Pix
I am getting some questions about the affects of the rain and possible need for Pix. I don’t think most cotton needs Pix at this point because:
- Most cotton has some bolls that will help hold it back.
- Most areas did not have enough rain to last a long time.
- Contrary to popular belief, Pix does not make cotton invest carbohydrates in bolls versus regrowth. The plant knows it needs to fill the older bolls. They are a heavy sink and the plant’s highest priority. The plant will take care of them and then only invest resources to regrowth or “vegetative” growth with any extra resources.
- The plant at this stage has older fruit it will concentrate on maturing and younger fruit it has already decided to abort due to a lack of resources. You should be seeing a lot of the younger fruit at the top of the plant shed because the plant already decided to invest in the older fruit and abandon the younger fruit. It is in the plants interest to allocate limited resources to the oldest fruit that it has already invested resources in. What does this mean? We will have a bottom crop and will be missing the middle crop. The regrowth we might see with the rain and some continued rain is not “vegetative” as it is often referred to. It will be fruiting branches and we need for that growth to occur to have a chance at a top crop to make decent yields.
The exception might be where we have applied Roundup to cotton past the 4 leaf stage over-the-top or where we have post-directed cotton. This can cause abortion of the older fruit due to lack of pollination. This tends to be worse the later the application is made and the more of the plant that is in contact with the Roundup in the case of post-direct application (higher on the plant). I would still be leery of Pix on this cotton because we need to put on new fruiting sites even more so than other cotton. You can look at flowers and small bolls to see if you have pollination problems due to Roundup. You should not see this problem in Flex cotton.
Figure 1. Flower from a plant treated with pollinations problems due to post-directed application to Roundup Ready cotton. Notice that the anthers are shorter than normal. The pollen is less viable than in non-treated cotton and tends to not be deposited at the end of the stigma due to the shorter anthers.
Figure 2. Normal flower from a Roundup Ready plant that did not receive post-directed Roundup.
Figure 3. The two bolls on the outside came from a field with poor fruit retention and appear to have pollination problems. The two bolls in the middle are normal bolls from a Roundup Ready field that had no fruit retention problems.
