SPLAT FAW: An inexpensive mating disruption solution to effectively protect row crops from damaging insecticide-resistant fall armyworms.

Summary:The objective of this project is to develop SPLAT FAW, a formulation to disrupt the mating of FAW in corn and other row crops, suppressing the pest's population in the treated area as well as the damage inflicted to the crop. An infestation by FAW can cause 15-73% reductions in corn crop yield, leading to losses between $0.5B and $2B a year. This makes FAW a serious liability for agriculture in the U.S., where corn is the nation's largest crop, with 15.1 billion bushels produced in 2016. With corn harvest price in 2016 at $3.49 per bushel the year's harvest brought over $50 billion in revenues to U.S. farmers. Corn is a vital resource in the food, beverage, dairy, beef and ethanol industries, among others.ISCA's SPLAT FAW mating disruption strategy will be delivered as a low-cost, non-toxic method of pest control. It will deploy sex pheromones in such a way that male insects in the treated area will be unable to locate female mates, interfering with reproduction and suppressing the pest populations over time. Sex pheromones are specific breeding chemical signals emitted by females of a single species, and detected only by receptors in the males of that same species. This form of communication evolved over millions of years of natural selection, making mating-disruption control immensely more resilient to the kind of built-up resistance that we see with conventional chemical pesticides and Bt proteins in GM-crops. The goal of Phase I field trials will be to gather data on the effectiveness of the formulation, as well as to determine the necessary application rate and size of the treatment area needed to overcome "edge effects" (oviposition by mated females migrating into the treated fields from surrounding untreated areas). We will produce adequate volumes of FAW pheromone to meet the requirements of the Phase I field trials. The SPLAT matrix also needs to be formulated for aerial and tractor spray applications and to be optimized for stable, slow release of the sex pheromones to ensure that the product will sustain its efficacy as a mating disruptant for an entire growing season with only one or two applications required.