My young cotton has jassids and thrips causing leaf curl and reddening in Sirsa. How do I manage early sucking pests sensibly?
3 Answers
Jassids cause leaf curling and reddening at the margins, while thrips give silvery leaves, and both hit young cotton hard, but over spraying early kills natural enemies and can trigger whitefly later, so go need based. Start with seed treatment that protects the early crop, use yellow and blue sticky traps for monitoring, and conserve predators rather than blanket spraying from day one. Spray only when the pest crosses the local economic threshold, and rotate insecticide groups to avoid resistance, following label dose and PHI. Avoid the insecticides known to flare whitefly. Balanced nutrition and avoiding moisture stress keep plants more tolerant. For the current threshold based schedule and safe product rotation, check with your local KVK or the state agriculture department.
Once I stopped spraying on a fixed calendar and only sprayed when jassids actually crossed the threshold, my whitefly problem later in the season also reduced. Early over spraying backfires.
The seed treatment at sowing carried my early crop through the first weeks against thrips and jassids without any foliar spray. By the time it wore off the plants were stronger. Starting with that protection meant I sprayed far less in the seedling stage.