Why Conditions Are Ripe For Potato Blight

I'm Susan Allen with Washington Ag today .With potato growers facing earliest potato blight season in memory Kevin Cochrane, the PNW row-crop rep for Dupont is urging growers to be proactive and get on a seven-day fungicide rotation; I checked in with Kevin on his thoughts on why conditions this year might have caused this early outbreak.

COCHRANE: This is the earliest it's been here in 20 years. Usually we are not worried about late blight until post row closure,being that it's here this early possibly it's seed born. What the supspion is that because it's here so early it's possibly it's seed born late blight, What the suspicion is that we are facing something that came in on seed. So if that's true there probably a really good opportunity that it's going to be in other areas because we buy seed the same places that Idaho and Oregon buy seed, so if it truly came in on seed it could be throughout the area, compound that with the fact Idaho had a really bad late blight year last year so they have a lot of coal, over winter volunteers, stuff like that that hold the inoculums over from last year and reinfect this year's crop.

If you have late blight in the area, again again another compounding factor is that not only do we have inocums in the area already but we have the right weather conditions for it, these hot and cold conditions temperature swings so it's hard to manage your water, then also we have thunderstorms that are moving through here we've had a wet spring in compassion to most years, so we've got the prime situations.

Thank you Kevin.