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Michigan | Here's an example: our snap beans this year were much larger than usual. Normally when we are required to water them we do so sparingly as to limit there size a bit. This year how ever we had an abundance of rain, not enough to start hurting the beans, but with ample fertility and water their size got almost out of control. Re ran a very intense fungicide program to counter this. The few spots that missed the applications got sick fast! Root rot, white mold, soft rot, all started attacking these "healthy" plants. Even tho we had great fertility, great water, and very little stress the beans were still attacked by "pests" which we were able to control with fungicides.
No one can deny that the earth isn't a perfect place. You can have all the fertility and water available to your crop, there are still pests out there with the ability to damage those "healthy" plants- especially at the reproductive stages when plants are at their peak stress levels of the year. It's silly not to use the insecticides/fungicides available to protect the crop if it's economically sensible or if thresholds are reached. You invest all that money in fertility for a healthy crop, just to let it suffer and/or use it's strength to heal itself from pests, rather than spray soemthing to eliminate the problem so then plant can keep thriving and adding more yield. | |
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lawfarms badfarmer and others
