Penn State's Soybean Sentinel Plot Project is Starting

Again this growing season, the Pennsylvania Soybean Board is funding a Soybean Sentinel Plot Program, which is being managed by The Department of Entomology at Penn State and executed by Penn State Extension. In this effort, Penn State Extension Educators will be regularly scouting about 20 'typical' soybean fields across Pennsylvania and reporting the populations of plant pathogens and insect pests that they find. These fields will be planted with untreated soybean seeds and will not receive other applications of preventative insecticides or fungicides. Our goal is to inform the agricultural community about which pests are active across the state, so folks will have a sense of what to expect when they scout their own fields as part of an IPM program. It would be inappropriate to use these reports to justify insecticide or fungicide applications.

Data from our previous 13 years of scouting have clearly shown that most soybean fields in Pennsylvania do not develop economically damaging populations of pathogens or insect pests. All the soybean fields we have scouted harbor communities of insect pests and pathogens, but their abundance has infrequently exceeded economic thresholds, meaning that they did not need to be controlled with insecticides or fungicides. For insect pests, only three fields out of about 240 fields (over 13 years) have needed an insecticide. Growers can benefit from our results because they show that insecticides and fungicides are not necessary to grow soybean profitably, so farmers can save money by not deploying them preventively each year. A viable alternative would be to use integrated pest management (IPM) to make decisions about deploying pesticides. See our fact sheet if you would like more information on how to use IPM to manage your soybean fields.