Removing Peanut Foliage Adjacent Shallow Subsurface Drip Laterals to Reduce Rodent Damage

Abstract

Removal of peanut foliage in alternate row middles with an 8-or 16-inch gap did not decrease yield or grade of peanut.• There was no difference in the amount of foliage removed with either the 8-or 16-inch cut gap.• Rodent damage decreased as cut gap increased from 8-to 16-inch cut gap. AbstractUsing Shallow SubSurface Drip Irrigation (S3DI) in field crops has been successful from a yield and economic standpoint. However, the use of S3DI in peanut has been discouraging due to the amount of rodent damage to drip tube laterals. The objective was to determine if cutting peanut foliage adjacent the drip tube lateral would reduce rodent damage. Peanut foliage was cut 90 d after planting using coulters to cut 8-and 16-inch gaps adjacent drip tube laterals. Multiple cuts were needed to keep peanut branches from over-lapping the drip tubing. Total foliage mass removed from cut middles was determined after each cut. Removed foliage mass was totaled and percentage removed per total available was calculated. Peanut was harvested, and yield and grade characteristics were determined. After harvest, drip tubing in each plot was manually extracted and evaluated for biological damage. There was no difference in the amount of foliage removed between the 8-and 16-inch cut gap. The average amount of foliage removed with either gap space was about 16% of the total forage available. There was no yield or grade difference with cut gap width. There were twice as many holes in the control and eight-inch gap compared with the 16-inch gap, such that rodent damage decreased as cut gap increased. This implies that within a peanut crop, foliage can be removed adjacent the S3DI drip laterals to reduce rodent damage without loss of peanut yield or grade.The conversion of non-irrigated land to SDI or SSDI can be challenging for land owners, especially with the day-to-day management of these systems concerning rodent damage. Both SDI and SSDI are Crop Forage Turfgrass Manage. 5:190010.

A 2020 Vision of Subsurface Drip Irrigation in the U.S.

“…There is substantial anecdotal evidence that rodent activity is further increased if crop residue is left on the soil surface, which results in a more favorable rodent habitat. As stated earlier (Sorensen, 2019), removal of peanut foliage resulted in reduced rodent damage to SDI driplines. At the USDA-ARS laboratory in Bushland, Texas, nearly 50 labor h ha -1 was needed to repair SDI driplines after fallowing with wheat stubble in the previous summer, fall, and winter.…”

“…The economic longevity of S 3 DI was estimated to be approximately 5.4 years (i.e., cost to repair leaks equal to replacement cost) by Sorensen and Lamb (2015) for a cottoncorn-peanut rotation in Georgia. Further work at this location to improve S 3 DI longevity found that removal of peanut foliage above the dripline greatly decreased the amount of rodent damage without reducing peanut yield or grade (Sorensen, 2019). Removal of residue with tillage has also been anecdotally reported to reduce rodent damage to driplines in many other regions of the U.S. A much deeper (0.40 to 0.45 m) SDI system on a deep silt loam soil in Kansas had a system life of 26.5 years without replacement (Lamm and Rogers, 2017).…”

Natural Repellents as a Method of Preventing Ant Damage to Microirrigation Systems

“…This could be partly explained by the fact that we reproduced only subsurface conditions, considering the relevance of SDI in the Mediterranean Basin due to the efficient water use, reduced energy costs and protection from weather conditions that this system ensures [68,69]. It is known that SDI systems in other areas may be strongly damaged by rodents [29,70], while surface systems such as microsprinklers or SD are vulnerable to birds and different chewing mammals [71][72][73]. Therefore, new tests in other areas and/or using surface systems would be highly advisable to determine whether our method can simultaneously control ants and larger agents, which is one of its main potential advantages compared to traditional approaches.…”