An Assessment of the Arkansas Experience with Bollworm Management Communities: Evaluated from Three Perspectives

M.J. Cochran, W.F. Nicholson, D.W. Parvin, Rob Raskin, and J.R. Phillips


 
ABSTRACT

Bollworm Management Communities (BMC) have been in existence in the state of Arkansas since 1976. However, it was not until 1979 that BMC'5 were operated by non-university research personnel. These programs attempt to manage the populations of the bollworm, Heliothis zea (Boddie), and the tobacco budworm, Fabricus, over large land areas rather than on the more common field by field approaches. When a decision is made that a treatment is necessary, most of the cotton fields in the BMC will be sprayed within a three day period. In 1983, there were approximately 80,000 acres and over 200 producers participating in BMC's in the state of Arkansas (Scott).

The performance of the BMC's will be examined from three different approaches. First, the exeriences in selected BMC's were compared with check areas in adjacent counties or surrounding areas. Several variables were included in this analysis. They were: yields per acre; number of insecticide applications; insecticide control costs per acre; net return per acre; and pounds of active ingredients of insecticide per acre (Parvin). The second approach involved a survey of the perceived benefits of participants in two of the BMC'S. This survey focused on the following aspects: yields per acre; production costs per acre; number of bollworm treatments; number of bollweevil treatments; and a rating of other community services. This analysis also examined the impact that participation in the BMC's had on adoption of production practices not related to bollworm management (Scott, Cochran and Nicholson). The final approach involves the use of a computer simulation model, COTCROP (Brown, et. al.), to examine any differences in the variation or riskinesss of the community control as opposed to the more common field by field control.



Reprinted from 1985 Proceedings: Beltwide Cotton Production Research Conferences pp. 160 - 162
©National Cotton Council, Memphis TN

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Document last modified Sunday, Dec 6 1998