By Clint Thompson
Cotton jassid’s lack of impact so far this season should not be a signal to Georgia growers to let their guards down. In fact, producers should be as vigilant as ever in scouting for the insect, believes Phillip Roberts, University of Georgia Extension cotton entomologist.
He emphasized that fact during last week’s Georgia Cotton Commission’s Mid-Year Meeting and University of Georgia (UGA) Cotton Pre-Harvest Workshop.
“We need to be scouting, and we need to make good decisions. We’re probably scouting more cotton this year than we have in my career,” Roberts said. “So don’t drop your guard. Let’s keep looking. Our agents are going to be looking. We’re going to keep growers updated with current information. Let’s just keep scouting, use thresholds, make good decisions.”
The jassid feeds on the lower surface of cotton leaves, extracting the contents of cells. Symptoms include yellowing, reddening and then bronzing of leaves. The jassid is also extremely small, so it is likely that plant damage will be observed before the insects themselves.
The insect’s threat to cotton is so severe, the threshold for jassid is one per leaf. That’s enough to prompt a chemical response from a farmer.
“We want to sample a certain leaf on the plant, the fourth leaf below the terminal, but the threshold is going to be when you average one jassid per leaf,” Roberts said. “So it’s not one in a field, it’s an average of one per leaf.”
The cotton jassid made its presence known in 2025, mostly impacting cotton and certain vegetables like okra and eggplant. The jassid has been noticeably absent this year, Roberts said.
“If we compare populations of jassid today to where we were a year ago, it’s much, much different. We really believe it was the cold temperatures. We had four significant cold events in the state of Georgia. But perhaps more importantly, we had some pretty heavy freezes all the way down to South Florida,” Roberts said. “This is a tropical type of insect and obviously it was sensitive to cold temperatures. I think we’re just seeing migration up from what may have survived in Florida coming into Georgia and you know we’re tracking that closely and we just have to see how everything develops.”