What is in this article?:
- Oklahoma upgrades boll weevil eradication status
- Transition year
- Accurate maps
No boll weevils have been caught in Oklahoma cotton fields in the 2010 growing season, according to the Oklahoma Boll Weevil Eradication Organization. Much of the state is now considered functionally eradicated.
More About:
Transition year
This year has been a year of transition for the OBWEO program's Information Technology department. A new eradication manager online program was installed to replace the old system that could no longer be supported, Harris said.
The new system focuses on deployed traps rather than on mapped fields, he said. It employs a single GPS unit and a separate data logger to mark trap locations and to log inspection results, including when and by whom traps were inspected each cycle. Trap location is a critical component of the program.
The new eradication manager keys on trap locations because across the cotton belt, certified cotton acres, upon which assessments are based, plus farm numbers and Common Land Units (CLU) are already provided to the various eradication programs by periodic updates from the respective USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) state offices.
FSA certified acres have been shown to be as accurate as acres resulting from in-house mapping CLUs, he said, which, along with certified acres data, render in-house mapping an expensive redundancy.
