyond their institution so they can deliver high quality programming to stakeholders. We anticipate this working group will engage additional sweet corn producers beyond those who already participate in our extension programming, encourage the use of production guides, increase IPM adoption, and lead to new collaborations and extension resources. Ultimately, stakeholders will be more successful managing pest of sweet corn and capacity for meeting needs in sweet corn will also be expanded through these efforts.

1. Revise and update IPM recommendations in key regional production guides.
2. Develop a sweet corn module for the Vegetable MyIPM app.
3. Build interdisciplinary relationships between sweet corn research and extension personnel.