ecmn | mafrif - 8/17/2025 07:27
What exactly are you saying needs to be done?
I have a field of corn, planted notill into clover and alfalfa stubbe that was a cover crop following oats last year, cows have been grazed on this land every fall for the last 5 years. Hasn't had any tillage since 2019.
But yet it has southern rust just like every other field.
I never said and nobody has ever said 100% resistant/ cured or that if you follow these steps you’ll never have a problem again. That’s why we use words like resistant, tolerant, better able to..
that's why I said.wouldn't it be nice most of the time to not have to use a fungicide. on that one year out of 10 that you have a blow-up disease. The fungicide treatment gives us a lot better response or we only need one treatment versus three or even with no treatment, we don't have as bad or a devastating loss.
We can use phosphite acids to boost plant immunity without applying a fungicide.
Did you do a fungicide pass, and did it work? How many years had the field gone without fungicide or insecticide?
From a scientific perspective, you could take a few untreated areas and measure the loss compared to treated areas, then do the same on a conventional field. That comparison tells you whether the system actually reduced disease impact.
It would be very interesting to pull brix reading on that field versus other fields around it.
That’s also why I brought up GMO plants. Even with the best genetics, respected scientists have only achieved a Brix reading of about 8. That’s better than most conventional fields at 3 or 4, but we ideally want 12 or higher. At that level, most fungal pathogens and insects struggle to survive on the plant. So if our current hybrids are capped at 8 and almost every conventional acre across the country is at 3 or 4 no-till and cover crops alone aren’t enough to reach that level of plant health.
Brix is a proxy of plant health. It's very easy for you and I to go take a reading. And we can do it before and after treatments /changes to see if we're gaining. |
Southern Rust End Game
