A Novel Approach to Fungicide Timing Decisions

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

The decision of whether to spray a fungicide or not, and if so when to spray can get complicated. InnerPlant’s Gary Schaefer says they’ve developed technology that enables a soybean crop to make the decision for the farmer, providing early indications of disease.

Schaefer… “ Typically farmers will fall into about three different categories. So there's farmers that are going to spray regardless, but maybe aren't sure about the timing. When you're spending $30, $40 an acre on a fungicide application, and taking the time to go spray all of the acres, timing is really, really crucial. So there's a subset of farmers that really think about optimizing timing. There's a lot of farmers though that aren't quite sold on fungicides, or whether or not they need to every year. They do know disease can be very impactful to their fields. And so there's a lot of farmers that actually use this to just know whether, to your point, if they should spray. I think there's kind of a third part of this that really crosses into kind of both categories, but I'll call it out a little separate–and that is tank composition. Not only are we telling farmers that the soybean plants are infected, we're telling them with what. So that they know what disease is actually infecting these plants, and they can more customize or tailor what goes into that spray tank to best cure or fight against this disease that's affecting the plant.”

Through their CropVoice platform, InnerPlant shares data to help farmers make these types of decisions.