Corn School: Resistance driving European corn borer comeback

European corn borer wreaked havoc for decades in cornfields across North America before the adoption of transgenic traits (Bt) in the late 1990s effectively punched out the pest. Earlier this year at Southwest Crop Diagnostic Days at the University of Guelph’s Ridgetown campus, Ontario ministry of agriculture entomologist Tracey Baute noted that the yield-robbing insect had fallen so far off the radar that it hasn't been a featured topic at the annual crop diagnostic event since 1997. But corn borer (ECB) is making a comeback and was on the Diagnostic Days agenda this year thanks to growing resistance to the transgenic traits. On this episode of the Real Agriculture Corn School, University of Guelph research scientist Jocelyn Smith tells host Bernard Tobin how ECB resistance was first found in Turo, Nova Scotia in 2018. Since that discovery, Smith notes that researchers have ramped up monitoring for resistance across Canada and have now found resistant populations near Montreal, Que., and Carmen, Man. In the video, Smith shares how she toured Nova Scotia fields and found corn borers in 30 to 70 per cent of plants that carried the Cry1F protein, which had protected plants against the pest for two decades Website: https://www.realagriculture.com/ #agriculture #farming Find us on our other social media platforms: Twitter:   / realagriculture   Instagram:   / realagriculture   Facebook:   / realagmedia