Sustainable sweet corn production research funded
It’s that time of year when summer fields are filled with mouthwatering local sweet corn. To help expand sustainable sweet corn production on Delmarva, a USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture Capacity Building Grant of nearly $600,000 was awarded to University of Maryland Eastern Shore researcher Dr. Simon Zebelo.
An associate professor and entomologist with the UMES Department of Natural Sciences, Zebelo will embark on a three-year research project that aims to develop organically based integrated pest management of corn earworm, one of the major insect pests for sweet corn.
“Specifically, we plan to design and educate growers about integrated pest management programs that simultaneously manipulate insect herbivores, weeds and beneficial arthropods that affect sweet corn,” Zebelo said.
Sweet corn was chosen as the test crop for the study, he said, because of its economic importance to diverse farming operations, and preliminary investigations displaying its compatibility with plant growth promoting rhizobacteria, minimum tillage and cover cropping.
Leaves of sweet corn that have been treated with plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria/PGPR, damaged by insects, mechanically damaged, and untreated will be collected. Four biological replicates will be collected for each treatment combination. Total RNA will be extracted from the leaf samples to characterize and qualify the changes of defense-related genes that regulate direct and indirect defenses. Corn earworm eggs will then be placed on a sweet corn leaf from plants inoculated with different PGPR treatments in a petri dish, which will be placed in an incubator. After larval hatch, the fate of a single neonate larva on each leaf will be followed until death or pupation.
Sweet corn will be placed in microplots in low tunnel houses to examine treated and untreated plants for egg-laying choice by the females.
“Our preliminary data show that European corn borer can differentiate between PGPR-treated corn plants and deposit more of their eggs on untreated plants,” Zebelo said.
The next step is to determine the effects of minimum tillage and using cover crops on weed and insect pests, natural enemy effectiveness and sweet corn yield, he said. Field experiments will be conducted during two seasons in Maryland.
As part of UMES Extension outreach, workshops for farmers on integrated pest management will be held to increase awareness and adoption of the three-level hierarchical approach for pest management recommended by the National Organic Program, demonstrate the effectiveness of alternative pest management tactics developed in the field experiments, provide educators and farmers training in applied pest management tactics, and create awareness of the benefits using minimum tillage and cover crops.
