With approval pending from the Environmental Protection Agency, Monsanto expects to have a limited amount of a new corn rootworm product on the market for use next spring.

This Monsanto corn rootworm technology, currently referred to as MON-863, is similar to the firm’s YieldGard corn borer technology, but is aimed at controlling Northern, Western and Mexico rootworm species. When approved, the product will be known as YieldGard Rootworm and the current product will be renamed YieldGard Corn Borer. The company is also working on a stacked trait that will combine both YieldGard corn borer and rootworm technologies, such as has been done with its current stacked hybrid of Roundup Ready corn and YieldGard corn.

“Corn rootworm costs growers roughly $1 billion per year, which includes soil-applied insecticides and what they lose in yield,” says John Eberwine, technology product manager for Monsanto. The company will seek Japanese approval to secure end-use markets for growers before a full launch of the product in 2002.

OTHER NO-TILL NEWS...

• While the size of the hypoxia zone in the Gulf of Mexico reached a record 8,006 square miles this year, scientists are realizing that weather conditions, rainfall totals and other items may play an even more important role than the amount of field-applied nitrogen flowing down the Mississippi River. A year ago, the hypoxia zone was only 1,700 square miles, the smallest in 14 years.

University of Illinois soil fertility specialist Robert Hoeft believes farmers will soon face tighter regulations on fertilizer use. Even with…