Soybean Gall Midge Adult Emergence Begins

Jun 23, 2022

By Ashley Dean and Erin Hodgson

This week, the first soybean gall midge adults (Photo 1) were collected in Iowa near Wall Lake in Sac County (Monday) and near Sutherland in O’Brien County (Thursday). This is similar to when soybean gall midge emergence was first detected in Iowa in 2021. The first Midwest report of soybean gall midge emergence in 2022 was on June 7 near Davey, Nebraska. You can keep up with soybean gall midge emergence at soybeangallmidge.org/. We will also send text updates on soybean gall midge activity in Iowa through the Iowa Pest Alert Network this summer.

Typically, plant injury is noticeable and larvae can be found feeding within stems a few weeks after adult emergence. Begin scouting for soybean gall midge larvae now, especially if plants are at least V2. Start scouting at the edge of soybean fields adjacent to fields that were infested last year or, if infestations were not noted last year, begin at the field edge near last year’s soybean. A black lesion is usually noticeable at the base of the plant (Photo 2). Look for white or orange larvae feeding inside soybean stems (Photo 3) by using your fingernail or a knife to split the stem. Early in the season, infestations might be noticeable if random plants are dead or wilting among otherwise healthy-looking plants (Photo 4). This becomes less obvious later in the season as the canopy closes.

Unfortunately, there are no known, effective management strategies to suppress larvae at this time. This summer, universities around the Midwest continue to monitor the distribution and evaluate potential management strategies. Read more about soybean gall midge identification, biology, and scouting in this encyclopedia article.

Source : iastate.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids