Growers Prep for Disease

Growers Prep for Disease

Rick Worthington
Rick Worthington
Growers Prep for disease

Now is a good time for producers to look ahead to the 2020 growing season.

Major rain and flooding events led to increased disease pressure in 2019, and some of those diseases can resurface.

Randy Kool is an agronomic services representative with Syngenta and talks about what you can do to plan ahead and combat growing disease threats in the new year.

“First we want to make sure that we have the history on those fields and what type of diseases were out there. With most cases, diseases are going to stay here year after year, so if we have some documentation, we know what areas of the field were worse, and then that leads to our hybrid or variety selection. Most growers don't think as much about disease tolerances with their varieties or hybrids they're selecting. If they have problems fields out there, I'd make sure they're changing that hybrid variety selection just a little bit to help minimize that disease. Also utilize preventive fungicides.”

He says, from the soybean side, a couple things that surprised them was that they had more white mold than would be expected.

On the Corn side, he says the most prevalent disease would have been the gray leaf spot. It’s been found to have probably caused the most yield loss.

We also had a lot of other diseases out there; Northern corn leaf blight was in some fields; we had common and Southern rusts.

Previous Report1890 Scholars Program
Next ReportProtections for Farmworkers