News Briefs: Several LSU AgCenter faculty members receive honors; a new poultry composting process holds promise for Louisiana poultry producers; the Macon Ridge Research Station gets a new lab building.

The LSU AgCenter has patented a vaccine that could be a shot in the arm for the hybrid striped bass industry to return to the Louisiana coast. Ron Thune of the AgCenter’s Department of Veterinary Science developed the vaccine that immunizes fish against photobacteriosis, a disease that all but wiped out the fledgling hybrid striped bass industry on the coast in the 1990s.

Preparing for cotton harvest involves some of the most important management decisions producers face. Applying chemical harvest aids before harvest can increase harvester efficiency, reduce leaf and trash content in harvested lint, facilitate dew drying, straighten lodged plants, retard boll rot, maintain or improve fiber quality and stimulate boll opening.

Formosan termites pose a growing threat to all structural wood materials in residential construction. New products must be developed that are resistant to these aggressive and voracious insects.

Research in forest pathology is shaped by the need to consider the consequences of a crop that must be managed from 20 to 100 years. If the desired end product of a forested area is wilderness, then dead and hollow trees may be considered part of the natural process and desirable for providing shelter for wildlife.

Advances in weed control technology have played an essential role in the development of the rice industry. Herbicides are critical to obtaining optimum yield and maximum profit. Before the development of selective rice herbicides, weed control involved intensive manual labor.

In the past few years there has been a resurgence of a boll rot often referred to as boll dangle, Phomopsis boll rot, atypical boll shed or vascular cavitation. This boll rot has been present at low levels for many years but has become more severe in the past eight years.

What may well be one of the country’s largest private camellia collections is on its way to a new home at the LSU AgCenter's Burden Center in Baton Rouge.

Debbie Otwell has learned tomatoes can be as profitable as they are tasty. Otwell grows about 2,000 tomato plants, which produce about 35,000 pounds per year, in her three greenhouses near Dubach, La. She got the idea after visiting the LSU AgCenter’s Red River Research Station in Bossier City.

Perlite is a processed volcanic mineral widely used as a propagating and growing medium for many horticultural crops, including tomatoes. The expense to dispose of the old material and replace it with new perlite shipped from distant markets can be significant.

The LSU AgCenter has released a new sweet potato named “Bienville,” which has resistance to root knot nematodes. It has been in trials as seedling L 94-96 in many locations in the sweet potato production areas of the state for the past few years and was commercially released for planting in May, said Mike Cannon, resident coordinator of the Sweet Potato Research Station at Chase.

Using computers to translate remote images of crop fields into prescriptions for irrigating, fertilizing and controlling pests is the next technological advance in farming—as soon as researchers can figure out how to do it economically.

Management of fertilizer nitrogen (N) is one of the most important components in producing maximum yield and profits in corn and cotton. Corn is inherently inefficient in fertilizer N uptake, typically using less than half of that applied. Cotton, on the other hand, has extremely high fertilizer uptake efficiency.

Researchers at Cornell University’s Ornithology Lab in Ithaca, New York, recently finished analyzing audio recordings and have determined that there is no conclusive evidence of the ivory-billed woodpecker’s existence in Louisiana. The last documented sighting of the bird was in Tensas Parish in 1942.

Several harvest aids are available for cotton.

A decline in loblolly pine, first reported in Bogalusa, La., in 1966, helped trigger a long-term study at the LSU AgCenter. At first, it was suspected that it was the same disease as littleleaf disease of shortleaf pine, which was attributed to site factors and Phyphthora cinnamomi, a water mold.

Vol. 45, No. 3