The Cotton Jassid Vanished This Season. Experts Say That's No Reason to Relax

The most feared new insect in Southern cotton is having a strangely quiet year — and the entomologists who track it don't trust the silence for a second.

Speaking at the Georgia Cotton Commission's Mid-Year Meeting and the University of Georgia Cotton Pre-Harvest Workshop last week, UGA Extension cotton entomologist Phillip Roberts told growers that cotton jassid populations are a fraction of where they stood a year ago. His explanation is the weather, not a win. Georgia logged four significant cold events this past winter, and hard freezes pushed all the way into South Florida — brutal conditions for what Roberts describes as a tropical insect.

"If we compare populations of jassid today to where we were a year ago, it's much, much different," Roberts said. "We really believe it was the cold temperatures." What growers are seeing now, he suspects, is the leading edge of migration northward from whatever survived in Florida.

That is a reprieve, not a resolution. The two-spotted cotton leafhopper arrived on the mainland in 2024 and tore through the Southeast in 2025, feeding on the undersides of cotton leaves and leaving a trail of yellowing, reddening and bronzed foliage. The insect is so small that damage typically shows up before the pest itself does — and the treatment threshold reflects its severity: an average of one jassid per leaf, sampled from the fourth leaf below the terminal, is enough to justify a chemical response.

Texas is watching the same front

For Texas growers, the quiet 2026 season lands on top of an already tense situation. The Texas Department of Agriculture moved early and hard against the pest, with Commissioner Sid Miller activating an emergency response last September and following up with additional emergency action in February. By March, jassids had been confirmed in Southeast Texas counties, putting the state's $5 billion cotton economy — roughly 40 percent of U.S. production — on alert just as planting season began.

A suppressed year in Georgia doesn't de-escalate any of that. Texas's quarantine framework around host plant movement remains in place, and the same tropical biology that made the jassid vulnerable to last winter's freezes makes every mild Gulf Coast winter a reset button for reinfestation.

Roberts's message to his Georgia audience applies word for word west of the Sabine. "We need to be scouting, and we need to make good decisions," he said. "We're probably scouting more cotton this year than we have in my career. So don't drop your guard." His instruction to agents and growers: keep sampling, use thresholds, and resist the temptation to read low early-season numbers as an all-clear.

The jassid feeds by extracting the contents of leaf cells, and heavy pressure can strip a field's photosynthetic capacity at the worst possible time. Beyond cotton, the pest showed an appetite in 2025 for vegetables including okra and eggplant — a concern for Texas's diversified growers and the ornamental plant industry, which TDA's February action was explicitly designed to shield.

What the rest of the season hinges on

The open question is how fast surviving Florida populations can rebuild and push north as summer heat peaks. Last year, the insect's spread caught much of the Southeast flat-footed; this year, with thresholds established, scouting networks running, and Transform insecticide positioned as a management tool, the region has infrastructure it lacked twelve months ago. Whether that infrastructure gets stress-tested depends on the migration now underway.

For now, the scoreboard reads: winter 1, jassid 0. Nobody in Extension is ready to call the game.