Our overall mild winter and wet spring are the kinds of conditions that favor survivorship and early development of stink bug populations. Because of these conditions, this could be a summer when we see higher than normal stink bug infestations in a lot of crops including field corn, cotton and soybean. Brown stink bugs are already being found in small grain fields and areas of North Carolina are reporting pretty heavy stink bug pressure on seedling field corn. See this article by Dr. Dominic Reisig at the NCSU station on Plymouth for details https://entomology.ces.ncsu.edu/2016/05/how-to-avoid-a-stink-bug-disaster-in-corn-2/
We need to be thinking ‘stink bugs’ this summer and aligning our field scouting, sampling and threshold efforts in that direction as the summer progresses—and that applies to cotton and soybean fields as they mature.