Late Blight Treatment

Yesterday, Dupont rep Kevin Cochrane told us that late blight is here early this year and recommended being vigilant about watching for signs in your potato crop. If they are there here's what you do. "Late blight is to potatoes what measles used to be to kids before there were vaccinations. It's just devastating. We have the right weather conditions for it, hot and cold temperature swings, so it's hard to manager water. Also we have some thunder storms moving through and wet spring conditions in comparison to most years so we got the prime situation. The recommendation would be if you've got late blight in close proximity to your crop, you want to be on about a seven day fungicide rotation and you want to rotate your modes of action between some of the standard products that everybody uses with like the Bravos and then something we would have would be a product like Tanos which has a component was a very good knockdown for late blight spores and as a residual component as well. It's got a good residual control but it's also got a very good quick knockdown component which is very important in late blight to stop it in its tracks. On top of that, you probably want to mix some copper products in with that to help give a drying effect into the field and the canopy. You have to knock down that bacteria level as well because copper is a natural bacteriacide. It creates a drying of that spore that might be out there and is getting ready to infect the plant.