Consumers naturally prefer that their confectionery sunflower snacks
look good as well as taste good. So a couple of years ago, when sunflower
farmers began seeing mysterious brown spots on the blunt end of their
seeds, Agricultural Research Service scientists answered
a call for help. Were the spots caused by a disease? An insect? Or both?
An answer and a solution to the problem remain crucial because farmers who
produce sunflower seeds for the confection market end up selling the seeds for
birdseed at low prices if more than 0.5 percent have the condition called
kernel brown spot. Last year, the spots were found in 7 percent of seed samples
from some fields.
"At first, we considered the type of fungus called Alternaria as
a prime suspect," says ARS plant pathologist Thomas J. Gulya, of the Red
River Valley Agricultural Research Center in Fargo, North Dakota.
But Gulya and ARS entomologist Laurence D. Charlet exonerated the fungus and
are now pointing at the lygus bug, also known as the tarnished plant bug. It's
an insect whose notoriety has been associated largely with cotton, but hundreds
of crops serve as hosts. In the Northern Great Plains, the quarter-inch-long
lygus bugs thrive on increasing acreages of canola. Other tasty crops in the
region include sugarbeets, safflower, buckwheat, and crambe.
Scientists at North Dakota State University are working with the ARS
scientists to compare lygus bug populations in sunflower fields planted next to
certain other crops. "So far, we've observed that sunflower, being a
late-seeded or late-maturing crop, serves as a host plant for second-generation
lygus bugs," says Charlet.
Though lygus bugs don't eat muchprobably not enough to reduce
sunflower crop yieldsthey have the nasty habit of injecting plant
tissues, such as the developing seeds, with digestive enzymes and extracting
nutrients with their pointy little mouthparts. The microscopic injuries thwart
development of surrounding tissue and appear as big brown spots after the seed
matures and is marketed and hulled.
In greenhouse studies, the scientists found kernel brown spot only in seeds
from flowers they had covered with bags containing lygus bugs. In USDA
insecticide trials at four sites, researchers found less severe kernel brown
spot where the plants had been sprayed well before harvest time with
insecticides used to control the banded sunflower moth and the seed weevil. The
same insecticides kill lygus bugs. To start learning what steps to take and
when best to take them to minimize kernel brown spot, the scientists set up
several types of experiments last summer.
The confectionery sunflower market has grown rapidly in recent years to
sales in multimillions of dollars involving China alone. U.S. exports of the
edible seeds to China grew from 300 metric tons in 1995 to 10,000 tons in
1999.By Ben Hardin, formerly with ARS.
This research is part of Crop Protection and Quarantine, an ARS National
Program (#304) described on the World Wide Web at
http://www.nps.ars.usda.gov.
Laurence D. Charlet and
Thomas J. Gulya are with the
USDA-ARS Northern Crop Science Laboratory,
Red River Valley
Agricultural Research Center, P.O. Box 5677, University Station, Fargo, ND
58105; phone (701) 239-1313, fax (701) 239-1346.
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